Sikhism, Kalam Cosmological Argument, Ibn Taymiyya and William Lane Craig

Published: 28 September 2024 (Updated: 28 September 2024)

Contents

Introduction

According to Sikhism, God is described in their divine scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib (GGS), as having existed alone without creation in an absolute state of “equipoise” (sunya), before responding to a sudden urge to create by bringing all of creation into existence by the sheer act of His will.

The belief that God existed alone sans creation is also the basis for a popular concept known as the Kalam, or Cosmological, argument, which advances a necessary first cause for the absolute beginning of all creation. This argument has enjoyed an upswing in popularity over the past 50 years, with arguably its strongest and most refined expression being forwarded by Western philosophers in what is called the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA).

God’s dramatic transition from the seemingly potential and changeless to the actual and active, however, elicits a variety of profound inquiries into the nature of time and His relationship with creation, both before and after, including how He began to create in the first place.

In turning to the works of both Western and Eastern academics, we will endeavour to critically examine this subject by exploring the speculative theo-philosophical landscape of Vedantic thought, Greek philosophy, Christian metaphysics, and Kalam theology. [1] In so doing, we intend to present Sikhism’s understanding of creation, and evaluate the coherency of the KCA, before contrasting both to the orthodox model of Islam. It will be shown that not only does Islamic orthodoxy reject an absolute beginning to creation, but in lieu of an eternally inactive deity purported to be omnipotent, posits in its place a volitionally dynamic being who perpetually exercises power from eternity.

Names and Attributes of Waheguru

While there is much that the Qur’an and the GGS differ on, one thing they do share in common is an explanation of the origin of all things created by God, or Waheguru as He is known in Sikhism. A cursory perusal of the Sikh scripture reveals that its authors were open to the hermeneutics of God’s nature and His status without creation.

Nevertheless, when it comes to the examination of Sikh theology from a scholarly and academic perspective, the scope of research in English is limited. With a handful of books dedicated exclusively to this subject, most of the discourse is restricted, at most, to single chapters and articles that ultimately lack any real analytical depth and insight.

Of the few prominent Sikh scholars to have broached this subject, one is Professor Wazir Singh, who acknowledges a type of theistic disposition in seeking to name and label the divine:

To be sure, it is only through the use of language and the capacity to think at the abstract level that we can conceive of a transcendent being. As such, any connection between our self and the divine simply cannot be said to defy all expressions and descriptions. It is for this reason that the well-known scholar of Sikh history and religion, Trilochan Singh, acknowledges some level of true comprehension:

In contrast, we have the traditionalist Sikh scholar, Daljeet Singh, attempting to cautiously remind us of the delicate balance between comprehending and limiting the divine through the use of our limited faculties:

But is God so different as to entirely transcend human logic? The irony is that, despite opining: “The nature of God transcends all known categories with which we describe the universe. The Creator of these limited categories cannot be judged by the yardstick of those created limitations within which we move, perceive, conceive, live and assess,” Daljeet is, nonetheless, forced towards a somewhat paradoxical concession in the very same paragraph: “All the same, the fifth Guru has mentioned the state when the Transcendent God was all by Himself and there was no creation.” [5] In other words, Nanak, Arjun and the other Gurus were content in judging and drawing logical conclusions of the divine by making recourse to those very same “limited categories” they apparently cautioned against.

Hence, when Wazir tells us that “Sikhism as a religion presents the intuitive insights of its mentors into reality and its modes, through the medium of poetry”, [6] these intuitive insights, which strongly suggest apprehensibility of God, only seem possible if the divine were apprehensible in the first place; a point which Jasbir Singh Ahluwalia appears to cede below:

What is, therefore, cognised through names and qualities, says Daljeet, is made all the more evident when the object itself is admitted as being fully attributed:

It is worth highlighting the indelible connection made by Daljeet between a God of attributes and His creation: “The attributive aspect (Immanence) of God is extremely significant. It inextricably links God with the universe,” which is the same as saying: “It is impossible to think of a God of Attributes or of His Immanence in the absence of a relative or changing world.” It is this lived experience and connection to the transcendent that pushes Wazir towards granting a level of investigation into the divine:

Waheguru and Time Without Creation

An inquiry into Sikhism’s conception of God’s relationship with creation, both before and after, is one that Guru Nanak certainly speculated about in quite some detail, as Daljeet briefly collates below:

Suffice it to say that, despite being told that God transcends “all known categories with which we describe the universe”, Guru Nanak has undoubtedly said enough for Daljeet to ironically come away drawing some emphatic conclusions about the one who “cannot be judged by the yardstick of those created limitations within which we move, perceive, conceive, live and assess”.

Be that as it may, there are a number of terms and concepts mentioned thus far that demand further exploration, including the word Sunn (void), the notion of Waheguru being “self-absorbed”, and the suggestion that God was spaceless and timeless. Regarding the meaning of Sunn, then Professor Bhandari elucidates:

Wazir also speaks of Waheguru being “the formless Void [which] remained in trance, prior to his act of creation, naught was in existence then”, [12] (bold ours) before continuing:

Having remained in sunya, samadhi or sahaj – terms which might crudely be translated collectively as equipoise – Waheguru is seen to be a formless spirit or absolute/ formless void that exists in a kind of meditative trance or contemplative state sans creation.

The question of a time before created metric time also requires addressing, particularly when confronted by Sher Singh’s apparent admission that “the Guru definitely says that for countless ages there was no creation and God was alone in an extreme form of meditation”, [14] [15] and Jhutti-Johal’s more explicit identification: “The Guru Granth Sahib speaks of a time before the universe was created, or in other words, a time before the ‘big-bang’.” [16] In this respect, it is equally interesting to note how Daljeet admits, inadvertently or otherwise, to an earlier and later dichotomy:

We have already encountered one such verse in the GGS (p.1035) that appears to speak of a period preceding metric time, and which is translated by the following three eminent Sikh scholars thusly:

It is interesting to note, as Wazir does, how the Gurus specifically referenced an actual measure of time in the GGS for this period of waiting:

In spite of the fact that these Gurus explicitly put a number to this duration, Wazir’s takeaway is that this, and any other such quantitative measures, ought to be understood symbolically rather than literally:

Jhutti-Johal proffers the same apology:

Sher, on the other hand, is altogether more cryptic in his evaluation of God’s relationship to duration. Strictly speaking, if time is to be applied to the eternal, then it should be done with the meaning of an “infinite duration of time”, as he tells us below:

Although “the Guru definitely says that for countless ages there was no creation and God was alone in an extreme form of meditation”, [23] Sher offers a more perspectival interpretation of this seemingly extended duration:

In contrast, Trilochan is emphatic that eternity, when “applied to God does not mean endless duration, the yesterday, today and forever, but it means that God is beyond time”. He declares:

Although Sohan shares the view that God is timeless sans creation, but related to time thereafter such that it subsists in Him, he nonetheless argues “that the movement from unconsciousness and finitude to consciousness and infinite is a movement within God, that time is in God and not that God is in time. In His conscious and Full nature God is Timeless, and time is created in the course of the movement from God as potential to God as self-evolved” (bold ours). [26]

But the most unequivocally damning and detailed evaluation is that of Ahluwalia’s, who sees the entire debate revolving around “the ‘createdness’ of time, that is, the nature of time with a beginning, as against the eternal duration of Vedantic time” (bold ours). It is an argument which posits God enduring either concomitantly with eternal (Vedantic) time, or existing timelessly sans creation, but temporally thereafter. As such, for Ahluwalia:

This conception of God, which “refers to the timelessness of the ultimate reality, that is, to its eternal, self-same state of being in the static continuum of time”, is seen by Ahluwalia to be untenable:

Ahluwalia continues:

Hence, any “scholars following the Vedantic tradition, timelessness of God means not a supra-temporal state, but a quality of being eternal, that is, immutable in all time. Eternity as a state of being (immutable) in time is a category applicable to the Vedantic ultimate reality—Brahman qua Being (substance)—and not to the Sikh conception of the Absolute qua Spirit conceived as Akal in the sense of being supra-temporal or time-transcendent”.

For Ahluwalia, therefore, this “new conception of God becoming determinate qua Spirit in time and space marks a qualitative change in the cognition of the ultimate reality: from Being to Spirit” which, in his eyes, is “a new conception of time… in the history of Indian religious thought”. [27]

Hence, aside from the few who favour God enduring through endless time in toto, the majority of Sikh scholars seem to support a timeless model of Waheguru existing changelessly and inactively sans creation.

Becoming of Creation in Sikhism

According to Sher Singh, Sikhism posits that Waheguru began to create at a moment in the past neither from absolutely nothing (creatio ex nihilo), and nor from any pre-existing material (creatio ex materia) or prior creation (creatio ex creatione):

This notion is said to distinguish Sikhism from Judeo-Christianity, says Western academic Pashaura Singh:

Thus, it is imperative that we explore this position in greater detail so as to find out precisely how Sikh scholars have gone about understanding and conceptualising the transition of Waheguru from latent potentiality to one of creative activity.

The first place to look is the GGS and Guru Nanak’s well-known composition of Asa di Var (462:17- 475:10; specifically 463:4-5), or the Ballad of Hope, which Professor Vir Singh (Vir Singh 1950: 393–4) renders:

Meanwhile, Sohan Singh in The Ballad of God and Man translates this as follows:

The most striking appellation being attributed here to the Creator has to be that He is self-created/ created Himself, or as Sahib Singh puts it (Sahib Singh 1962–4: 3, 616):

To better apprehend what is meant here, Vir Singh elucidates:

The peculiar picture being painted is that Waheguru is fashioning the creation, not as something distinct, separate and indistinguishable from His self, but literally from His self.

Sohan expresses similar ideas in his philosophically-laden commentary on Asa di Var, in which he speaks of “[t]he unfoldment of the phenomenal aspect of God [which] takes place in time” such that “God expands himself in kudarat in sheer delight in His creative Nature”. In other words, since “God as Kudarat is existence” and this “existence is in time and space”, His existence is, thus, subject to “change” in a way where:

In his commentary, Professor Teja Singh puts things more simply and lucidly:

In relation to this before-and-after dichotomy, it is quite revealing that Teja recognises the inevitable double-phase of this deity, which Sohan Singh calls “His own two-fold Nature”. In fact, Sohan considers it necessary to elaborate on “His dual nature” in order “to understand the transition between His nature as sunn (sunya), or pure potentiality, and His nature as world-embodiment”. He continues: [36]

The transformation process of the dual nature of Waheguru, which includes the creation of this “dhundhukara”, is detailed more thoroughly by Trilochan:

This duality is expressed even more starkly by Wazir, who goes so far as to ascribe both a finite and infinite nature to Waheguru wherein the former is “contained” or “absorbed” in the latter:

As with before, however, Ahluwalia stands apart from his peers. This time he expresses fundamental disagreement with any model suggesting that the Creator is the material cause of the phenomenal reality. Even if such “pre-Nanakian ideas in Indian philosophy and mythology”, as he describes them, succeed in “keeping intact the idea of transcendence”, he insists that “the concept of immanence of the cause in the effect is just another way of saying that the latter pre-exists in the former”, before adding:

But Ahluwalia’s suggestion that God is merely immanent through the use of His causal will does nothing to explain the origin of the phenomenal reality. If He is not the material cause, and creatio ex nihilo is to be dismissed out of hand, then from whence did this material originate?

In spite of this broad academic conflict, it should be obvious to both parties that the transition from a state of absolute quiescence to perpetual activity should represent two wholly distinct and mutually-exclusive phases of Waheguru’s existence; at least that is how Trilochan sees it:

Irrespective of whether Waheguru is considered both the material and efficient cause of creation, or just simply the efficient, it cannot be said that what He was sans creation is what He would be thereafter. It is this affirmation, however, which represents one of Sikh theology’s greatest pitfalls.

Waheguru’s Transitional Feat of Creation

Whatever comes from God is not contradictory.
– Shaikh al-Islam

Whether one identifies as a Vendantic eternalist who sees Waheguru enduring changelessly in a metrically amorphous time that lacks any intrinsic metric, or existing timelessly before undergoing some type of relational change with the becoming of the universe, there is one inescapable question that requires answering: How did Waheguru begin to create?

This question, which has long been debated among philosophers and theologians alike, is integral to the understanding of truth being attributed to God. While both interreligious and intrareligious answers vary among the world’s major religions, the issue, broadly speaking, revolves around God’s freedom and His relationship to time.

“The idea of the world once being non-existent and then its having been created at a certain point of time is said to have some philosophical difficulties,” recognises Sher Singh, before quoting George Galloway’s Philosophy of Religion to better explain his position:

In order for God to be regarded exclusively as logically prior to creation, what would be required is a timeless model of a sort, which, as we saw earlier, appears to be the most widely adopted position among Sikh scholars and academics:

Although a conception of a timeless God being logically prior might mitigate questions around why He would have waited from eternity before deciding to create, we are still no closer to answering how He would have been able to create in the first place. Indeed, having carefully sifted through the works of the Sikh religious intelligentsia, it appears that their explanation for a timeless being’s transition from a state of absolute quiescence to one of first activity verges on brute insistence more than anything else.

For Daljeet, it is Waheguru’s attribute of will that is taken to be the resolution to this conundrum:

For him, the following portion of the GGS is sufficient enough: “‘God was by Himself and there was nothing else… There was no love or devotion, nor was His Creative Power in operation… When He willed, He created the Universe.’ [1. p. 1036].” [46] (bold ours)

Similarly, God’s mysterious will is Wazir’s preferred explanation: “The transition from the hidden (gupt) state to the revealed (pargut) state was effected through the mysterious ‘will’ of the Divine, which in the Vedic account has been put down as ‘desire’.” [47] (bold ours) He is wholly content with the circularity that God Himself is a properly basic reason for the cause of His own existence:

Balbinder Singh Bhogal of Hofstra University likewise considers this volitional feat to be a mystery:

This self-activating mechanism is also preferred by Teja Singh, who again turns to scripture for his simplistic solution:

There is, then, the seemingly volitional quality of urge that has been attributed by the following scholars to their timeless deity, which, going by its context, appears to connote a gradual move towards a maximal peak before the initialisation of His inaugural act: [51]

Thus, be it the mysterious will, an inner urge, a capacity of willing to create freely, or the initiation of the process of cause and effect, the implication is all the same: Waheguru is seen to be able to transition, as a timeless being, from a state of non-activity to one of activity.

At no stage though is an attempt made to answer the integral question of how this “movement”, as Sohan calls it, from one state to the other actually occurs. Put in the form of a question: What reasons are there for explaining the transition of an eternally inactive and changeless being ostensibly occupying a timeless existence? For this, there is simply no reasoned answer; at least none that we have encountered.

Even Sikh scholars, who fully comprehend the mutual exclusivity of Waheguru’s timelessly eternal existence sans creation against that of His existence thereafter, appear either content in accepting this transition on account of God’s mysterious will, urge, or self-caused activity-volition; or compound their situation further by throwing into the mix Sikhism’s apophatic-cum-cataphatic (Nirgun-Sargun) doctrine of God, with Waheguru existing paradoxically in a timeless-cum-temporal state (for more details, see here). Take the following from Wazir as a prime example:

Despite a complete absence of moments and events in a timeless setting, at no point does Wazir pause to ask how an eternally motionless and ever-the-same being is capable of deciding, choosing, considering, taking a moment, or even an instance, to achieve this imponderable feat of creating the universe.

But Sikhs are not the only ones to have pondered this mystery. Muslims (see Appendix A – Modern Muslims’ Mistrust of the TCM) and Christians alike have also attempted to tackle this creative conundrum through a series of increasingly sophisticated polemics that have collectively come to be known as Kalam or the Cosmological arguments.

Kalam Cosmological Argument

The ways of the philosophers contain within them ruin
in terms of the goal and the means.
– Ibn Taymiyya

The Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) is a contemporary version of a medieval doctrine championed within the Muslim world by a theo-philosophical group called the Asharites, and which gained attention more recently within Western scholarly circles following the publication of a book in 1979 by the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig.

