Abstract
Two major views attempt to solve the problem of predestination and human free will: a ‘predestinarian view’ and a ‘deterministic perspective’. The first view emphasizes on God’s direct intervention in the creation of existents. The second view is based on Aristotelian idea which states that destiny (qadar) and the determination of all existents are basically due to their inherent natures rather than being dependent on the occasionalistic inference of the deity. This article, however, will limit its discussion to a determinism of Avicenna only. This paper will also provide major works of Avicenna, then the explanation and evaluation of Avicenna’s view of God’s knowledge.
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Notes
Mirza Tahir Ahmad, An Elementary study of Islam (Morden, UK: Islam International Publications, 2011) 57. The Risala (often translated ‘Treatise’ in this instance) of al-Hasan al-Bas generally seen as one of the earliest documents concerned with the argument for free will, although both the ascription of an early date to the text and its status as one of the earliest texts have been questioned. Al-Hasan argues in the treatise for the position of the individual’s free will on the basis of the Qur’an; any suggestion made in the Qur’an that predestination is to be supported (as his opponents suggested) is to be countered by an interpretation of the passage in light of other statements. Most obvious in this regard, statements such as Qur’an 13/27—‘God sends anyone He wishes astray’ (implying that the individual’s fate is in the hands of God alone and there is nothing that can be done about it)—are to be interpreted in the light of other statements such as Qur’an 14/27, ‘God sends wrongdoers astray’, where, it is asserted, the people are already astray (they are already ‘wrongdoers’, by the act of their own free will) before God confirms them in their ‘fate’. This became the standard interpretative tool of all those who argued for the free will position in Islam. From a more positive angle, the argument also ran that God says in Qur’an 51/56, ‘I have only created jinn and people so they may worship Me’, meaning that all people must be free to worship God, for God would not command them to do something and then prevent them from doing it. The Mu ‘tazila also championed the notion of the created Qur’an as a part of their understanding of the inherent free will of humanity, often pointing to Abū Lahab and his being condemned to hell in sūra 111. The Qur’ān must have been created at the time of its revelation, they argued, for otherwise the fate of Abū Lahab would have been established for all eternity, thus removing his freedom to determine his own fate. More discussion about free will proponent, see Andrew Rippin, Muslim Their Religious Beliefs and Practices 4th edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 78–80.
Other examples: There shall be no compulsion in matters of faith. (Qur’an 2:257); Allah burdens not any soul beyond its capacity. It shall have the reward it earns, and it shall get the punishment it incurs. (Qur’an 2:287); And that man will have nothing but what he strives for. (Qur’an 53:40).
Andrew Rippin and Jawid Mojaddedi, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Qur’ān (New Jersey: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2017), 514.
Maria De Cillis, Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought: Theoretical Compromises in the Works of Avicenna, Ghāzālī and Ibn’arabī. Culture and Civilization in the Middle East, 42 (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 13.Aristotle perceives nature as the principle which allows any being to be what it is. It is also the principle through which any being manifests a predisposition to realize the potentialities (dynamis) with which it has come to exist. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Books H and Z, trans. D. Bostock, Clarendon Aristotle Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 1050a 21. Aristotle, De Anima, 414a 16–7, cited in Griffel, al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 135. What is Mu‘tazilite occasionalism? The Mu ‘tazilites theoretically substantiated their belief that human actions are not divinely predetermined. They achieved this result by resorting to the philosophical metaphysics of atoms and accidents generally designated as ‘occasionalistic’. Based on the idea that everything in the world consists of atoms (jawāhir) and accidents (a ‘rād.), the Mu‘tazilites adapted the theory of atomism to their notion of human capacity to act freely by way of distinguishing between a primary and secondary causality that were not necessarily coincident in their spheres of action. Mu ‘tazilite occasionalism was certainly indebted to Aristotle’s worldview for which the realm of generation and corruption resulted from the combinations of forms and matters. According to Aristotle, bodies (ajsām, sing. jism), resulting from the arrangement of matter and form, were made of atoms. For the Mu‘tazilites too bodies consisted of atoms but, differently from Aristotle’s view, they could not be divided. The majority of the Mu ‘tazilites focused their atomistic theory on the cardinal tenet that the jawhar was merely the bearer of accidents, incapable however, like the Aristotelian compounds, of autonomous subsistence. See C. Baffioni, Atomismo e Antiatomismo nel Pensiero Islamico (Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1982), 82; N. Dhanani, The Physical Theory of Kalām: Atoms, Space, and Void in Basrian Mu ‘tazilī Cosmology (Leiden: Brill, 1994); R.M. Frank, ‘Bodies and Atoms: The Ash‘arite Analysis’, in M.E. Marmura (ed.), Islamic Theology and Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984) 39–53; Ibid, ‘The Non-Existent and the Possible in Classical Ash‘arite teaching’, Institut Dominicain d’Études Orientales du Caire: Mélanges 24, 2000, 1–37. In contrast to the view of Aristotle and the Peripatetic philosophers, the Mu ‘tazilites did not admit any distinction between the ‘essential’ and the ‘accidental’ properties of created things. See A. Ivry, ‘Al-Kindī and the Mu ‘tazilah: A Reevaluation’, in Al-Kindi’s Metaphysics (Alban, NY: State University of New York Press, 1974), 52. Frank has argued that the mutakallimūn in general, Ash‘arites included, regarded accidents as concrete entities: ‘beings or existent in the full proper sense’. See Frank, ‘Bodies and atoms’, 42.
