I was recently re-reading my heavily underlined and dog-eared copy of Murtaza Mutahhari’s excellent “Fundamentals of Islamic Thought: God, Man, and the Universe” (a book which should be more widely used as a fundamental primer text on Islam) and thought I ‘d post a few bits and pieces taken from its contents. This particular section is Mutahhari’s compressed presentation of the philosophical argument for a “necessary being”. I’ve edited this excerpt down to its main points for brevity. I would highly recommending obtaining a copy of the book and reading it in full.
From the section “The world-view of tauhid”
“The realities that man perceives through his senses, the sum total of which we call the world, are phenomena from which the following five properties are inseparable:
1. Limitation: The beings we sense and cognize, from the smallest particle to the most immense star, are limited. They are allocated to a particular area of space and interval of time….
2. Change: The beings of the universe are all undergoing change and transformation, are unstable. No being in the world of sense remains in a single state. All are either growing and evolving or eroding and declining….
3. Dependency: Every being’s existence is dependant and conditional upon the existence of one or more other beings…. We find no sensible being that can exist unconditionally and absolutely (free of ties to other beings, such that the presence or absence of other beings is of no consequence to it)….Each being exists by virtue of the existence of another, which in turn exists by virtue of another, and so on.
4. Need: Among all sensible beings, we cannot find one that is of itself, that does not need things other than itself…. Thus poverty, necessity, and need envelop all these beings.
5. Relativity: …We characterize (things) as great, powerful, beautiful, old…. If we say the sun is large, we mean it is large by comparison with us, our earth, and the other bodies in our solar system; but the sun is small in relation to some stars….
The power of man’s reason and thought, which, by contrast to the senses, do not remain content with appearances but cause their rays to penetrate behind the curtain of existence, proclaims that being cannot be confined to these limited, mutable, relative, conditional, and necessitous phenomena….
There must necessarily exist some unlimited, enduring, absolute, unconditioned, self-sufficient reality present at all times and places as a support to all beings. Otherwise the edifice of existence could not subsist…. The Qur’an refers to God by such attributes as “the Everlasting,”"the Free of Need” and “the Eternal.” Thus, it reminds us that the edifice of existence needs that Reality by which it subsists. That Reality is the support and preserver of all limited, relative, and conditional things. He is without need because all other things have needs….”
(Mutahhari in “Fundamentals of Islamic Thought”, Mizan Press)
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