As part of what Craig calls a “family of arguments that seek to demonstrate the existence of a Sufficient Reason or First Cause of the existence of the cosmos”, [58] the KCA is considered today, if not the strongest, then certainly the most popular version of these Cosmological arguments.

This section will focus on presenting and critiquing the foundation of Craig’s formulation of this argument, which has been presented, he says, “to show that the universe is not eternal but had a beginning”. Thus, Craig’s KCA, as it stands in its current form, attempts to prove “that the universe must therefore be contingent in its existence” and that “it came into existence out of nothing” [59]  through the following argument:

For Craig, “premise (1) is a metaphysical principle: being cannot come from nonbeing; something cannot come into existence uncaused from nothing”. Hence, if there is “not even the potentiality of the universe’s existence prior to the big bang, since nothing is prior to the big bang… then how could the universe become actual if there was not even the potentiality of its existence? It makes much more sense to say that the potentiality of the universe lay in the power of God to create it”. [61]

As with the majority of Sikh academics, Craig also supports a timeless cause having brought about the first temporal effect; except that his emerges under very specific conditions that derive from the influential Asharite scholar, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (died 1111CE). Craig explains:

Despite disagreeing with the Asharite heavyweight over the issue of change, Craig, nevertheless, agrees with al-Ghazali’s utilisation of the free-will card as being strictly predicated on the absence of any prior determining conditions:

According to Craig, since “there was not anything physically prior to the singularity” of creation, “it is impossible that the potentiality of the existence of the universe lay in itself, since it did not exist. On the theistic view, the potentiality of the universe’s existence lay in the power of God to create it”. [64] In other words, the only answer to the question of potentiality, which Craig says “entails the possession of modally accidental intrinsic properties”, [65] lies within the nature of God:

For this reason, not only must this solution be free of any determining conditions, but its potentiality is necessarily rooted in His omnipotence: “Imagine once again God existing changelessly alone without creation, with a changeless and eternal determination to create a temporal world. Since God is omnipotent, His will is done, and a temporal world begins to exist.” [67]

Similar to the Asharites before, Craig’s theology is so driven by his devotion to preserve freedom for a timeless deity that “on the Christian view God is free to refrain from creating at all”: [68]

When taking into consideration a God with such seemingly boundless freedom, it should come as no surprise to also learn that “it is possible for God to exist with timeless intentions and volitions”. [70] [71]

Such an open-ended nature of divine freedom has certainly drawn criticism, with the following objection raised by Keith Ward. This Anglican priest has fundamentally “objected to the doctrine that God is the Creator of time ex nihilo” by questioning whether a timeless deity can even make such a transition. Craig quotes him below:

Notwithstanding the fact that Ward’s argument could have been framed more accurately, it does, all the same, have the makings of an intuitively compelling response, in spite of Craig’s counter below:

Even if God’s decision to create is not taken to imply a movement from indecision to decision, Craig’s argument, that God is free in His timeless existence to determine His own volition, fails to explain why He determined to create on this particular occasion rather than refrain from doing so.

The reason this question of why is so important, is because it requires rationally justifying the relationship between God’s “timeless intentions and volitions”, which involve His “decision to create” via the “free act of His will”, against the stark picture Craig has drawn below of a timeless God being utterly immobile, changeless, and solitary in His existence:

But in the absence of any temporal state of affairs, one might be forgiven for wondering how a decision-making process can be reconciled with the idea of a timeless God existing in an “utterly changeless state”, particularly when decisions normally involve choosing between at least two alternatives, which, as it so happens, is precisely how Craig frames it:

It is important to pause and take stock of the claim being made here. Even if Craig is granted the latitude that intentionality and desire are not future-directed, we are still being asked to apprehend a being who, while existing changelessly in a timeless state of creative potentiality, conveniently possesses non-future directed free intentionality over two readily available alternatives. In spite of the arbitrariness of it all, Craig attempts to make things more intelligible by forwarding this little anthropomorphic example:

To cite freedom as the reason behind why a man, sitting changelessly from eternity, might suddenly choose to stand up, seemingly at a whim, strikes us more as brute fact than an intuitively satisfying explanation. Nevertheless, Craig bulldozes ahead:

But this breakdown, and all other similar attempts made by him ad nauseam over the decades, still falls short in explaining how a being – existing in a single timeless state and, therefore, incapable of changing its mind – is free. It appears as though this timeless and changeless being has as much choice in the matter of creating as it is said to have in existing timelessly. Take the following as an example from Craig of just how undifferentiated this eternal now really is:

At what point in this single, undifferentiated, timeless instant are we to make sense of God’s choice in freely deciding to create or not?

To approach this question another way, let us replace Craig’s dubious analogy of an eternally changeless man with an analogy that accurately captures the absence of freedom for this changeless, point-like state: a basic computer that will print the word ‘create’ on the return key being pressed provided that its program’s Boolean data-type is set to 1 (true) and not 0 (false). A Boolean data-type by definition can neither occupy a neutral position in between 1 and 0, nor exist in both states at the same time, but can only ever be either 1 or 0. Similarly, since a timeless God cannot be subject to change, such as Him transitioning from a state of indecision to a state of decision, He too can only exist in a single, eternally undifferentiated state to either create or not create. Thus, in order for our analogy to accurately represent this changeless, point-like, timeless state, we know that the computer’s Boolean condition must be pre-set to true for it to print the word create. But, while only a temporal state of affairs can explain the process of pre-programming required for this computer’s data-type to be set to true, in Craig’s model, the complete absence of moments in a timeless setting makes freedom’s application to decision-making and choice appear utterly meaningless. Hence, it is nonsensical for choice to be associated to a timeless intention that exists necessarily in a single, undifferentiated, eternally changeless state.

So understood, this brings us back full circle to Ward’s initial conclusion that “the idea of a decision is vacuous; he just is in one state or the other”. [78] In other words, in the absence of a rational explanation for why God chose to create rather than not, the attribution of freedom to a timeless deity is nothing save illusion. No matter what that state is purported to be – existing eternally alone without creation or in a state of readiness to execute His creative will – what appears to determine this position is not free choice, but rather the preconceived notions retrospectively determined by the claimant.

It is ironic, therefore, to find those guilty of uncritically accepting timeless freedom and timeless cause as brute facts, being caught employing double standards, as Craig and Moreland do when faulting the atheists for “holding that the existence of the universe is a brute fact, an exception to the principle of sufficient reason”, and for “maintaining not merely that the universe exists eternally without explanation, but rather that for no reason at all it magically popped into being out of nothing”. [79] Their failure in providing a sufficient reason for the causal act of creatio ex nihilo makes them just as culpable as the atheists for accepting a process that is no less magical than creation out of absolutely nothing.

This hollow portrayal of God, who is window-dressed as being free on the timeless ontology, and ascribed with arbitrary conditions and attributes ex post facto, will undoubtedly impact Craig’s conception of the divine, in spite of his conviction that this “immaterial, beginningless, uncaused, timeless, and spaceless” deity exemplifies what he calls personhood, and which he describes as an unembodied or disembodied mind:

Our assessment raises the more fundamental question of whether a timeless God can even be explanatorily related to concrete objects let alone causally so. Any rational basis for how a timeless being can freely exercise agency has been found to be wanting. God is gratuitously presented as a volitionally powerful “agent cause”. Consequently, there is no good reason for conceptually differentiating the God of the KCA from an abstract object when it comes to the question of causality. There is certainly something about those detractors identified by Craig, therefore, who frequently allege “that the concept of a timeless person is incoherent, that the properties essential to personhood cannot be exemplified timelessly”. [81]

Ironically, Craig actually dismisses “a radical doctrine” called Divine Simplicity, [82] which he believes “enjoys no biblical support and even is at odds with the biblical conception of God in various ways”. This doctrine, he continues, not only “holds that God, as the metaphysical ultimate, is an undifferentiated unity, that there is no complexity in his nature or being”, but also that “God has no distinct attributes, he stands in no real relations, his essence is not distinct from his existence, he just is the pure act of being subsisting”. Branding such an idea as “patently false”, he elucidates on this further:

Although Craig rhetorically asks: “Why should we adopt so extraordinary a doctrine?” [83] the irony here is that his conception of a timeless God, which brings into question the coherency of what he understands as personhood, and whether God can stand in any real relations with creation, is no less extraordinary or radical in nature.

Tasalsul Creativity Model (TCM)

They have been given intelligence but not integrity;
they have been given acumen but not knowledge.
– Ibn Taymiyya on Kalam

Of the two versions of the Cosmological argument mentioned in this paper so far, we consider both to be unconvincing. While the KCA’s underlying assumption of a definite beginning to time is multi-flawed, the version which contends that God endured through infinite past-time (the eternal duration of Vedantic time) before creating at some moment of time, suffers from two major shortcomings. Not only does it fail to explain what made that particular moment of creation any more privileged than the infinite moments that preceded it, but why God had to wait any longer than required before deciding to create.

In this chapter, therefore, we aim to propose an alternative argument championed by a Muslim scholar, whose genius has only recently started to become more widely recognised by academics in the West, with them finally beginning to take his works as seriously as those of al-Ghazali, Avicenna and Averroes.

Often referred to by the honorific title Shaikh al-Islam, Taqi ad-Deen Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728 AH/ 1328 CE) did not just advance one of the most robust refutations ever penned down against these family of Cosmological arguments, but also presented in their stead an orthodox conception of God’s creative process we have dubbed the Tasalsul Creativity Model (TCM). [84]

In his treatise, Sharh Hadith ‘Imran b. Husayn (as translated by Jon Hoover, who has written extensively on the Damascene theologian’s theology-proper), Ibn Taymiyya argues that “[p]ositing a beginning to God’s activity is irrational” and that Kalam theologians erred “by positing a beginning to the genus of origination”.

For the Shaikh, “confessing that God has been doing what He wills and speaking what He wills from eternity is ascribing [to Him] the perfection that befits Him, whereas anything else is deficiency that must be denied of Him” (bold, underline ours). [85]

As with Craig, who is unconvinced by the suggestion that God delayed creating from eternity to “enjoy His maximal state of anticipatory happiness”, because “a perfectly rational agent does not delay some action he wills to undertake apart from a good reason for doing so”, [86] [87] the Shaikh also demands good reasons for justifying a timeless God’s transition without cause by making recourse to the Principle of Preponderance.

Principle of Sufficient Reason

Known more commonly today as the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), this concept, Hoover highlights, propounds that “every possibility requires a complete preponderator (murajjih tamm) that tips the scales in favour of its existence over its nonexistence”. [88]

Hoover continues that not only does Ibn Taymiyya utilise this principle to conclude that “in refutation of the Kalam doctrine of creation ex nihilo, God cannot change from the impossibility of acting to the possibility of acting without a preponderator”, but Shaikh al-Islam also criticises al-Ghazali for suggesting that “one who is powerful and choosing preponderates one of his two possibilities over the other without a preponderator” (bold ours). [89] [90]

Of course, al-Ghazali’s approach only mirrors that of his Asharite fellows. Ibn Taymiyya, says Vasalou, argued that the latter were so “[b]ent on preserving God’s sovereignty from the encroachment of limiting standards foreign to His will, [that] they left His will brute and dark to reasons”, to the extent that the question of how was uncritically dismissed by them:

Hence, with no credible explanation for God’s brute causality, Hoover adds that the Damascene theologian fully “rejects the Kalam view that it is in the nature of God’s will to decide without prior cause” [92] on the basis that “a God unable to act is trapped in this inability and cannot suddenly begin exercising power”. [93]

God’s perfection for the Shaikh, Hoover adds, is squarely rooted in His creative process in perpetuum:

As part of his multi-faceted approach to exposing Kalam, the Shaikh has also taken an alternate angle of attack by tying orthodoxy to orthopraxy in such a way as to argue, in the general sense, for a perpetually active deity being more worthy of worship than a quiescent-cum-active one:

For Ibn Taymiyya, the perfection of a volitional property of a being that is alive is not just in its actualisation, but in its temporal perpetuity, as Abdel Hakim Ajhar [96] touches upon below:

Ibn Taymiyya Denies the Eternal World of the Philosophers

For the Damascene theologian, a coherent conception of God can only be upheld by affirming a volitionally dynamic being that temporally wills to create one thing after another, with no single concrete existent being eternal and non-contingent.

Although “Ibn Taymiyya maintains that the eternal divine will of the Kalam theologians and the eternal complete cause of the philosophers cannot explain the emergence of originating events… the shaykh claims that God’s perpetual activity does not mean that any one thing in the world is eternal”. To the contrary, Hoover relates:

Ibn Taymiyya does not just deny the eternality of this world, but argues for a type of creatio ex materia, or what Farid Suleiman believes “is perhaps best described as a doctrine of creatio ex creatione (creation from the created)”: [101] the formation of this universe not ex nihilo, but from extant matter [102] which, as Ajhar succinctly breaks down, is quite unlike the notion of prime matter speculated by the philosophers:

This type of substantial change referred to by Ibn Taymiyya stands in contrast to the limited process of change that only affects the morphological form of a substance (determined existent). In this case, the substance loses or gains non-essential properties, but continues to remain essentially the same, such as when “[t]he cloth can be torn, the stone can be broken, and the silver can be changed from form to form, but its truth, i.e. its matter, remains as it is. This is what is called the accidental form”, says Ajhar. [105]

As for substantial change, then this is “[l]ike man who is created from sperm, the sperm being the matter that does not endure but that is going to be annihilated and undergo corruption” (bold, underline ours), Ajhar adds in reference of Ibn Taymiyya. This process of generation, Ajhar continues, is what “Ibn Taymiyya calls the substantial form… such as the body of a man [which] is to be understood as an independent substance, created from [a] previous independent substance” (bold ours). [106] It is in this sense that the contrastive terms of existence and non-existence, and something and nothing are understood and applied by the Shaikh, as Ajhar further highlights below:

Similarly, when it is said that the heavens and the earth were once non-existent or nothing; all this means is that they existed potentially in another substance before the time of their existence.

Given the indispensability of time in this entire debate, it will be relevant to identify which of the two main contemporary models of time Ibn Taymiyya would have likely fallen under: the A-theory of time or the B-theory? [108] The answer would most probably be the former. According to Hoover, the Shaikh approvingly cites a rebuttal from Ibn Sina, who dismisses “the Kalam use of the application argument…[109] against an infinite regress of causes and effects” as only being valid for what actually exists. Since the actual infinite in question “does not correspond to anything in actuality, because everything in the past no longer exists and everything in the future does not yet exist”, such an exercise essentially amounts to nothing more than a “mental exercise”. [110]

With respect to the Shaikh’s overall ontology and understanding of extra-mental particular existents, we may conveniently divide his position into two categories: one that has been explicitly stated, and the other which can be inferred. As regards the former, then this includes any individual existent within a given universe, whose unique and specific form is defined by its essential properties. Such an object would acquire its distinct form from the complete and substantial change of an antecedent object. This subsequent object, while being determinately maintained and conserved, would invariably lose and gain non-essential properties when undergoing accidental change over time. [111]

While it is true that Ibn Taymiyya envisaged the notion of atoms not remaining unchanged during the process of substantial change in something as mundane as the transformation of sperm into a human being, his position was motivated not just by his rejection of the ancient Greek idea of matter fundamentally being composed of discrete irreducible units called jawahir mufradah (indivisible atoms), but also the corollary that substantial change, therefore, meant that these homogeneous and incorruptible atoms can only undergo rearrangement. Although it has been suggested by some that the Shaikh’s theory of substance might be “incompatible with modern science”, [112] his final interpretation does not appear to undermine his position that the matter and energy constituting this universe are not eternal.

The above details, therefore, lead us to infer a second type of existent in this regard. If it is true that no two identical objects (let alone entirely different ones) within the same spatiotemporal framework can share an accidental property (much less an essential one), then what of the ontological distinction between any one given universe and its predecessor?

If it is the case, as Ajhar suggests of Ibn Taymiyya, that “before this existence there was another existence, that is, the throne and the water, with the further implication that before this time there was another time”, [113] it would seem reasonable to infer that the transformation of a previous form of matter into an entirely new universe, with its own unique metric of time, would necessitate a change far more radical than a sperm’s eventual transformation into a person.