The historical, social, and political circumstances, for instances, cannot be separated from theological occurrence or position of someone. The Qadariyya, for instance, are those who discussed the issue of qadar (destiny), the preordination of events in the world by God. This group held to the position of the free will of humanity and was opposed in this matter by those often said to be more closely aligned to the political powers of the day. That is, the Qadariyya were on the more revolutionary wing of the theological groupings; their espousal of free will was frequently connected to those agitating for a new political order which was opposed to the ruling Umayyad caliphs, who had appropriated both political and theological authority under the guise of having been appointed by God (and thus destined to fulfill this function). If individuals were accountable for their actions, then so were governments, according to the argument of the Qadariyya. The Murji’a are frequently pictured as those most supportive of the ruling powers, for their doctrine of faith as a personal concern did not facilitate judgments being made on people as to their status in the faith (beyond the actual statement of faith), whether that person be a peasant or the ruler. Rippin, Muslim Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, 77–78, for Mu ‘tazila, see Rippin and Mojaddedi, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Qur’ān, 413, 523.
W.E. Gohlamn, Avicenna’s Biography, The Life of Ibn Sina: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1974); Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition; A.M. Goichon, ‘Ibn Sīnā’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed, 941–947, in particular pp. 945–946 where the author lists numerous bibliographical and biographical sources; D.C. Reisman, ‘Stealing Avicenna’s Books: A Study of the Historical Sources for the Life and Times of Avicenna’, in D.C. Reisman and A.H. Al-Rahim (eds), Before and After Avicenna (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2003), 91–126.
Ibid, 145; M. Elkaisy-Friemuth, God and Humans in Islamic Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 26.
Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition, 145.
A.L. Ivry, ‘Destiny Revisited: Avicenna’s Concept of Determinism’, in M.E. Marmura (ed.), Islamic Theology and Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984), 162. The ‘Aristotelian’ tradition which Avicenna received and the Neoplatonic teachings he inherited were not mutually compatible. Incoherencies were due to the vicissitudes that the transmission of this tradition underwent both from Greek into Arabic (often through Syriac) and within Arabic intellectual history. Particularly, distortions due to textual corruption and errors in the attribution of certain works to their respective authors were quite common. The most famous case is that of the Plotinian Theologia Aristotelis which, attributed to Aristotle, led to a misinterpretation of his philosophy. See Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition, 237; J. Janssens, ‘Ibn Sina’s ideas of ultimate realities’, Ultimate Reality and Meaning 10, 1987, 253; P. Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the ‘Theology of Aristotle’ (London: Duckworth, 2002).
Avicenna confessed to have been confused when he attempted to understand Aristotle’s Metaphysics, despite he had read it 40 times. More specifically, Avicenna encountered difficulties when he attempted to grasp the aim of the Stagirite’s work. Al-Fārābī’s work, On the Purpose of Metaphysics, provided an answer to Avicenna’s doubts.
Goichon, ‘The Philosopher of Being’, 121–141; Griffel, al-Ghazali’s Philosophical Theology, 135. Avicenna adopts this point very clearly in his al-Shifa: al-Ilahiyyat: The Metaphysics of the Healing. A Parallel English-Arabic Text, trans. M.E. Marmura. (Provo (Utah): Brigham Young University Press, 2005), 127–128.
The notion of ‘emanation’ is among the most problematic concepts in philosophy; its complexity is due to the fact that, as Armstrong suggests, it has not got any precise philosophical meaning but it rather pertains to the domain of metaphor, as the classical image of the sun and the rays emanated from the luminous source demonstrates. A.H. Armstrong, ‘Emanation in Plotinus’, Mind 46, 1937, 61–2.
Despite the efforts of describing the ‘flood’ of life in metaphorical terms, the philosophical sense of emanation remained an equivocal one. H. Dörrie, ‘Emanation. Ein unphilosophisches wort im spätantiken denken’, in H. Dörrie, Platonica Minora, Fink: Munich, 1976, 70–88, quoted in De Smet, La Quiétude de l’Intellect, Leuven: Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 1995, 104.
F. Rahman, ‘Ibn Sina’, in M.M. Sharif (ed.), A History of Muslim Philosophy with Short Accounts of Other Disciplines and the Modern Renaissance in Muslim Lands (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1966), 481–482.
Chapter 3, Text 3: al-Fārābī, Fī Aġrāḍ.
Chapter 3, Text 2: al-Fārābī, Fī Aġrāḍ.