If the TCM were to be cautiously compared to an equivalent doctrine in Western philosophy, it would be divine conservation, with the important proviso that, while Kalam might classify the sub-categories of creatio originans (originating creation) and creatio continuans (continuous creation) “as species of creatio ex nihilo” (as Craig and Copan do with Christianity), [114] the TCM would subsume these under creatio ex materia or creatio ex creatione as defined by Shaikh al-Islam, thereby making it comparable to what Salim and Malik have called:

Hoover reveals a significant difference of opinion within the ranks of the Asharites involving no less a figure than al-Razi. Although he initially “affirms the Ash’ari view that God is timeless and not subject to temporal origination in His essence… in his late work Sublime Issues, he asserts that the Ash’aris, the Mu’tazilis, and the philosophers cannot evade the logical conclusion that temporally originating events subsist in the essence of God” (bold ours). [116] In this respect, al-Razi is cited as asserting: “It is established through this investigation, which we have mentioned, that speaking of the temporal origination of attributes in the essence of God is the view that all sects speak of.” [117] (bold ours) Hoover adds further:

Yet, by advocating volition and temporally originating events in God, Ibn Taymiyya has to face up to the charge of introducing change in God’s nature. Citing his opponents’ argument as follows: “If originating events subsisted in [God], change (taghayyur) in Him would follow necessarily, and change being incumbent upon God is absurd,” the Shaikh, Hoover reveals, believes that “the likes of al-Razi see nothing more in this than a tautology”, meaning that change in this context would be “tantamount to saying, ‘If originating events subsisted in [God], originating events would subsist in Him’”. More significantly, since “the expression ‘change’ is equivocal (mujmal)”, Ibn Taymiyya argues that this can either entail something undergoing change, and yet remaining essentially the same, or changing to the extent that it suffers from imperfection. God is not subject to the latter, meaning that His “attributes of perfection do not deteriorate into imperfection”. Since God’s perpetual activity under the TCM necessitates originating events, the Shaikh attributes this understanding of change to be “the view of the salaf and the People of the Sunna: ‘[God] has been speaking from eternity when He willed. He is powerful from eternity. He has been qualified with the attributes of perfection from eternity and He is still thus. He has not changed’”. As such, the irony of being accused thusly is not lost on the Damascene theologian, who masterfully “turns the tables” on his opponents by instead accusing them of “introducing change into God by positing a transition from the pre-eternal stage of God’s inaction to a later state when God did act”. [120]

Craig himself is not nearly as unyielding as the Asharites in fixatedly and erroneously trying to safeguard God’s sovereignty from any and all temporally originating events and their perception of change. Despite acknowledging his debt to al-Ghazali, Craig has no qualms in freeing himself from his predecessors where necessary, including an acceptance of, at the very least, extrinsic relational change at the moment of creation:

The reasons behind this departure, which are integral to Craig upholding his version of the KCA, will be explored in more detail in the following sections.

Incoherence of Causal Simultaneity

These people force their natural disposition, instincts
and their intellects to accept contradictory impossibilities.
– Ibn Taymiyya on the Jahmites

Craig has another card up his sleeve when arguing for the God of the KCA having begun to create:

But why must the cause be simultaneous with its effect? The answer lies in the model of the KCA being championed by Craig, and said to rest not just upon the doctrine of “temporal creatio ex nihilo” as ratified by the Catholic Church in 1215, [123] but also a model of God that necessarily requires Him to be immaterial so as to maintain the integrity of His timeless nature sans creation:

The reason why God is required to exist timelessly in this way, is because “to conclude that God existed temporally prior to his creation of the universe in a sort of metaphysical time” does not just require one “to answer the difficult question that Leibniz lodged against Samuel Clarke: why did God delay for infinite time the creation of the world?”, but also opens the door to the existence of an actual infinite. However, since “the notion of an actual infinity of past events or intervals of time seems strikingly counterintuitive” to Craig, the solution for him is to argue for the cause and effect being simultaneous:

As such, what the supporters of the KCA deem to be an actual (as opposed to a potential) infinite is an essential cog in this entire argument, and one which we will have cause to return to in the next section.

For the moment, we will attempt to assess the coherency of causal simultaneity from a purely ontological perspective by comparing causality in the TCM to that of the KCA, given that for Craig “the existence of simultaneous causation is a matter of ontology”. [126] The aim here is to highlight two factors regarding causal priority: 1) Its connection to God’s unique perfection; 2) its intuitive discernibility.

Ibn Taymiyya’s perception of time with respect to causality ultimately achieves the purpose of rejecting the simultaneity of the cause to its effect by arguing for both God’s causal and temporal priority over the world. According to Ajhar, not only does Ibn Taymiyya hold “that the cause would vanish at a definite moment of time after actualizing its potentiality”, [127] but considers the effect to be “neither concomitant with nor loosened (la muqarina wa-la mutarakhiyya) from a cause”, [128] such that:

It is this strict delimitation of the cause from its effect which unambiguously crystallises God’s Lordship (Rububiyya) by firmly establishing His divine priority over and before all things created; as Hoover cites the Shaikh: “The agent precedes every one of his acts, and this necessitates that everything other than Him be originated and created.” (bold ours) [131] On this basis, Ajhar notes of Ibn Taymiyya:

While we have already covered how time plays a far more integral role in the TCM when it comes to the eternal concatenation of temporal causes and effects, we now get an initial idea of how time plays a part in the temporal prioritisation of God, with time’s arrow ensuring temporal asymmetry in causation: the cause preceding its effect without delay or a temporal gap. More crucially, when this cause – comprising of God’s requisite attributes of will, power and action – is understood to strictly subsist in His essence, with its immediate effect materialising distinct and separate therefrom, not only does this further crystallise the all too obvious necessary-contingent dichotomy, but also preserves, in addition to God’s causal priority, His necessary temporal priority over creation.

As one who upholds the doctrine of Kalam, Craig has been resolutely committed to the belief that temporal priority must be eliminated from the equation if his model is to stand the test of time. The issue is that, even if brute causality is taken for granted, how sensible is the contention that, despite both originating from two mutually-exclusive ontological points of origin, the immaterial cause and its material effect “both occur and there is no time between their occurrences”? [133] This is especially so since Craig readily acknowledges that “God created everything external to himself, which means that reality is constituted by God and creation” (bold ours). [134] [135]

As we shall come to see, God’s volition is the means by which He chooses to act through His power in the TCM. But as with all of God’s attributes, which necessarily subsist in His essence rather than existing separate therefrom as extra-mental particular existents, this action also arises in His essence, and not as something apart from His self. In contrast to the KCA, God’s priority in the TCM elicits a more intuitively satisfying understanding by producing a conceptually purer ontological bifurcation between the Creator and His creation.

Craig’s Timeless-cum-temporal Attributes of God

As we have seen, a sound defence of the model of KCA requires that God’s divine freedom be safeguarded against two defeaters: the why-not-sooner conundrum and the existence of an actual infinite regress of causes. Craig and his colleagues believe that this can be achieved by positing a timeless act of volition which, while purportedly being free of any external determining conditions itself, can bring about a temporal creative act simultaneously with its effect. This approach, however, is not quite as obvious as it might at first appear, with the coherency of timeless freedom once again coming up short by comparing two equally real, concrete actions in God’s timeless will and His temporal power.

One place we can start is by examining Jacob Erasmus’ recent response to an apparent contradiction unearthed by Erik Wielenberg against Craig’s defence of the KCA. In his paper, Craig’s Contradictory Kalam: Trouble at the Moment of Creation, Wielenberg summarily concludes that “on Craig’s view, the temporal event of the universe beginning is caused by God in His timeless phase; but all temporal events caused by God are caused while He is in his temporal phase. Thus, God must be in His timeless phase and His temporal phase at once – an impossibility”. [136]

Identifying Wielenberg’s objection as “entail[ing] that God’s timeless-ness and His temporal-ness overlap, or both occur simultaneously, at the moment of creation (t1)” (t1 here being equivalent to t=0 for Craig), Erasmus counters that “Craig and friends… do not claim that the first cause must necessarily be atemporal ‘at t1’, but they happily affirm that God is, or ‘becomes’, temporal at t1. Hence, there is no explicit contradiction in CCH [Craig’s Creation Hypothesis]”. [137] [138] Having understood his friend’s solution in such a way that “the changeless state that is prior to our time is not merely metric-less, but also involves no discrete intervals”, Erasmus attempts to prove this point by providing the following conceptual distinction:

According to Erasmus, although God is temporal for Craig et al. at t1; as an instant, t1 is also part of the inaugural event that comprises of the instants t1 and t2:

While both academics here “happily affirm that God is, or ‘becomes’, temporal at t1”, God for them also exists changelessly alone at t1, which is a state that Craig labels as timeless. Erasmus is not suggesting here, as he defines below, that the Divine contradictorily occupies the state of temporality and timelessness at t1 simultaneously as Wielenberg has argued, but that t2 is the instant at which time comes into existence to complete the first event:

Except that things are not quite as straightforward as they are being portrayed. For one, if t1 is a timeless instant, then Erasmus is simply wrong in generally defining an instant as “an undivided temporal point” (bold ours). Secondly, Erasmus has drawn a false equivalency between the first event e(t1, t2) and all events thereafter. To be sure, this inaugural event is distinctly unique for the obvious fact that it is bounded by two contrastive instants in t1being timeless, and all subsequent instants t2, t3 … tn being temporal. Hence, although one can easily define all events denoted e(n+1, n+2) as wholly temporal, given that they are all bounded by temporal instants, the same cannot be true of this timeless-cum-temporal first event, whose fragile makeup can actually be exposed by exploring the relationship between divine volition and omnipotence (see Figure 1).

Craig and Erasmus both affirm power for a timeless God, with Craig affirming Him to be powerful across all possible worlds; even those “worlds in which God does not create, He retains the power to create”, [141] and Erasmus attributing His causal power to “all instances (t1, t2, t3, … tn)”, [142] which includes the first timeless instant of t1.

Craig, as we may recall, also states that God exists with a “real act of the will” at t1. But in what sense is this act to be understood? The question of accurately classifying the ontology of this timeless will seems relevant, particularly when needing to compare it against that of God’s timeless intention so as to more precisely understand their relationship to God’s power and their specific role in bringing about His creative act. It is at least important enough for Craig’s fellow Christian philosopher, Alan Padgett, to briefly broach, albeit from a temporal perspective:

Padgett’s query over whether his colleague deems will a concrete action or merely an abstract plan or intention, is explicitly answered below by Craig when categorically identifying timeless volition, not as an event, but as an action that brings about the first event:

In order to keep this timeless will free of any antecedent determining conditions, Craig posits God freely willing at t1 to simultaneously exercise His power and creative act in bringing about creation at t2, all of which constitutes that first quasi-hybrid event.

But here is the problem. If God’s act of creation is a concrete action that necessarily requires the activity of His power, and that this real act of the will is an action that is no less concrete in nature than His act of creation, then there ought to be no reason why the exercising of power would be necessary for one but not the other. Craig will be expected to explain how these two types of actions differ in their ontological concreteness so as to circumvent the exercising of power being a determining condition for God’s will. In the absence of such a cogent explanation, not only will Craig’s notion of timeless freedom be in jeopardy, but he will also have to account for whether God exercises this timeless power sans volition, which in turn raises the possibility of him confronting a vicious regress of active powers and active wills.

Finally, we can arrive at addressing the crux of this chapter by examining the consistency of Craig’s position regarding temporal causal simultaneity. As a reminder, simultaneous causation sees God’s first creative act occurring at the same time as the first event, with a timeless state existing sans creation. Craig’s reasoning has it that if all the sufficient causal conditions entailing the effect are present, and there are no reasons for the effect to be delayed, including time being causally inefficacious on the relational view of time, as he clarifies below; then God’s causal act and its effect must be simultaneous:

Craig argues from this that, because the existence of time does not jeopardise the simultaneity of cause and effect, and neither does time exist sans creation, locutions such as before, prior and earlier can only be understood and applied to a timeless God in a causal or logical sense, not a temporal one. Craig underscores this point when tackling Paul Helm’s apparent misrepresentation of him that “Bill [Craig]… wishes to say that before creation God exists in a timeless instant” (bold ours) by responding:

Craig even goes so far as to provide alternative descriptions for anyone contending against the use of the word simultaneous being applied to a timeless singularity:

In short, the coherency of causal simultaneity for Craig can be maintained through the following three factors: 1) the causal inefficacy of time; 2) no delay between the cause and effect, provided all the sufficient conditions for the latter are present; 3) two incidents are coincident (simultaneous) if there is no time between their occurrence.

Except that, once again, these conditions create a problem of inconsistency when it comes to God’s timeless will. We are told that God’s concrete action to create constitutes a sufficient condition by which creation comes into effect. More crucially, we are also told that God’s will is the sufficient condition by which His creative act occurs in conjunction with His active power. Now, given that God’s real act of the will is also a concrete action that is made to exist in a changelessly active state to bring about His concrete act of creation, how can they both not be simultaneous? If, as Craig reasons, “two incidents co-occur iff [if and only if] they both occur and there is no time between their occurrences”, then since time’s causal inefficacy allows a temporal sufficient condition to occur simultaneously with what it conditions, a fortiori a timeless sufficient condition should, given the absence of time, likewise occur simultaneously.

Ironically, the example of Immanuel Kant’s cushion cited by Craig to better illustrate his notion of simultaneous causation also serves to accurately capture timeless volition’s interconnectedness to the creative activity it conditions. If a heavy ball’s coming into contact with a cushion, and the immediate depression that appears as a consequence, [148] is meant to mirror God’s causal creative act being simultaneous with its effect, the same should also be true of the act of volition simultaneously actualising both the exercising of power and the act of creation. In fact, one could argue that simultaneity in this respect appears to be more intuitively obvious when these three attributes are looked at from the perspective of their origination. That is to say, if it is the case that simultaneity holds between two separate ontological frames of reference in God as the agent-cause and creation as the effect external of Him, and both can be construed as non-durational temporal events, then why would it not be equally true, if not more so, for two events in the form of divine concrete actions (the first being timeless and, thus, non-durational) occurring as part of a single reference frame, i.e. in God?

Although Wielenberg missed the mark in concluding that the first cause is both timeless and temporal at t1, he was not far off. Our assessment of the KCA is not just more accurate, but uncovers a number of inconsistencies when carefully examining the concrete nature of the relationship between God’s will, His creative act, and His power. In light of the above, it appears that any resistance in admitting the simultaneity of God’s will to His creative act is purely ad hoc and motivated by a need to preserve God’s freedom by hook or by crook.

Traversing a Causally-connected Actual Infinite

There is nothing in the domain of [sound] reason that conflicts with [true] revelation.
– Ibn Taymiyya

There are a number of other approaches utilised by Craig for proving “the impossibility of the existence of an actual infinite” (an argument he uses to support the second premise of the KCA: the universe began to exist), which he formulates as follows:

This actual infinite must also be differentiated from a potential infinite. Although both comprise of “any collection having at a time t a number of definite and discrete members”, the former’s collection “is greater than any natural number {0, 1, 2, 3, . . .}”, while the latter’s collection “is equal to some natural number but which over time increases endlessly toward infinity as a limit”, [149] with the difference between the two, Craig tells us, being the following:

Additionally, Craig defines the ensuing key terms to reinforce the fact that he is essentially denying the existence of a particular kind of infinite whose members comprise entirely of extra-mental concrete entities:

He, then, clarifies: “Since any change takes time,” an event can neither be “instantaneous” nor “infinitely slow”, but must “have a finite, nonzero duration”. [152] Moreover, change in this respect is also differentiated from the first act of creation. Motivated by Biblical scripture and tradition, which “conceive of God as both the Creator and the Conserver of the world, the former having reference to his initial act of bringing the universe into being out of nothing, and the latter referring to his preservation of the world in being from one moment to another”, [153] Craig concludes that because creation, unlike change, requires “no patient entity on which the agent acts… [i]t follows that creation is not a type of change, since there is no enduring object that persists from one state to another”. [154] As such, he accepts the concept of conservation, wherein “God acts on an existent object to perpetuate its existence”. [155]

Although Ibn Taymiyya would certainly have joined Craig in rejecting the dubious doctrine of radical occasionalism, which sees some entity x being created by God ex nihilo at every time t rather than existing earlier than t, there is virtually nothing available from Craig, or any other academic for that matter, which might practically demonstrate how his overall argument against the existence of an actual infinite would translate over to the rejection of the TCM. [156] Yet, the exclusion of the TCM from the contemporary debate should not come as much of a surprise, given how the question of the existence of an actual infinite is virtually confined by Western academics to a single universe. Nonetheless, an answer can be arrived at by scrutinising Craig’s respective definitions of the terms things, events and equal past intervals of time, before examining how these correspond to the TCM.

To begin with, let us tabulate below Landon Hedrick’s useful collation of the variety of ways in which Craig has tweaked his cherished argument over the past few decades to assist us in breaking things down more accurately:

The existence of an actual infinite in this argument can be comprised of either events (physical events) or intervals of time, with the former, says Craig, being “any change occurring within the space-time universe” such that “there are no instantaneous events. Neither could there be an infinitely slow event, since such an ‘event’ would in reality be a changeless state. Therefore, any event will have a finite, nonzero duration”. [157] Craig reasons further in this respect that if this series is not made up of an actually infinite number of events, “then since the universe is not distinct from the series of past physical events, the universe must have had a beginning, in the sense of a first standard event” (bold ours). [158]

As for a beginningless series of intervals of time in Premise 2 of Version A2, then an interval can be of any arbitrary finite extent, provided it is of equal duration, with Craig elaborating:

Craig’s identification of these two types of members in this beginningless series will become relevant later when seeking to determine whether the TCM also comprises a beginningless series of events or intervals of time. But before that, Craig informs that “an actual infinite cannot exist in the real, spatiotemporal world… for this would involve counterintuitive absurdities”, which he believes “can be shown by concrete examples that illustrate the various absurdities that would result if an actual infinite were to be instantiated in the real world”. [160] [161] He attempts to demonstrate these counterintuitive absurdities by utilising thought experiments in support of his first premise (A1 and its variants); including one he is particularly fond of, namely Hilbert’s Hotel. Comprising of what is said to be an actually infinite number of rooms all occupied by guests, this hotel was first imagined by the German mathematician David Hilbert to show the absurdities that might ensue when adding or subtracting an infinite number of guests from said occupied premises. While there are a number of other such imaginary hypotheticals, including Craig’s very own infinite library, which speaks of the impossibility of books being added to an infinite number of already existing books that have all been numerically referenced, the end result is always the same: to “show in general that it is impossible for an actually infinite number of things to exist in spatiotemporal reality”.

Craig is aware that if this series constitutes an actually infinite number of events, “then since the universe is not distinct from the series of past physical events, the universe must have had a beginning, in the sense of a first standard event” (bold ours). [162] His fellow KCA apologist Andrew Loke appears to concur by echoing that these excursions of the mind are only relevant with respect to a beginningless or, as Loke calls it, ‘past-eternal’ universe:

But, as Paul Copan observes in his book co-edited with Craig, The Kalam Cosmological Argument, the underlying reason for why this actual infinite is objected to in the way that it is, is because “the proponents of the KCA” make a “distinction between causally effete abstract objects and concrete objects, holding that the absurdities attending the existence of an actual infinite apply only to causally connected objects” (bold ours). [164]

Indeed, Craig welcomes in the aforesaid book the conclusion reached by fellow philosophers Alexander Pruss and Robert Koons, whom he says “hold that arguments against the actual infinite apply only to causally connected things, thereby exempting abstracta from their strictures” (bold ours). [165]

In the same vein, Loke argues that his own thought experiment, which he dubs the “Christmas present scenario, indicates that the problem with certain kinds of concrete infinities is related to the fact that the members of the set are embedded in a network of causal relations and which involve the violation of metaphysical necessary truth. Since an actual infinite of abstract entities are not embedded in a network of causal relations and do not involve such violations, the realm of abstract objects is exempted. By making these sorts of moves, proponents of the KCA can allow for the existence of an actual infinite number of extra-mental abstract entities, but argue that an actual infinite past does involve such a violation and thus is metaphysically impossible” (bold ours). [166]

Before examining the more critical argument of whether TCM comprises a beginningless series of causally-connected events, we still have the question of how the boundaries of a universe might be defined with respect to its events and intervals of time. If we take matter and energy to be the underlying basis for the actual existence of a universe and its space-time manifold (in a non-realist sense), [167] it would seem reasonable to say that matter and energy do not just define the boundaries of both its beginning and end, but also serve to ontologically distinguish it from both antecedent and subsequent universes. In this case, we are not referring to the so-called oscillating models of the universe, which Craig and other theists rightly condemn as eternally non-contingent. Instead, we are referring to a universe that is brought to a definite end by God, with all its matter and energy undergoing complete reconstitution for the purpose of being transformed into an entirely new one, such that what essentially separates the two, or any other contemporary universes for that matter, is their distinctly unique space-time. It stands to reason, therefore, that if matter and energy ontologically define and distinguish between universes, this must also be true of both the intervals of time and the events that constitute them, given that Craig, as we saw earlier, takes them synonymously to be “any change occurring within the space-time universe”.

These ontological boundaries, which identify one universe from another, also lend support to our previous contention that a given universe’s unique metric of time is defined by macro-substantial change, where matter from one universe is completely transformed and rearranged anew to bring about a new universe. Not only would any given universe in TCM, thus, boast its own unique starting point in time, but this would also be true of the series of events and intervals of time that comprise it. Hence, without ignoring those ontological boundaries that define each given universe, the existence of an actual infinite of non-beginningless universes would not entail a beginningless series of events or intervals of time in TCM.

Traversing Ibn Taymiyya’s Infinite Regress

A third approach in support of said premise involves what is known as “the impossibility of traversing the infinite”. This argument, explains Craig, is an attempt to prove the absurdity of “the existence of an actually infinite number of things” by taking “the temporal formation of such a multitude through a process of successive addition. By ‘successive addition,’ one means the accrual of one new element at a (later) time”. On this basis, “the formation of an actually infinite collection by never beginning and ending at some point seems scarcely less difficult than the formation of such a collection by beginning at some point and never ending” (bold ours). Expressed differently, just as “one cannot count to infinity”, then neither “can one traverse it by moving in the opposite direction” (bold ours).

In as much as this temporal process is required to have no beginning or end point, Craig does allude to this entire exercise again resting on the existence of a single eternal universe made up of an actually infinite collection:

Having already answered questions regarding the relationship between a universe comprising of a series of both events and intervals of time, in this section we will endeavour to examine these two series from the perspective of God’s creative activity with respect to time, and see whether His temporal acts constitute an actual infinite.

Although an in-depth study of Shaikh al-Islam’s conception of time is yet to be undertaken by Western academia, those who have mentioned it in passing have done so in consonance with the theologian’s overall doctrinal schema and his adherence to what Hoover calls, a “rigorous nominalism that denies the existence of extramental universals”. [169]

Ibn Taymiyya, for instance, does not hold time to be what Adamson and Lammer attribute to al-Razi (who is said to trace it back to “Imam Plato”): “[A] substance subsisting in itself and independent in itself,” [170] but rather holds an understanding closer to Craig’s who says: “So many people would think of time as a sort of concrete reality or spacetime as a concrete reality. I am more disposed to the view… that thinks of time as a relation among events. I think time is distinct from space.” [171] (bold ours) For Craig, there are “very substantive reasons to reject space-time realism”, which sees some modern physicists adopting a realist approach to taking “the indissoluble unification of space and time into a four-dimensional continuum”. [172]

Craig’s classification of time into metaphysical and physical conforms with Ibn Taymiyya’s in so far as metaphysical time is taken as corresponding exclusively to God’s temporal activity. [173] The point of divergence arises with physical time being subdivided by Craig into two further categories: the relativistic metric of local time as registered by the time-keeping quality of standard physical clocks, and “cosmic time, which measures the duration of the universe as a whole”, and which Craig associates directly to God’s metaphysical time:

Conversely, metaphysical time is not just understood by Ibn Taymiyya to be the duration it takes for God to bring about His creative effect, but is also the privileged reference frame to which all physical local times would coincide with in the present. With no room for a universal cosmic time, [175] the Shaikh’s two-fold typology is also consistent with his belief in the two basic ontologies highlighted by Ajhar:

This distinction between the necessary and the contingent is such that Ibn Taymiyya is quoted by Zeni as stating: “There is nothing of His creation within His Essence nor is there anything of His Essence within His creatures.” [177] Thus, while Ajhar further clarifies that “[t]he term generated (hadith), nevertheless, must be used to describe the actions emerging in God’s essence, while the term created (makhluq) must be used exclusively to describe the material created thing outside God,” [178] this demarcation might also explain why the Shaikh terminologically distinguishes metaphysical time from physical time in Arabic by generally referring to the former as waqt, and the latter by the more widely used nomenclature of zaman. [179]

Although Ajhar recognises that Ibn Taymiyya acknowledged time and movement/ motion (haraka) as “eternal qua genus”, at no point does the author categorise duration into divine time and created time. Hence, although he continues to clarify that Ibn Taymiyya “equates the notion of motion with the eternal particularization of God’s attributes into actions” when mentioning the Shaikh’s affirmation of “the doctrine of the eternity of motion and time”, [180] Ajhar’s failure in explicitly identifying this eternal time as either metaphysical or physical does not preclude the fact that on a relational view of time, they would both be causally inert.

It is vital to correctly understand why an infinite regress of divine causes in TCM (also responsible for an infinite regress of metaphysical durations) does not require traversing an actual infinite. The reason is that not only does no single divine cause share in causal relations with any other cause, but the creative process in TCM must be observed through the lens of presentism.

As part of a dynamically endless process that involves continuous creation qua sustenance, the whole of creation is sustained by God in the present through divine causes being initiated by the free act of His will. While properly conditioned according to His knowledge and wisdom, each cause immediately, though not simultaneously, results in its respective effect being created without delay or a temporal gap. As for the duration of any given divine causal act, then this lasts for precisely as long as it takes for the resultant effect to be produced, with metaphysical time serving as the privileged reference frame to which the physical time of this effect necessarily coincides.

In dismissing an infinite regress of independent causes (tasalsul al-ʿilal) and an infinite regress of agents (al-tasalsul fi al-fa’ilin) – the impossibility of the latter described by the Shaikh “as being ‘innate’ (fitri) and ‘necessary’ (daruri)” [181] – the Damascene scholar firmly roots the divine cause in both God’s volition and omniscience such that He exercises His will for every instance He chooses to create in the present now. It is His will, in conjunction with His divine plan, which determines when He chooses to exercise His temporal activity, in what Hoover dubs the Sequence Principle. Ibn Taymiyya sees compatibility between “the necessity of God’s prior decree and the freedom of God’s own volition” in such a way, observes Hoover, that:

Ajhar essentially makes the same point when he quotes the Shaikh as stating that “the creation is conditioned by the agent’s concept of the created thing before its creation (al-khalq mashrut bi-tasawwur al-khaliq qabla khalqihi). But the creation must be realized by means of the will, and the will is conditioned by knowledge (wa’l-irada mashrutatan bi’l-ilm). God, therefore, creates by means of His will, and He wills what He knows, everything created then is known to God” (bold ours).

While each will would be instantiated at its designated time, its collective sequence would necessitate an infinite regress of wills. This detail is highlighted by Ajhar when he states that God’s volition can be seen as both “a genus” and as “an indefinite number of wills (iradat)” where “[e]ach specific will pertains to a specific operation” or  creation of things. [183] In this respect, Ibn Taymiyya is cited by Hoover as stating:

Furthermore, the fact that these discrete activities are strictly embedded in a temporal series ordered by past, present and future entails that they necessarily stand in mutual relations of earlier than, simultaneous with or later than. Insofar as God’s volition ensures the causal independency of these activities, their sequential ordering necessitates that not only must they be conditionally determined by activities occurring in the immediate past or present, but they also serve as determinant conditions for other activities to occur in the present or immediate future. In this respect, Zeni cites practical examples from Ibn Taymiyya that provide a useful snapshot of what the Shaikh meant by these interrelated temporal conditions:

It is this temporally ordered set of sequential relations that Ibn Taymiyya affirms as an infinite regress of conditions (tasalsul ash-shuruṭ), as cited by Ajhar:

An affirmation of an infinite regress of dependent causes, therefore, ensures that the argument of traversing an infinite, which rests on a series of independent causes, is inapplicable to God’s temporal creative activity in TCM. At the same time, the acceptance of an infinite regress of effects (tasalsul al-athar) functioning as conditions, allows one to return to the question of whether TCM comprises a beginningless series of causally-connected events. It is worth noting that the terms athar, which Ajhar translates as trace; and ta’thir, which Zeni translates as effectiveness, should be understood according to their respective contexts and in accordance to Ibn Taymiyya’s conception of natural causality. The author elucidates that the Shaikh, contrary to Kalam’s denial of causality, acknowledges “that God acts by means of causes He created first and then brings out of these causes new things”. For instance, “Ibn Taymiyya decisively asserts that ‘there is a power in fire that necessitates heat, and in water a power that necessitates cold, the eye as well has a power to see, and the tongue a power to taste.’”. The Shaikh is cited as declaring: “Those who deny powers and natures deny causes as well, and say that God acts at the moment of causation not by means of these causes (‘inda al-asbab la-biha)”. Ibn Taymiyya’s “theory of conditions as ‘causes’” is such that, although God “works through instruments, and things produce each other as God has decided for them; therefore, ‘it is wrong to say that God created without instrument (bi-la wasita) for He produces things by means of each other’”, [189] Ajhar continues by cautioning that these “causes do not generate their effects by virtue of themselves alone, and God at the same time does not act but through things themselves. Things as the creation of God have their potentiality; emergence from this potentiality occurs by means of God as agent and as giver of the forms, or as actualizer of what is potential” (bold ours).

In this context, causes are of two basic types for Ibn Taymiyya: God’s overarching creative cause that is initiated exclusively through His will, and those physical causes the Shaikh illustrated above as “created causes like fire, which burns, and the sun, which shines, and food and drink, which satiate and quench”. Referring to the latter as a “proximate cause”, Ajhar cautions that this is “merely a condition or instrument by and from which God actualizes the effect that occurs… does not represent a sufficient cause by which alone the coming to be of the following thing can be born” (bold, underline ours). [190] Zeni cites Ibn Taymiyya’s summation of his contextual understanding and application of the terms athar and ta’thir in relation to these physical causes below:

Thus, when Ajhar states: “All the effects in the world are traces (athar), but can never in themselves be permanent vital causes,” (bold ours) [192]  not only is he underlining the fact that these effects are in themselves causally inefficacious, but goes on to clarify that they exist only for a predetermined duration, but never as something everlasting:

Hence, unlike the impossibility of traversing an actual infinite number of independent causes that are embedded in a network of causal relations, we have argued that the absence of such causal strings in the TCM provides us with persuasive reasons for accepting an infinite regress of causes that are entirely dependent upon God. [194] Causality for the Shaikh is not unconditioned such that it threatens God’s wisdom by rendering His actions aimless, nor conditioned to the point that it undermines His providence and independence. Instead, as Ajhar eloquently describes, it is temporally ordered according to God’s wisdom and knowledge:

Conclusion

What cannot be grasped or what is beyond reason
is not for anyone to believe or to express as his opinion.
– Shaikh al-Islam

The aim of this paper was to introduce Sikhism’s theological reasoning behind the origin of the world, before contrasting this against Islam’s, whose assessment, in turn, led to an extensive evaluation of Christianity’s and its influence upon the latter.

Despite the body of Sikh academic work on this topic being extremely limited in the English language, what was found to be available fell woefully short in providing a sufficiently detailed and nuanced understanding of the relationship between the apophatic-cum-cataphatic (Nirgun-Sargun) God of Sikhism and His creation (or at least the currently prevalent model).

Although it is true that creatio ex nihilo is practically rejected by Sikh academics across the board, their conception of the becoming of all things is evidently comparable to both the cosmological argument propounded by the Asharites, and its modern-day version as refined and championed by Christian philosopher William Lane Craig.