The Shaykh al-ra’īs argues that impossibility occurs when, in the absence of any conceivable cause, even if considered simply in the mind, the quiddity of an object self-evidently demonstrates that it is not ‘able’ to accept existence in any way, so that such a non-entity cannot be conceived in reality. The possibility of existence is explained as that which could be supposed to be either non-existent or existent without the occurrence of any contradiction, its coming into existence depending on the presence of a cause external to it. The necessary of existence, instead, is said to be that existent which could not be supposed as non-existent without the occurrence of a contradiction. The necessarily existent entities are furthermore divided into two ‘categories’: (i) the entity necessary by itself whose existence is not dependent on any cause (God), and (ii) an entity which is not necessary by itself but whose existence depends on an external cause (anything other than God). Avicenna believes that the entire universe perpetually receives existence by an external cause which is essentially necessary and absolutely non-contingent: the wājib al-wujūd bi-dhātihi. This marks a significant point in the Avicennian construct which is often accused of undermining the world’s dependence on God: in truth, as will be observed in more detail in the course of this study, despite the fact that the world is pre-eternal, it still needs God to impart existence upon it from eternity. See Avicenna, al-Ilahiyyat, 27–34.
M. Fakhry, ‘The Subject-Matter of Metaphysics: Aristotle and Ibn Sina’, in M.E. Marmura (ed.), Islamic Theology and Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984), 140.
Avicenna, al-Ilahiyyat, 195.
Avicenna, al-Ilahiyyat, 195.
Ya ‘qub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, Rasa ‘il al-Kindi al-Falsafiya, ed. Abu Rida, 2 vols (Cairo: n.p., 1950–53), 16; De Smet, La Quiétude de l’Intellect, 129–30.
Avicenna, al-Ilahiyyat, 195–200.
B. Kogan, Averroes and the Metaphysics of Causation, Albany (NY: State University of New York Press, 1985, 28.
Avicenna, al-Ilahiyyat, 283–290.
Avicenna, The Metaphysics of the Healing (al-Shifā’: al-Ilāhiyyāt), trans. M. E. Marmura (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), 284.
Avicenna says, ‘The Necessary Existent, however, is also said to know eternally by a conceptual knowledge, so that the object of His knowledge is primarily the universal’. See Avicenna, Kitab al-Hidaya, 266–267. Avicenna offers a clear definition of what universal means in al-Ilahiyyat, 148–157. M. E. Marmura, ‘Some Aspects of Avicenna’s Theory of God’s Knowledge of Particulars’, JAOS 82, no. 3 (July–Sept. 1962), 300–301; A. M. Goichon, La Distinction de l’Essence et de l’Existence d’après Ibn Sīnā (Avicenne) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1937), 260, 267.
Goichon, Distinction, 267.
Avicenna, ‘Treatise on Knowledge (Dānish-nāma-yi ʿalāʾī)’, ch. 11 in An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia, ed. S. H. Nasr and M. Aminrazavi, vol. 1, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 199; Avicenna, Metaphysics, trans. Marmura, 284–285.
Avicenna, ‘Treatise’, 200.
Avicenna, al-Ilāhiyyāt, pp. 288–289; Marmura, ‘Some Aspects’, 301–302.
Avicenna, ‘Treatise’, 200; A. J. Arberry, Avicenna on Theology (London: John Murray, 1951), 33–35.
Avicenna, al-Ilahiyyat, 283–290.
If God does not know particulars how can He be aware of each individual and punish or reward him/her accordingly? On similar questions see P. Adamson, ‘On knowledge of particulars’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105, 2005, 273–94; M.E. Marmura, ‘Some Aspects of Avicenna’s Theory of God’s Knowledge of Particulars’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 82, 1962, pp. 299–312; H. Zghal, ‘La Connaissance des Singuliers chez Avicenne’, in R. Morelon and A. Hasnawi (eds), De Zénon d’Élée à Poicaré: Recueil d’études en homage à Roshdi Rashed (Louvain: Peeters), 685–718.
Ibn Sīnā, Najāt, 225–239.
Wilferd Madelung and Toby Mayer, Struggling with the Philosopher: A Refutation of Avicenna’s Metaphysics (Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, 2001), 34.
Norman L. Geisler, Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Publishing Group, 2013), 256–259.
Avicenna, The Metaphysics of the Healing, 284.
Avicenna, al-Ilahiyyat, 283–290.
The only thing an omniscient Being cannot know is what is impossible, like a square circle. For example, God cannot know that what is true is false, or that what is good is evil.
Adamson, Peter. ‘On Knowledge of Particulars’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 105 (2005): 257–78. Accessed May 18, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4545438.
Avicenna, al-Shifā’, al-Ilāhiyyāt, 416.
Avicenna, al-Shifā’, al-Ilāhiyyāt, 417.
Catarina Belo, Chance and Determinism in Avicenna and Averroes, Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science, V. 69, (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 119.
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Chia, P.S. The Divine Knowledge in Relation to Determinism in the Philosophy of Avicenna. SOPHIA 61, 319–329 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00876-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00876-y