Despite there being talk of Waheguru enduring changelessly in a kind of Vedantic, metaphysical time, the dominant supposition – or at least the one that has been most widely adopted and argued for – is that He was timeless sans creation, before being temporally involved with its becoming. With Waheguru being the actual material cause of the universe having little, if any, impact on the underlying question of becoming, we bypassed the doctrine of creatio ex deo to fully focus on the explanatory grounds for justifying a timeless being freely capable of choosing and willing to create. This was done by turning, primarily, to the works of Western academics specialising in the study of the Islamic debate over the origin of the world, particularly those who have focused on Shaikh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyya’s evaluation of and response to both the Greco-Hellenistic inspired peripatetic philosophers, and the rationally-oriented theo-philosophical schools of the Sunnis and Shiites. The end result is this paper which, to our knowledge, is the very first Western attempt in the modern era at tackling the much vaunted Kalam Cosmological Argument by turning to the principles derived from what we have dubbed the Tasalsul Creativity Model.

Our endeavour involved specifically taking on the modern-day version of Craig’s KCA in an attempt at exposing its failings. We found that the general popularisation of this argument within Western philosophical discourse has concurrently led to it being subjected to increasingly sophisticated and powerfully persuasive attacks, in addition to laying bare a number of significant differences of opinion among its supporters.

We were unsurprised to find that the same shortcomings that plagued the Asharites of old have continued to haunt those who have today taken up their mantle in the West. Having committed fully to Kalam’s exaggeratedly-conceived notion of God’s freedom, these successors have been forced towards contriving a defence which, despite claims to the contrary, borders more on the repetition of ancient arguments and a growing tendency towards relying on counterintuitive explanations coupled with brute insistence rather than anything capably argued. There was no better exposition of this than examining the rhetoric and language used in explicating and rationally justifying the reasons behind God’s transition from a state of necessary timeless quiescence to a state of temporal activity.

Although we are often given to believe that the KCA is intuitive, a deeper look at the way in which this argument has been sophisticatedly weaved together, including the use of various rhetorical and explanatory devices, reveals that it is anything but. The number of intricate factors adduced in support of God’s inaugural creative act ought to suggest that the KCA is more an irreducibly complex argument than an intuitively simple one. Not only are we told that intentionality can be freely derived from the availability of two alternatives, but that choice can be intelligibly associated to the timeless intention of a deity who, existing in a single eternally changeless state, is also timelessly free in His decision-making.

That is not all. While God “experiences the flow of time” [196] concurrently with His tenseless, undivided knowledge being falsified and replaced by its differentiated, tensed counterpart, [197] Craig et alia must affirm simultaneous causation to obviate the existence of an actual infinite, while accepting that all the above can be achieved without any meaningful change or violation in His Godly perfection. These, and similar such, arguments, essentially appear to lull the partisan of the KCA into a false sense of security over the soundness of God’s brute causality.

With no rationally viable reason for God to create, Ibn Taymiyya dismisses as impossible the idea that a timeless being can simply choose to. On the contrary, he believes that the most befitting explanation for upholding God’s perfection is to affirm that He has been powerful, willing and creating in a temporally-ordered sequence from eternity. Hence, and contrary to claims made by Craig, with timelessness being, to borrow Mullins phrase, “unworkable and devastating” to Muslim theology, temporality requires to be taken as an essential attribute of God. [198]

In the end, whether one adheres to an absolute beginning of creation, or an eternal cyclic process involving periods of creativity juxtaposed by stretches of inactivity, the above obstacles must be faced head on. They cannot be ignored or, worse still, brushed aside as impossible epistemological demands when the coherency of the very foundation of the model is being questioned.

Although Muslim adherents to Kalam will be expected to confront our objections against the KCA, the hope is that their approach neither compromises Islamic orthodoxy, nor relies upon speculative scientific theories (particularly those that introduce and associate indeterminism to an omniscient, all-wise being).

But perhaps even more crucial is the question of whether these Muslims, in general, truly have a grasp of the significant details, much less the intricacies, of the current discourse, including the differences of opinion that exist among today’s leading supporters of the KCA?  With virtually nothing to go by when it comes to Islam’s academic contribution to this debate in the West, the only input available are semi-academic papers contributed by a paltry few, a single booklet amounting to nothing more than a cursory introduction to the subject, [199] and a trivial spattering of casual, non-scholarly discussions on Youtube.

It is, therefore, hoped that this paper drags such Muslims out of their comfort zone, especially those who have been reduced to merely parroting Craig et al., and encouraging them to directly confront the counterarguments we have highlighted, which their esteemed Christian cohorts have, in our estimation, failed to address. For us, the KCA is as incoherent as Pike contends when he observes: “I have been unable to discover any clear logical connection between the idea that God is a being a greater than which cannot be conceived and the idea that God is timeless.” [200]

There will be those who, upon encountering TCM for the first time, may find its underlying thesis of a perpetually dynamic deity avant-garde and, thus, somewhat jarring. It is likely, however, that this rudimentary reaction will stem from a combination of ignorance of the KCA and a lack of in-depth understanding of the arguments levelled against the model as a whole. We have attempted to show how these two factors have impacted the arguments of those Muslims evaluated in this paper (see Appendix A – Modern Muslims’ Mistrust of the TCM), whose opposition to TCM on the basis of eternal creation predominantly rests upon misrepresentation and misunderstanding. Yet, it is our contention that, once TCM is properly grasped, it should become obvious that certain types of infinite regresses are not just possible, but necessary in affirming a rationally-based perfection for God. This, in turn, should lead one to recognise both the impossibility of things coming from nothing, and the permissibility of contingents existing with and entirely dependent upon God, but without being logically, temporally and causally prior to Him.

Finally, it needs to be stressed that the time and effort expended in researching this subject and eventually publishing this paper has ultimately stemmed from a sincere belief in the orthodoxy of TCM, as well as its rational viability and advantage over that of the KCA. On reflection, and well before our introduction to Ibn Taymiyya’s exposé of the KCA and his exposition of TCM kick-started this project, the niggling question of God’s status sans creation, while always having been a troublesome one, was never intuitively satisfied by the trite appeal to His omnipotence. Even learning of Kalam’s notion of God’s timeless existence and its many arguments against the existence of an actual infinite – which, incidentally, preceded any knowledge of the Shaikh’s refutation of them – failed to fully erase the deep-seated doubt of an omnipotent being having, at one stage, been eternally quiescent. Likewise, coming to learn that Islamic orthodoxy for some meant affirming for God the divine name The Creator, even before He had created, was perplexing to say the least.

In the end, TCM provides an intuitively satisfying and rationally coherent answer for anyone harbouring similar such doubts, while concurrently serving to uphold and sustain the absolute perfection of God not just in recognising Him as “a being a greater than which cannot be conceived”, but far more importantly, as a deity who is truly worthy of being adored and worshipped.

Acknowledgements

Finally, while it should go without saying that the publication of this paper would not have been possible without, of course, God, to whom all praise and adoration is due, we also wish to acknowledge each and every person who has contributed, both directly and indirectly, to its completion.

Appendix A – Modern Muslims’ Mistrust of the TCM

Disgraced is the one who threw the Qur’an behind his back,
and when asked to provide evidence, responds:
‘Al-Akhtal [a Christian] said!’
– Lamiyyah by Ibn Taymiyya

Although William Lane Craig’s influential book The Kalam Cosmological Argument initially “fell stillborn from the presses, going immediately out of print” following its release, it is only “over the decades since its first publication” in 1979, says Western philosopher Paul Copan, that “it has steadily grown in influence” to “become one of the most widely debated arguments of natural theology”. [201]

Beyond the restricted confines of philosophical journals, perhaps the most important factor in popularising the KCA has been digital mass communication, particularly with the advent of the internet. Not only has this changed the way information is shared across the globe, but it has also played a huge virtual hand in the unprecedented commercialisation and popularisation of this argument.

Overtime, with Craig’s defence of the KCA progressing beyond the written word to encompass the spoken, including high profile debates against prominent atheists, his version did not just find an even bigger audience through online video sharing and social media platforms like Youtube, but was eventually assimilated by some Muslim proselytisers in the West.

In contrast, criticism of the KCA in the English language by Muslims has been sparse. The only solitary online source to have taken up the challenge from the perspective of TCM is a number of interrelated websites (the most relevant being Asharis.com and IbnTaymiyyah.com) published by an individual named Amjad Rafeeq (teknonym: Abu Iyaad), who identifies as a Salafist/ Athari traditionalist. Predominantly based on the works of Shaikh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyya, Rafeeq’s efforts, although successful in providing a historical overview of the debate and in simplifying some of the Shaikh’s more intricate arguments, is ultimately restricted to rebutting Kalam as championed by the Asharites.

More recently, two books have been published which, while touching upon Ibn Taymiyya’s treatment of the KCA, differ markedly in their approach. The first, titled Ibn Taymiyya on Causality and Reliance on God, has the author, Tallal Zeni, elicit a somewhat novel doctrine of a timeless deity. Inspired by the current scientific theory, not only does he believe that light “does not experience space nor time”, but that photons are “massless, and they are not matter nor bodies [sic]”. [202] Further still, he draws an audacious similitude between light and God, before defending a model that has God existing timelessly both with and without creation:

Except that Zeni never takes his perspectival interpretation of reality, which differentiates the world into two separate planes of comprehension – reference frames of the physical world and reference frames of the metaphysical world – to its obvious logical end by identifying his preferred model of time. Consequently, not only does this glaring absence leave his hermeneutic open to the possibility of uniting two contradictory theories of time, with God’s reference frame potentially resting on a static theory of time whilst ours a dynamic theory, but also leaves us in the dark over whose reference frame is to be taken as privileged. Hence, rather than perspicuously identifying a single reality, our author’s non-committal approach to his quasi-hybridised model of time ends up giving the impression that his is merely a futile case of epistemic perception, where each party in relation to the timeless versus temporal divide is simplistically presented as merely perceiving reality in two mutually-exclusive ways.

There is also the question of what impact this perspectival approach has on a straightforward reading and interpretation of scripture that speaks of God responding to events in time? As an eternalist who upholds an absolute timeless and immutable position on God, the author would, presumably, deny Him a historical existence in order to preserve God’s timeless immutability. As such, when scripture represents a dialogue between God and His servant, one would expect Zeni to treat this exchange as metaphorical.

Zeni may respond, as some eternalists do, that the scriptural use of tensed language in presenting God as responding in real-time – directly through dialogue and promises, or indirectly through seeing and hearing events unfolding before Him – is only meant to serve a functional role towards achieving an intended goal. This explanation, however, strikes us as problematic, not least of all because it denies scripture’s vivid representation of God as having a dynamic, perpetually interactive history with creation.

Notwithstanding the sheer number of examples available, the following incident in the Qur’an palpably captures the sense of temporal immediacy between what appears to be, for all intents and purposes, a back and forth dialogue between God and Moses involving real-time action and reaction:

If the interaction between God and Moses might be construed as too far removed, then there is the following event on the Day of Judgement, as recorded in Sahih Muslim, involving the last person to enter Paradise, which further exhibits God’s temporal involvement with His creation:

There are, then, the consecutive proclamations of Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses – as recorded by Imams Bukhari, Muslim and others – who reveal a unique occurrence on the Day of Judgement involving God experiencing a maximal state of anger: “Today my Lord has become angry as He has never become before, nor will ever become thereafter.” [204] (bold, underline ours) A plain reading of this text incontrovertibly points to God reacting at a very specific historical moment in time.

These three examples of the divine’s engagement with creation are not exceptional, but very much typical of Islam’s representation of God, with a myriad of other texts demonstrating His continual acting and responding to events that occur in human affairs, including repeated mutual reciprocations between God and His creation occurring in time. However, if eternalists, like Zeni, are to be believed, then these prior arguments amount to nothing more than sophistry based on a conspicuously misleading interpretation of scripture that portrays the divine as being unambiguously involved in the temporal affairs of His creation. Moreover, these texts must imply God having deceived His servants into believing that they can, have, and will engage in genuine, real-time dialogue with Him.

As for Zeni’s interpretive approach to theology, then he takes his perspectival paradigm as an indispensable prerequisite for understanding reality itself, be it God “speaking and acting from pre-eternity” [205] or in understanding His relationship with an ever-changing world of temporal events that include “the splitting of the sea, which only occurred by the action of God… [and] was not eternal but rather occurred at the exact time He willed”. [206] In this respect, the author exposits:

Despite asserting that God cannot be comprehended and understood from His frame of reference, Zeni is evidently the exception to the rule here as he posits that “God’s will is eternal” and that “God’s wisdom is eternal, yet His wise purposes, which are attached to what He has enacted and created, are manifested and occur at the time He freely chooses and wills”. [209] We know, for instance, that when Zeni makes the following distinction: “Now, we must concede… that God has been speaking and acting from pre-eternity. That said… it need not be contended that the Holy Lord has been creating from pre-eternity,” [210] what he does not mean by “acting from pre-eternity” is that God has been acting sempiternally, or from eternity past, because he explicitly states that “His actions are outside of time or are timeless from His perspective” (bold ours). Likewise, he clarifies “that from His frame of reference it [God’s will] is not temporal nor [sic] attached to time”. [211]

Zeni’s obfuscation continues when asserting that “God’s actions are in time and sequence from our perspective, but His actions are outside of time or are timeless from His perspective”. We are further told that “from our frame of reference God ‘moves’ and ‘acts’ sequentially in time”. It is obvious that Zeni is at pains to avoid introducing metaphysical duration and change in God. To this end, he suggests that we “not say that God acts in accordance with His ‘Volitional Attributes’ (sifat ikhtiyariyya) as this… could imply or be understood to imply that God’s attributes are originated by His choice, instead of being eternal”. In its place, “we should instead only say that God possesses ‘volitional acts’ (af’al ikhtiyariyya)” such that: “These volitional acts and His speech are not manifested eternally but rather in time from our frame of reference; however, from His frame of reference, there is no change in Him and they are outside of time.” To further shore things up, he reminds us that, because the “actions of the Holy Lord… and [] their modalities are unlike ours… we cannot understand His frame of reference”. [212]

At no point, however, does Zeni locate the actual origin of these volitional acts; that is to say, whether they subsist as multiple instantiations within God or external to Him. He is merely content in ineffectively repeating his mantra that God does not change and that these acts occur outside of time from His frame of reference. What is more, in referring to these timeless acts in the plural, he begs the question as to how a timeless God wills a multiplicity of acts that would require being sequentially manifested in time. Zeni’s attempt at dampening the obvious power of rebutting defeaters to his hypothesis by appealing to the antithetical modalities of the Creator and His creation is undone by the paradoxical ascription of multiple actions and wills to a timeless and immutable being.

The author also conflates between cause and effect by imprecisely claiming that it is God’s volitional acts that are “manifested… in time from our frame of reference”, when, in fact, it is His created effects rather than His choice of actions. Hence, if these sequential effects point to anything at all, it is to a multiplicity of causes which, if said to be timeless, force a return to the question of how these are to be reconciled with a timeless and immutable being.

A defence of a full-blown doctrine of divine immutability and Zeni’s version of divine simplicity seems virtually impossible when looking at a timeless God’s relationship with creation from His frame of reference. Although Zeni’s failure in locating the origin of these timeless acts is frustrating, if they are taken to subsist in God’s essence, then our author will be required to explain how a multiplicity of timeless acts and wills – presumably all occurring at a single, timeless instant – are able to intersect with a dynamically evolving world. On the other hand, if these timeless acts subsist outside of God, then Zeni will certainly have far more explaining to do.

Regardless of his appeal to a single, timeless will and act, Zeni will still be required to face up to the formidable conundrum of how this timeless being remains wholly unaffected, both internally and externally, when standing in real relations with a changing, temporal world. To be certain, Zeni rejects the doctrine of occasionalism:

With God having directly been involved in creating and sustaining the world, not only should it be true, therefore, that He possesses the properties of creating the world and sustaining the world, but God should also ipso facto be causally related to the world. By that very fact, it would seem obvious to infer that a causally-related being would have to undergo some type of change when coming into real relations with the becoming of the world as its sustaining ground.

One other approach that potentially undercuts Zeni’s perspectival bifurcation is to inquire into how a timeless deity, who presumably possesses a changeless being’s immediate awareness of all things in creation, can apprehend knowledge of events that necessarily exist in temporal succession. In the absence of change in a timeless state of affairs, one would also assume that all these temporal processes would be presented to God not successively, but all at once such that all moments are apprehended by Him simultaneously. But, then, how would temporal relations of earlier than and later than exist in a timeless being’s frame of reference? Would such a deity, for example, be able to discriminate the present from all past and future moments, given the absence of the succession of such moments in a timeless state? Or perhaps Zeni supports a particular model of divine simplicity that holds God’s knowledge to be so utterly simple and changeless, that He is incapable of grasping the difference between knowledge in abstracto and knowledge in concreto. If not, then how would he accommodate for God experiencing change in His knowledge of temporally changing events when speaking of future events? Can God grasp propositional knowledge related to elapsing temporal moments such that He knows the difference between Zeni having planned to write his book, and Zeni having finally written and published it? How will our author reconcile between God experiencing unique internal changes of state and Him standing in a timelessly eternal relation with the temporal world, but without being directly involved in responding to what happens in time? Zeni will be required to confront these obstacles if his model is to be taken seriously.

When it comes to Ibn Taymiyya, Zeni sets his stall out early by unequivocally declaring in his introductory chapter: “Now, this author will contend that infinite regress from pre-eternity does not follow necessarily from God having wise purposes for what He has created, and in particular His creation of humanity”. Except that Zeni’s alternate model is riddled with inconsistencies, such as admitting to a regress of wise purposes “back to the time [when] He commanded the Pen to write everything that would occur until the Day of Judgement”, but not “back to the instance when the Holy Lord created His Throne”.

Pursuing a perplexing interpretive hermeneutic, Zeni alleges that, because there is “no authentic or sound revelation whereby it is said that the Holy Lord ‘created’ His Throne, in contrast to the hadith which states, ‘The first entity which God created was the Pen’… this author contends that His Throne does not have a beginning in time but it does have a beginning in essence [and therefore] His Throne and the water preceded, in essence, the Pen and the multiverse, since God (Glorious is He) created the latter in time”. The assertion that the pen and the multiverse are created in time should not be taken at face value to literally mean in time, because Zeni illuminates elsewhere that “both the Throne and the Pen were created outside of time from pre-eternity (even though the Pen was created concomitant to the initiation of time)” (bold, underline ours).

Before coming back to untangle this paradoxical stance, Zeni’s bizarre conception of time is further highlighted when identifying the specific instant at which physical time began. For Zeni, “the first mention of time or ‘then’ (thumma) is the time from the Pen writing and determining within the Preserved Tablet to the creation of the heavens and the earth” (bold, underline ours). Later, he tentatively forwards timelessness as an answer to the question of what preceded the creation of time when the pen began to write: “Regress anterior to the Pen writing within the Preserved Tablet should not be contended though, as that was most likely timeless.” (bold, underline ours) [214]

The fundamental concern here should not be with creation and whether the timeless pen (“created concomitant to the initiation of time”) would have required being created simultaneously with its process of writing (the instant at which Zeni believes time was first mentioned) in order to make sense of the precise juncture at which time began, or whether the preserved tablet was created coincident with the creation of the pen. Instead, the question that begs to be asked is why the actual divine act of creatio ex nihilo, which brings this pen into existence – presumably logically preceding its effect – is not the actual cause for the creation of time.

If a timeless state of affairs requires time’s absence, with no prior temporal moments to speak of, then Zeni’s speculation that God’s wise purposes can only regress “back to the time He commanded the Pen to write… [but] not… back to the instance when the Holy Lord created His Throne” is similarly misconstrued, since both objects would have necessarily co-existed at the same timeless instant. Hence, Zeni’s speculation that the pen is “most likely” timeless is misplaced. Given that “both the Throne and the Pen were created outside of time” such that “God created His Throne and the water beneath it as timeless”, there should be no hesitancy on his part in recognising the timeless nature of the pen.

If a timeless state of affairs requires changelessness, then one would think that God’s causing the throne and the pen to exist simultaneously would constitute a change. Even if Zeni were to intransigently insist upon God’s immutability in lieu of Him having acquired a new relational property of creating and sustaining these entities, the fact that they were brought into existence simultaneously would presumably warrant time’s existence on a relational theory of time.

As for Zeni’s assumption that there is no scriptural evidence of the throne being denoted by the term created, not only does it not follow that the throne must, therefore, take precedence over the pen qua essence, but, ironically, neither is there any scriptural evidence to explicitly prove this. As such, the only other way in which precedence might have been argued for is rooted in temporality and spatiality (Ibn Taymiyya and Ibnul Qayyim describe the throne as “the greatest of created things” while holding that it preceded the pen in time), [215] which Zeni dismisses out of hand.

While we would encourage Zeni to consider our arguments against God’s brute causality afresh, in the end, and in spite of his laudable literary contribution to the study of Shaikh al-Islam and Ibnul Qayyim, Zeni’s convoluted model of creation coupled with his peculiar versions of divine simplicity, divine timelessness and divine immutability are hopelessly incoherent.

More recently, the English-language publishing company Dar al-Arqam (also based in Birmingham, UK) announced a “series of translations from Ibn Taymiyyah’s theological works” that would cover topics like God’s perfection and His creative agency. To this end, while their first book covered Ibn Taymiyyah on The Oneness of God, their second (published in 2023) has faithfully presented the more pertinent subject of Ibn Taymiyyah on Creation ex Materia. [216]

Aside from these efforts, and to our knowledge, not a single attempt has been made at directly engaging the contemporary debate on the KCA within Western academia from the perspective of the TCM.

On the other hand, supporters of the KCA have jumped on the KCA-bandwagon to help facilitate their agenda-driven proselytization, with most either explicitly citing Craig as their source, or couching their arguments in language identical to or redolent of the Christian philosopher’s.

One such example is the book The Divine Reality authored by British Muslim convert, Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, in which the apologist aims at “intelligently and compassionately deconstructing atheism” by philosophically arguing for the finitude of the universe. He attempts to demonstrate this along the same lines as Craig by making recourse to contrived thought experiments similar to those of Hilbert’s Hotel, believing such an approach to be “[t]he most persuasive and intuitive arguments to substantiate the impossibility of an actual infinite”. [217] But as mentioned before, these quaint mental exercises appear inapplicable to the model of the TCM, since not a single series of concrete existents therein can be said to be beginningless.

As to the issue of the universe coming into existence from nothing, or the a priori principle of “being cannot come from nonbeing”, our fellow faithful follows suit by assuming that, since creation could not have sprung from a state of nothingness, its absolute beginning could only have come about through an inaugural divine cause. He warns that to say otherwise would be tantamount to “counter discourse. Anyone could claim anything”. And as with Craig, the “potential causal conditions” required for this feat lie with “a unique agent with the potential to create and bring things into existence through His will and power” such that “this act of creation means that there was no material stuff”. [218]

On this assumption, the issue of causality – a temporal effect arising out of a timeless cause – is taken for granted on the basis “that causes always occur simultaneously with their immediate effects”; simultaneous causation, as we saw, being another of Craig’s integral arguments in support of the KCA.

During his discussion on causality, time and the Big Bang, Tzortzis recommends an article written by Sharif Randhawa, The Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Problem of Divine Creative Agency and Purpose, which, he contends, has “intelligently addressed” the following series of imposing questions: “If the Creator of the universe is eternal, why did the universe begin to exist when it did, instead of existing from eternity? If God is maximally perfect and transcendent, what caused Him to create at all? Does God require creation in order to possess attributes of perfection?” [219] As it turns out, this publication is the most detailed response to the TCM and Ibn Taymiyya we have encountered from a Muslim thus far. As such, a large bulk of this section will be dedicated to dealing with the meat and bones of Randhawa’s arguments which, in spite of the author’s obvious familiarity with the subject, ultimately suffer not just from a lack of necessary detail, but culminate in misrepresenting Ibn Taymiyya’s position on the TCM.

Contrary to his vigorous support and eventual conclusion that the “KCA does seem to emerge as sound on the model I have proposed”, Randhawa deems it appropriate to caution “like Ibn Taymiyya, that the complex nature of the theological problems it raises make it contrary to the way of Tradition and probably unsuitable toward stimulating healthy faith”. Nevertheless, when it comes to “the textual support Ibn Taymiyya adduced for his view from the Qur’an and hadith [this] only shows that the Islamic sources allow the possibility of the latter view, since they do not decisively pronounce that creation as a genus had a beginning. But nowhere do they clearly oblige that view either. Rather, they do not negate either possibility but leave the question open”. [220] But as mentioned before, possibility is precisely how the Shaikh frames his approach to arguing for a pre-eternal genus of originating events.

Randhawa also follows in the footsteps of Craig, whom he recognises to be “the leading modern defender of the KCA”, [221] by dividing God’s attributes into essential and non-essential, [222] before stating:

The first thing that should leap out here is Randhawa’s philosophical faux pas in letting slip that God “would have no reason to act in the absence of creation (other than bringing creation into existence, of course)”. But of course! Except that this is the very crux of the debate: to ascertain whether there are any sound reasons for this timeless being’s inaugural act, or whether this is a case of special pleading? As the author unmistakably understands:

Again Randhawa is content in citing Craig to do his heavy lifting:

Needless to say, Craig’s answer is more than sufficient for the author to contentedly accept: “KCA can maintain that the originator of the universe must be an eternal personal being who can exercise free agency, [y]et can still be a timeless final cause for that being [227] that motivates him to create.” [228] (bold ours)

This free-will card is actually meant to summarise al-Ghazali’s solution to a paradox of “a man who is presented with two dates, one on the right and one on the left, in which neither appears better than the other, and he has to choose one. In the absence of a deciding factors [sic], he will not stand before them for eternity without choosing one—he will just choose”. [229] We have already contested the polemic that prejudicially grants a timeless being imaginary choices so as to buttress the illusion of freedom. To repeat, it is impossible to reconcile between the position that God timelessly existed to create, and the assertion that this position was by way of choice and the free intention to create via a decisive will. Such intimations of choice and intention – be they present- or future-directed, couched in the language of freedom, or otherwise – are entirely unfounded, and thus can only stem from dogma and preconceived notions.

In an attempt to rationalise this illusion of choice, Randhawa aims to undermine Ibn Taymiyya’s principle of preponderance (referred to by him as the principle of determinism, but more commonly known as the principle of sufficient reason) by making surprising recourse to a branch of theoretical physics known as quantum indeterminism. Despite acknowledging that “like so much of physics, the details of quantum theory are tentative” (an important proviso that should have been plainly declared in the main text, rather than being elusively footnoted), Randhawa believes that “the mere probable nature of physical indeterminism provides important evidence for the metaphysical plausibility of limited indeterminism”, which, put more plainly, means that an explanation that entails physical deterministic causes is not required if it is based on random probability. Hence, given that the “behavior of quantum particles is indeterminant”, it is impossible to precisely know the final emergence of any given particle in a quantum vacuum, because: “All possibilities within that range are [] equally probable and causally equivalent.” He, therefore, reasons that this randomly-based “statistical explanation” not only “violates the strongest version” of said principle, which demands that “the explanation must entail that phenomenon”, but in addition to satisfying its weaker version, which only demands “some explanation for a phenomenon”, also “explains how freedom is possible in a willing agent”.

With the groundwork laid, Randhawa continues by drawing an inevitable correlation with the divine by arguing that, because “[t]here really can be a measure of randomness in the acts of an agent… this means that among a range of relevantly equivalent possibilities, God can choose one of them over the others without a determining cause”, thereby disproving the Shaikh’s principle of preponderance.

But this argument gratuitously gives the conception of randomness far greater ontological worth than the author has demonstrated, at least nowhere near sufficient in ascribing it to God’s nature. The fact that science does not have complete knowledge of the quantum world should warrant a far more conspicuously cautious approach than Randhawa has injudiciously adopted. He has evidently ignored an instrumental interpretation of what is called epistemic randomness, which confines the usefulness of this interpretive tool to the limitations of human knowledge, and embraced a realist position referred to as ontological randomness, which treats the nature of the world as intrinsically unpredictable. This latter position necessarily raises some serious concerns (at least from a traditional Islamic theistic viewpoint) as to whether it precludes agent-causation and whether it violates God’s omniscience and providence over the world.

Let us start with His qualities in general. Randhawa opines “that because God’s attributes are essential to him, the fact that he would create a world in which he could most perfectly express those attributes is inevitable. He has not [sic] need for the creation, but he creates in order to manifest his perfection” (bold ours). He tells us further that creatio ex nihilo necessitates that the inaugural expression of God’s perfect attributes is “spontaneous and arbitrary” in the sense that, while it “lies in God’s power, which when enacted becomes the efficient cause”, it can only occur “within certain ranges of probability, [and] there would be inevitable randomness in the decision God has to make” (bold, underline ours). Taking a quantum particle as his example, he makes it clear that “within that range [of probability] there are no physical determining causes that govern when a particle will emerge” (bold ours). In other words, the expression of God’s perfection entails that, just as randomness dictates the emergence of a virtual particle, it also determines His decision in beginning to create. Despite being told that “randomness in the decision God has to make… does not undermine his wisdom, because wisdom is that he chooses the best decision when there is one”, the fact that God randomly chooses from “among a range of relevantly equivalent possibilities”, (bold ours) can only mean that it violates the very definition of wisdom he gives, since God’s choice cannot be better or worse than any of the others available to Him. If it demonstrates anything, it is that God must have been indifferent to the choice He eventually arrived at.

The stakes are raised further when considering the ramifications of ascribing indifference to a deity Muslims affirm as the most praiseworthy of all. What makes God praiseworthy in His random acts, let alone the greatest conceivable being, when He is reduced to such arbitrariness? Things are compounded further still with Randhawa’s commitment to his belief in this scientific theory compelling him to bizarrely submit that the “statistical explanation” for the behaviour of these particles, although “a sufficient explanation… is not sufficient to determine exactly what the outcome will be. Thus, if the same situation and circumstances were repeated, different results would occur” (bold, underline ours). This is an extraordinary admission, the implications of which again raises the question of what makes a deity, so indifferent to making decisions, the most praiseworthy of all. If it is true that, given the same set of circumstances, the “inevitable randomness in the decision God” could have conceivably led to an outcome contrary to the one that occurred in the first place, how can such a quality be said to “not undermine his wisdom”? [230] In light of Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of wisdom, which, Vasalou defines, “is to acknowledge that God’s actions and commands are directed to ‘praiseworthy consequences’ (‘awaqib mahmuda) and ‘beloved ends’ (ghayat mahbuba)”, such that “God does not randomly choose between indifferent things”, [231] it seems incoherent to describe one who chooses so arbitrarily – or, put more starkly, one whose actions are reduced to raw, purposeless and mechanical responses – as being wise and praiseworthy. [232] Not only does this doctrine threaten to bring the idea of a deity being worthy of all praise into disrepute, but also raises a number of vexing questions, including how God, who presumably loves the actions He does, could love such purposeless acts?

Randhawa’s misguided approach also threatens to undermine God’s omniscience when he argues that the reason why “a freely willing agent will be confronted with choices in which their results do not compel him to make one choice rather than its contrary”, is because “within certain ranges of probability, there would be inevitable randomness in the decision God has to make”. [233] But this only begs the question as to whether a range of choices actually qualify as being random for an omniscient being required to have knowledge of what stands before Him when making His decision. If we are aware of three different choices standing before us, our decision in choosing one over the other two is determined by the very fact that we can discriminate between them by way of our knowledge of them. The only sense in which these three choices could qualify as random for any decision is if knowledge that differentiates them is entirely absent, or if they are exactly the same as to outcome. Is this what Randhawa means by God being ignorant of the range of choices He randomly decides to choose from? If not, then nothing can stand before the Omniscient as being random. Even Craig, whom Randhawa, we might remind him, considers “the leading modern defender of the KCA”, acknowledges for God, albeit equally misguidedly, free intentionality and knowledge over two readily available alternatives in His decision to create.

The irony with Randhawa’s schema can be summed up in his boast below:

First, God has not been creating from infinity, but from eternity past. Second, while we will have more to say below on this casual remark, for the moment, it would be interesting to know exactly how many theists actually are predisposed to acknowledging a wise and omniscient being resorting to randomness when making decisions.

But what is undoubtedly most concerning of all, is how cavalier Randhawa is in allowing science to shape his theology in this way, particularly one which is as speculative and as constantly evolving as quantum physics, and whose theoretical progress is ultimately limited by the technology of its time. [235] Opening the door to this dangerously precarious approach not only threatens the subordination of the Qur’an and the Prophetic Sunnah to the speculative philosophy of science, but also risks bringing Islam into disrepute if a given hypothesis attached to Islam is later found to be wanting.

Coming to his objections of the TCM, then the first and most obvious is Shaikh al-Islam’s allowance for “the possibility of an infinite temporal regress of God’s creating and acting, on rational, theological, and Scriptural grounds”, [236] which Randhawa expands upon more fully below:

Having already gone over the paradoxical implications of a timeless first cause, the only thing that remains is a practical demonstration of the principles of the TCM being applied against the specific arguments of our author.

Despite acknowledging “that Ibn Taymiyya does not regard an infinite regress of causes as possible, such that an effect occurs only if it results from a cause that is contingent on another cause ad infinitum. Rather, he simply considers an infinite regress of effects proceeding from the same Agent as possible” (bold ours), [238] Randhawa holds these events, which entail “God’s creating and acting”, to be logically impossible.

His first point of contention involves the question of traversing a beginningless series through successive addition. Whilst the misadventure of disproving the existence of an actual infinite rests on the impossibility of counting down from infinity to reach the present, when it comes to the TCM, we have provided a full explanation above in Traversing a Causally-connected Actual Infinite as to why this approach is inapplicable to the TCM.

In his publication The End of the Timeless God, Christian philosopher, Ryan Mullins, analyses the major shortcomings in relation to the idea of a timeless deity, while concurrently urging that “theologians and philosophers should abandon the divine timeless research program because it is unworkable and devastating to Christian theology. Instead, they should devote their attention to developing models of divine temporality and the implications that it has for the rest of Christian theology”. [239] Although we would make a similar appeal to Muslims, unlike the Christians, we already have a model in the TCM, which truly epitomises what Mullins conspicuously expresses regarding the ontological reality of presentism:

We will repeat our contention again, that the cogency of presentism in its purest conceptual form can only really be understood and appreciated against the backdrop of the TCM and Shaikh al-Islam’s concept of tasalsul (infinite regress). It will, therefore, be helpful to further elaborate on this, not least because Randhawa himself, despite having made recourse to some of the same sources on the TCM that we have, viz. Hoover and Ajhar, comes away failing to fully grasp the scope and grandeur of Ibn Taymiyya’s thesis in this regard.

To begin with, our author, despite recognising that “Ibn Taymiyya fervently defends the possibility of an infinite temporal regress of God’s creating and acting, on rational, theological, and Scriptural grounds”, nonetheless considers this a “very philosophically contentious issue”; so contentious in fact that it “is difficult for me to see how this could be”. [241]

Given the author’s limited evaluation of this subject, we will assume that, similar to most others in Kalam, Randhawa also rejects infinite regresses in toto. Before delving deeper, perhaps the single most important factor to underscore first is his acknowledgement that Ibn Taymiyya rejects what might be called an infinite regress of independent causes (covered in Traversing a Causally-connected Actual Infinite), or as our author phrases it, “a cause that is contingent on another cause ad infinitum”.

Questioning God’s Voluntary Attributes in the TCM

But what of Randhawa’s justification in both ascribing qualities to a timeless God, and his attempt at downplaying Ibn Taymiyya’s multifaceted doctrine? Let us start with the following example:

Except that this does not quite accurately encompass or represent the Shaikh’s theology-proper in this regard. First, arguing that a timeless being’s eternal inactivity entails him being attributeless, is not the same as a timeless being’s permanent inactivity entailing him being attributeless, since the former suggests that if Ibn Taymiyya considered God powerless sans creation, he would have considered Him powerful with its becoming. To the contrary, Shaikh al-Islam’s approach to qualifying a timeless entity was on the basis of it being possible. A being incapable of activity, therefore, could not be described as a creator any more than he could with any other quality. As we have argued before, the assumption on the part of Kalam involved taking for granted changelessness over immutability as the nature of a timeless God.

On the other hand, with Kalam having failed to rationally justify how this timeless entity began to create, Ibn Taymiyya dismissed the KCA as the grounds for upholding God’s perfection and, thus, the only one worthy of worship. As Ajhar summarised in this respect:

Judging by Randhawa’s following response, either he does not understand the actual crux of the Shaikh’s argument, or he does, but deludingly believes that the below reply adequately addresses the issue:

The superiority of TCM’s conception of God’s perfection over that of the KCA’s is that, while all His attributes are eternally exercisable in the former, in the latter, His timeless attributes are inactive. If both models are judged on this basis alone, it would seem intuitively obvious that if the perfection of an attribute is not just in its actualisation, but more importantly in its accessibility, then this criterion could only be fulfilled by God coexisting with the world, and not by Him existing timelessly sans creation. Hence, not only does Randhawa miss the mark entirely by drawing an erroneous parallel between affirming timelessly inactive attributes, and temporal attributes that God chooses to delay exercising, but his introduction of the arbitrary dichotomy of essential and nonessential attributes, and whether these might be partially or fully manifested, strikes us as irrelevant.

Having almost come to the end of our evaluation of Randhawa’s misgivings, we are almost certain that our intrepid author has not been able to fully grasp and appreciate the main thrust of Shaikh al-Islam’s theory; and this final example only cements our suspicion. Here, Randhawa raises the issue of God’s eligibility in being qualified by His divine qualities:

While the Damascene scholar’s conception of God’s perfection certainly does not rest on the false assumption that such attributes be perpetually active in some hyperactive, uninterrupted fashion, [246] providing a breakdown of the Shaikh’s typology of God’s attributes, and their relationship to His essence, will be worthwhile if we are to better answer Randhawa’s query.

In this respect, Ajhar tells us that “Ibn Taymiyya believed that God as a real existent must be conceived in terms of meaningful words and concepts”. The Shaikh categorically rejected any allusions of a self-standing essence devoid of attributes as nothing but a cognitive process of abstraction: “This severance of the attributes of God from His essence implies that the essence of God is something different from the attributes,” Ajhar says, before clarifying:

Ajhar continues that the Shaikh further warns: “It is artificial to differentiate between the attributes of essence (sifat dhat) and the attributes of ma’ani (sifat ma’na),” as the proponents of Kalam did “due to the influence of [the] logicians who distinguished between what is essential and constitutes the essence of a thing (lawazim al-mahiyya al-muqawwima lil-dhat) and the accidental qualities of a thing (lawazim al-wujud ‘aradiyya)”. [248] In fact, the Shaikh is cited by Ajhar as charging the philosophers, and in turn Kalam, for arbitrarily differentiating between an object’s essentiality and its apparent accidents: “They hold on purely arbitrary grounds that one thing is of the essence while another is not. They do not imply any means by which the essential may be distinguished from the non-essential.” [249]

The Shaikh was, according to Ajhar, trenchantly committed to a holistic vision of the divine whose existence, while being composed of an essence and a plurality of attributes (these being neither additional to (za’ida) nor separate from and other than (ghayr) His essence), was nevertheless a single undifferentiated and inseparable unity:

Hence, Ibn Taymiyya, Ajhar concludes, gave full legitimacy to the undifferentiated nature of God’s qualities and “constantly maintained that each attribute is different from the others; thus, power cannot be confused with knowledge, hearing is not life, and so on”. [252]

The supplanting of creatio ex nihilo with God’s eternal activity of creation requires that we further explore this perpetuity from the angle of God’s qualities. To begin with, Hoover says: “God in Ibn Taymiyyah’s theology acts by means of His will and power with successive voluntary acts that subsist in His essence,” before quoting him thusly:

Hoover further cites the Shaikh as stating:

Ibn Taymiyya frequently juxtaposes God’s quality of speech with His attributes of will and power as an oft-cited example of God’s voluntary attributes (al-sifat al-ikhtiyariyya), all of which are not just “‘personal’ in the sense that it is enacted by an exercise of will in time”, but also “gives God a distinctly personal character in that God’s voluntary attributes interact with the world within its own sequential vicissitudes of time” [256] or “its own terms of temporal sequence” in what Hoover dubs the “sequence principle”. [257]

In light of the above, there appears to be no impediments in identifying a perpetually active deity who freely chooses when, how and what He wills, provided this conception of freedom is internally coherent. It is in this respect that Randhawa again incoherently presupposes freedom for a timeless being by positing “that one of the virtues of the human creation is that it allows God to manifest his attributes to them more fully than with all other creatures: through justice, forgiveness, companionship, providing them special types of mercy, etc.” (bold ours). The argument, therefore, cannot be whether God “is still deserving of the title of that attribute” before its inaugural enactment, but whether an attribute can be enacted at all in a timeless state of affairs with God possessing the potential of fully realising it; or as Randhawa puts it: “It is a matter of necessity, however, that the reality of God attributes unfolds and fully manifests [sic] only through time”. [258]

It is, therefore, entirely moot to ask why God chooses to enact some of His voluntary attributes all of the time and others some of the time, when divine choice and freedom can only make sense under the rubric of the TCM wherein God is qualified of His voluntary attributes only as an eternally dynamic being.

Examining Tasalsul Creativity Model’s Rational Orthodoxy

Bassam Zawadi’s [259] approach to this subject is fairly unique in that it stems from a more traditionalist viewpoint, at least in comparison to Randhawa’s. What makes this apologist’s position more intriguing is that, not only does he adhere to the Salafi-Athari school of thought that is, for all intents and purposes, the same as Ibn Taymiyya’s, but also holds the Shaikh in high esteem. Yet, in a post published on the now defunct ahlalhdeeth.com forum, Bassam categorically states:

More recently, he approaches this subject as an agnostic by attempting to present both sides of the argument. In his paper An Overview of the Intra-Islamic Debate on Whether an Infinite Series of Events in the Past is Possible, Bassam endeavours to contrast the arguments of the affirmative camp as against those of the negative camp in order to “refute the following two misconceptions surrounding this debate: 1) All Atharis believe that an infinite series of events in the past either happened or is possible 2) There are no scriptural and theological arguments in favor of the negative camp position”. [261] Be that as it may, our aim here is to confront three specific objections attributed to the negationists.

The first involves charges of “infinite regression” brought against those who affirm the existence of things eternally concomitant with God. [262] Having already dealt with the objection that the TCM constitutes an actual infinite, as well as the related issue of successive addition, what remains is the allegation that the TCM apparently contravenes Islamic orthodoxy by suggesting that something eternal exists alongside God. But in what sense is the TCM said to be in violation here? Is it from the angle of the process of creation, more specifically its discrete concrete elements, or both?

Believing it to be the former, Hafeez Fazli sets out to prove Ibn Taymiyya wrong in his paper Ibn Sina, Al-Gazali and Ibn Taymiyyah on the Origination of the World, despite being well aware that, unlike “Ibn Sina’s philosophy [which] presupposes the existence of a primordial matter coeternal with god”, the Shaikh holds that, even “though the process of creation is eternal, however, everything is a unique creation and the universe as a whole is not coeternal with God”.

However, his attempt falls at the very first hurdle when he asserts: “If the process of creation is admitted to be eternally continuing, it will become coeternal with God. Those who are co-eternal are parallel, and those who are parallel have no power over each other.” [263] Fazli’s confusion here is that he sees the eternal process as more than just a mental abstract representation of a series comprising of single discrete concrete processes. Why else would he draw a parallel between this and the eternal world of the philosophers by asserting that it exists coeternally parallel to and causally independent of God? This misunderstanding is one which Ibn Taymiyya identified during his time and, as Ajhar cites, cautioned against:

Fazli needs to recognise that the TCM does not posit any eternal contingent thing existing concomitantly with God, as Hoover makes clear below, before citing Shaikh al-Islam himself:

Having already argued that any suggestions of God being totally free in His decision to create ex nihilo is nothing more than an admission of brute causality, how might Fazli’s notion of free-choice stand against God’s pre-decree, given that he argues:

We have previously delineated the causally-effete role that causes and effects play as an infinite regress of conditions in Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of God’s wise purposes, involving as they do an ordered sequence of predetermined events that Hoover calls the Shaikh’s Sequence Principle:

The following illustration better demonstrates the indelible relationship between divine pre-decree and volition. If God has prophesied event C, and He has made it known that this will not be fulfilled until events A and B obtain first; then C comes into existence if and only if B comes into existence, and B comes into existence if and only if A comes into existence. Therefore, A and B must serve as necessary conditions for C. Since God has decreed and has always had knowledge that these three states of affairs will obtain sequentially at their designated times – A at t1, B at t2, and C at t3 – it would be absurd to hold that He could choose to act in opposition to what He has preordained. Threatening to undermine God’s wisdom and purposiveness in this way is certainly too high a price to pay for preserving such a tenuous notion of freedom.

Fazli’s conception of creation also leaves much to be desired, based as it is on ill-conceived assumptions that read more like dogmatic assertions than argumentation and reasoning. For instance, not only does he take for granted al-Ghazali’s position that “no logical contradiction occurs in believing” that God eternally willed to create, or “in accepting [the] delayed effect for a cause”, [269] but he also concedes that, while “Imam Ghazali believes that the ‘universe’ and ‘the time’ both have been created in the past ex-nihilo… Ghazali does not support [t]his stand point with proofs; rather he considers the rejection of [the] Muslim philosophers’ stand point [of cause and effect being temporally simultaneous] sufficient in this regard”. [270]

Fazli’s rejection of causal simultaneity though makes a complete hash of his creative model, which posits two ontological phases: the “Phase of Seclusion (Ahdiyat) [that] comes before the phase of Divine Manifestation (Wahdat)”, and which envisages God in the former as “beyond having any desire, want, etc. No aspiration as to be known, nor of seeing His Own Beauty in the mirror of the universe; neither any Will to create the universe nor of not to create it; no archetypes nor anything like Platonic ideas etc. At this phase the Divine Being willed that He creates the universe. Now the determinations come into being in Divine Knowledge and these determinations are expressed, not with logical necessity, but with Allah’s absolute Knowledge and on His Command (amr)” (bold, underline ours). [271]

The difficulty lies in reconciling the actual instance at which time is created ex nihilo with the instance at which God wills to create it. On the one hand, Fazli tells us that physical time began during the second phase (Divine Manifestation) of God: “At Ahdiyat there are no determinations. Time and space refer to determinations and their coming into being by Allah’s Will (Iradah) and Command (Amr) is called the phase of Wahdat.” On the other hand, he insists that during “this [first] phase, the Divine Being willed that He creates the universe” while contradictorily also having “neither any Will to create the universe nor of not to create it”. But even if we were to give him the benefit of doubt by assuming that what he meant to say of God’s creative volition during this first phase was that His “Will (Iradah) is a capacity which is free in its activity. It itself is its principle of particularization”, [272] this would bring us no closer to identifying the ontological status of this instance immediately preceding the creation of physical time. His situation is further compounded when he asserts:

If it is the case, as we strongly suspect, that durationality is unavoidable when rejecting causal simultaneity, and Fazli fails to maintain the existence of a timeless or non-durational instant before physical time, then, in addition to him having to reconcile “[i]dentifying God with ‘time’ [which] is absolutely against the Quran”, [274] he may have to face up to the formidable why-not-sooner question of why God arbitrarily waited since eternity before deciding to create.

But what of the accusations of heterodoxy levelled against those who champion the TCM, and who answer affirmatively to the more fundamental question of whether there was “ever a point in which God existed without creation alongside Him”, as Zawadi puts it? [275]

We may recall that Ibn Taymiyya was emphatic in his rejection of the doctrine of the simultaneity of cause and effect, insisting that “it is impossible for the individual effect to be simultaneous with its own agent, though it is not impossible for the latter to create one thing after another”. [276] According to Ajhar:

To be sure, it seems inconceivable to just ignore temporal directionality in a temporal causal series and not consider a cause having temporal priority over its effect, particularly when the former subsists in God’s essence while the other does not. How creation can, therefore, occur simultaneously with His act – without threatening to undermine God’s temporal, causal and logical priority – is the real question here, and one which gives Ibn Taymiyya’s position, as Ajhar describes more fully below, a strong intuitive resonance:

On this basis, the Shaikh insists that said “doctrine is invalid if judged by plain reason. This is admitted by all [people of] sound natural intelligence who have not been corrupted by the harmful imitation [of the philosophers]”. [282]

God’s ‘Need’ of Creation

The second challenge of Bassam’s negative camp centres on the aforementioned Asharite obsession over divine freedom. It queries “that to say that God must be creating from eternity or displaying His Mercy from eternity makes Him dependent upon His creation”.

Apparently, the best the affirmative camp can muster against the crux of their opponent’s argument that “God needs creation, hence He creates” is to misrepresent it as follows: “God’s Perfection by necessity demands that He creates; hence, this is why there is creation at all times”. Despite Bassam dismissively interpreting this reply as “a clever linguistic tactic, which does not address the substantial [] point behind the argument itself”, the fact is that it actually does answer the underlying objection by locating perfection in God’s creative acts, thereby rooting it within God Himself, and not something other than Him. As for the genus of creation in TCM, then as a contingent by-product necessitated by His creative process, this comprises of nothing more than a series of causally inert, conditional traces. To argue otherwise would require demonstrating that creation does contribute causally to the creative process, so as to undermine the position that perfection is rooted exclusively in God’s essence.

Ibn Taymiyya answers the Asharites along these same lines by locating perfection, not in creation, but in God’s essence: “God is perfected by His own will and power without help from any other,” says Hoover, before citing the Shaikh himself:

If, as Hoover surmises, “God’s acts are just as constitutive of His perfection as His attributes and essence”, then since “God’s activity is a necessary concomitant of God’s perfection, and in no way does God acquire perfection through His acts”, [284] creation is nothing more than the necessary by-product of His actions.

Although the long and protracted history of the argument on dependency is outside the scope of this paper, the above line of reasoning on the part of the negativists is symptomatic of a general malaise affecting their polemics against the TCM that involves them presupposing creatio ex nihilo. And the following from Bassam, or more accurately the negative camp he is representing, is just such an example: “God is both Self-Fulfilling and Perfect in His Essence, and thus does not need to ‘act’ and exert His attributes in order to demonstrate His perfection.” [285] Here the reasoning entails that, since God’s perfection is dependent exclusively upon His essence and not His volitional attributes, He could have maintained His timeless solitary existence by choosing not to create, and still remained perfect. In contrast, we have argued that, since the notion of freely choosing between two alternative options in a timeless state is purely illusory, this timeless deity could only have existed in a single unalterable state. If we leave aside brute assertion and accept the fact that a timeless state of affairs does not afford us a rational explanation for why this entity decided to create, then the very least that can be said, courtesy of the luxury of hindsight, is that this deity occupied a single timeless state to do nothing except create. This will place Bassam in a dilemma to explain why the God of KCA is in any less of a need to create than that alleged of TCM.

Fundamentally speaking though, this issue of pitting inactivity against its counterpoint cannot and should not be reduced to any comparison that conveniently ignores the fact that the logical and coherent rationality of the metaphysical reality of existence is upheld in the model of the TCM, not the KCA. Hence, questions such as: “Why is action a sign of life; based on what analogy is such an assertion being made?” implicitly seek to undermine the argument’s overall thrust that timeless inactivity and perfect life are incompatible, by reducing its strength to being based on mere analogy alone.

In any case, when it does come to analogising between the actions of the creation and those of the divine as a sign of life, Ibn Taymiyya does so using a fortiori argumentation (qiyas al-awla) which holds that “God is all the more worthy of being qualified with perfections found in creatures than are the creatures themselves, and God is all the more worthy of being exonerated of imperfections found in creatures than are the creatures themselves” (bold ours). Hence, this “fundamental principle”, [286] as Hoover dubs it, is not being used here to draw analogical inferences to life per se, but to perfect life, for which there are a number of intuitively compelling reasons why it would necessitate action, and why the negative camp’s responses below appear guilty of having grabbed the wrong end of the stick:

While it may very well be true that a comatose person possesses agency (the capacity to act), it would be ludicrous to suggest that the quality of life in such a vegetative and minimally-conscious state is anywhere near ideal. When looked at from the perspective of perfection, not only is volition (the ability of freely choosing to act) a necessary prerequisite for perfect life, but perfect life must necessarily include both transitive and intransitive acts. Hence, with perfect life being inexorably linked to action, and action requiring both volition and power; then, since activity is an essential requirement for both perfect human life and a fortiori perfect life per se, we may arrive at Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of God being powerful through His acts:

Conversely, therefore, inactivity would be in diametric opposition to perfection, with eternal or timeless inactivity amounting not so much to a lack of volition and power, but being indicative of the absence of the very attributes themselves. In arguing against Kalam, the Damascene Shaikh considers it absurd to attribute power to a being sans creation, when the existence of the very object upon which power is to be exercised is not just absent, but an ontological impossibility:

With that said, we may also comment on the negative camp’s attempt at demonstrating God’s activity sans volitional acts by broadening the category of action to include “self-awareness, constant cognition, unchanging and non-sequential mode of speaking” as “‘active’ states”. Such an approach might all be good if not for the fact that this alleged activity, presumably during His timeless and changeless phase of existence, will yield precisely the same concerns we aired against Craig’s endeavour at attempting to explain how a changeless God possesses “timeless intentions and volitions”, as well as the “decision to create” via a “free act of His will”; but without relying on brute fact. When it came to God’s changelessness without creation, although Craig sought to have his cake and eat it too by positing a simultaneous cause and effect, Bassam’s negativists seem to be confused over their conception of a timeless deity. Despite divine speech said to be both changeless and non-sequential, not only are we left in the dark over what God’s so-called cognition here might entail, but if it is non-sequential in nature, then one wonders how this might be squared against it also being “constant”; the latter term indicating a sequential temporal process as opposed to a changelessly timeless one, and one which would, therefore, paradoxically imply change.

In all, it is far from clear whether these timeless qualities are rationally coherent. Ibn Taymiyya postulated volitional acts as the basis for God’s greatness, with the perfection of an action realised in it actualisation, not its supposed latent potentiality. Activity is, thus, a necessary prerequisite for entertaining any conceptions of He whom has been referred to as the greatest conceivable being. Moreover, activity cannot be restricted, but must instead be inclusive of both His transitive and intransitive actions, which themselves would inexorably be linked to His eternal divine power and will. Hence, a timelessly inactive being is as good as attributeless; thereby making him imperfect and impotent. As an eternally living and omnipotent agent, acting follows necessarily and is among the necessary concomitants (lawazim) of His perfect life.

Finally, there is the critical issue of Muslims having arrived at the KCA and Kalam (we consider both to be mutually inclusive) either via a purely Muslim-oriented route, through Western philosophical discourse alone, or a combination of both. Irrespective of the path arrived at, it would be remiss of anyone to ignore the fact that the most influential form of the KCA, and, arguably, its most refined expression, is today found in the West. As for the aforementioned protagonists evaluated in this section, then they have, indeed, been influenced, to some level of degree, by Western discourse on the subject. This invariably raises the question as to what extent they are prepared to go in supporting the theological implications and ramifications that follow therefrom.

Take, for instance, the occurrence of change in the nature of the divine, which Craig wholeheartedly affirms: “God also changes in intrinsic ways – for example, knowing what time it is. He knows it’s now t1, now it’s t2, now it’s t3. But I think that these kinds of trivial changes are not at all threatening to an orthodox concept of God.” [290] Are our Muslim stalwarts of the KCA willing to admit both intrinsic and extrinsic change, as Bassam apparently has done? Although he has disclosed: “I distinguish between Allah undergoing intrinsic changes and extrinsic changes. I see nothing objectionable in Allah undergoing extrinsic changes, but I am against Allah undergoing intrinsic changes,” [291] he, nonetheless, does question the possibility of reconciling between a deity said to be absolutely changeless and possessing knowledge of all tensed facts:

Might they likewise be forced into affirming some of the more dubious beliefs of their theological fellow travellers amongst the Christians, such as the belief that God’s transition from timelessness to temporality results in all tenseless facts existing in His timeless knowledge being instantly transformed into their tensed counterparts (and whether they consider this change to be “trivial” in nature, as Craig puts its). [293]

It is hoped that these, and other related questions, are not ignored or taken for granted, but resolutely confronted.

[1] It should be noted that this paper is not meant to be an entry point to what is otherwise a vast and complicated interdisciplinary field of theo-philosophy. While we have endeavoured to simplify less familiar concepts where possible, readers with an intermediate understanding of this subject are likely to benefit the most.
[2] S.S. Bhatia, A. Spencer (1999), The Sikh Tradition: A Continuing Reality (Essays in History and Religion), (Publication Bureau Punjabi University, Patiala, India), p. 202.
[3] L.M. Joshi (2000), Sikhism, (Publication Bureau Punjabi University, Patiala), p. 49.
[4] Ibid., pp. 49-57.
[5] D. Singh (2004), Sikhism: A Comparative Study of its Theology and Mysticism, (Amritsar, Singh Brothers), p. 187.
[6] W. Singh (1981), Philosophy of Sikh Religion, (Ess Ess Publications, Punjabi University, Patiala), p. 44.
[7] J.S. Ahluwalia (1983), The Sovereignty of the Sikh Doctrine, (Bahri Publications Pvt Ltd., New Delhi), p. 65.
[8] D. Singh, op. cit., p. 190.
[9] W. Singh, op. cit., p. 5.
[10] D. Singh, op. cit., p. 187.
[11] J.S. Mann, S.S. Sodhi, Concepts in Sikhism – Cognitive Psychology – Mind Map Approach to Understanding Sikhism for the Second Generation Sikh Children, (Global Sikh Studies.net; accessed: 09 Dec. 2009), p. 459.
[12] W. Singh, op. cit., pp. 25-6.
[13] Ibid., pp. 44-6.
[14] Fn. 4: G.G., p. 227.
[15] S. Singh (1986), Philosophy of Sikhism, (Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, Amritsar), pp. 181-2.
[16] J. Jhutti-Johal (2011), Sikhism Today, (Continuum International Publishing Group), pp. 15-6.
[17] D. Singh, K. Singh (1997), Sikhism – Its Philosophy and History, (Institute of Sikh Studies, New Delhi), p. 39.
[18] J. Jhutti-Johal, op. cit., pp. 15-6.
[19] W. Singh, op. cit., pp. 44-6.
[20] Ibid., p. 48.
[21] J. Jhutti-Johal, op. cit., pp. 15-6.
[22] S. Singh (1986), op. cit., p. 161.
[23] Fn. 4: G.G., p. 227.
[24] Ibid., pp. 181-2.
[25] L.M. Joshi, op. cit., p. 52.
[26] Ibid., p. 160.
[27] J.S. Ahluwalia (2001), op. cit., pp. 45-7.
[28] S. Singh (1986), op. cit., p. 182.
[29] P. Singh (2006), Life and Work of Guru Arjan, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), p. 250.
[30] C. Shackle (2008), Repackaging the Ineffable: Changing Styles of Sikh Scriptural Commentary, (Bulletin of SOAS, 71, 2, pp. 273-4, School of Oriental and African Studies), p. 19.
[31] S. Singh (1982), The Ballad of God and Man, (Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar), pp. 13-4.
[32] C. Shackle, op. cit., p. 18.
[33] Ibid., pp. 19-20.
[34] S. Singh (1982), op. cit., pp. 15-6.
[35] T. Singh (1990), Asa Di Var, (Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, Amritsar), pp. 115-6.
[36] L.M. Joshi, op. cit., p. 156.
[37] Ibid, , p. 159.
[38] Ibid., p. 59.
[39] W. Singh, op. cit., pp. 13-4.
[40] J.S. Ahluwalia (1983), op. cit., pp. 59-60.
[41] L.M. Joshi, op. cit., p. 60.
[42] S. Singh (1986), op. cit., pp. 181-2.
[43] L.M. Joshi, op. cit., p. 52.
[44] Ibid., p. 160.
[45] D. Singh, op. cit., p. 191.
[46] D. Singh, K. Singh, op. cit., p. 39.
[47] W. Singh, op. cit., pp. 44-6.
[48] Ibid., pp. 16-7.
[49] B.S. Bhogal, Cosmogony, Cosmology, Consciousness: The Meaning and Purpose of Life, (academia.edu; accessed: 08 Dec 2021), p. 7.
[50] T. Singh, op. cit., pp. 115-6.
[51] This type of anticipatory urge is not dissimilar to the anticipatory joy and pleasure proposed by American philosopher Brian Leftow (himself a proponent of God’s timeless existence), who is quoted by his colleague William Lane Craig as stating:

[52] L.M. Joshi, op. cit., p. 159.
[53] Ibid., p. 160.
[54] J.S. Mann, S.S. Sodhi, op. cit., p. 459.
[55] S. Singh (1986), op. cit., p. 137.
[56] J.S. Ahluwalia (1983), op. cit., p. 58.
[57] W. Singh, op. cit., p. 16.
[58] W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2003), Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, (IVP Academic), p. 465:

[59] Ibid., p. 468.
[60] (Eds.) P. Copan, W.L. Craig (2018), The Kalam Cosmological Argument – Philosophical Arguments for the Finitude of the Past, (Bloomsbury Academic), p. 302.
[61] W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2003), Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, (InterVarsity Press, Illinois), p. 480.
[62] W.L. Craig (2001), God, Time & Eternity – The Coherence of Theism II: Eternity, (Kluwer Academic Publishers, eBook), p. 261.
[63] W.L. Craig (2009), How Did the Universe Begin?, (Reasonable Faith; accessed: 02 May 2015).
[64] W.L. Craig (1992), God and the Initial Cosmological Singularity: A Reply to Quentin Smith, (Faith and Philosophy 9: 237-247; accessed: 31 May 2024).
[65] (Ed.) W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2012), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, (John Wiley & Sons), p. 94.
[66] W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2003), op. cit., p. 469.
[67] W.L. Craig (2001), God, Time, and Eternity, (Kluwer Academic Publishers), pp. 59-60.
[68] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., p. 46.
[69] Ibid., p. 60.
[70] Craig says of volition simply:

[71] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., p. 52.
[72] Ibid., p. 279.
[73] Ibid., pp. 279-80.
[74] Ibid., p. 271.
[75] Ibid., p. 52.
[76] (Ed.) W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2012), op. cit., p. 194.
[77] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., p. 270.
[78] Ibid., p. 279.
[79] W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2003), op. cit., p. 468.
[80] (Ed.) W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2012), op. cit., pp. 192-3.
[81] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., p. 43.
[82] Divine simplicity is a radical doctrine that assumes an extreme transcendent nature for God. It requires denying Him distinct attributes in order to obviate the accusation of ‘composition’ in His nature. The argument has it, in brief, that such a composite deity is dependent upon its attributes for its perfection, and that such dependency violates God’s perfection. God is, thus, reduced to an irreducibly simple being that is presented as identical to all His divine attributes, as well as His own divine nature.

Ibn Taymiyya’s response to the accusation of composition in God begins with his position that there is no external particular that exists in reality actually devoid of attributes except as a mental abstract notion. As el-Tobgui points out below, since “the ontological reality of any existent entity necessarily comprises both its essence and its concomitant attributes as one (ontological) inseparable and indivisible whole”, the argument that an entity is dependent upon what it is necessarily qualified by is a misrepresentation of the reality of externally existent particulars:

Sikh theology has an additional headscratcher in that Waheguru, while perceived as existing devoid of attributes in His transcendent nature of Nirgun, is concurrently identified with attributes inhering in His non-transcendent nature of Sargun. In short, Waheguru exists contradictorily with and without attributes as an indivisible and inseparable whole.

[83] W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2003), op. cit., p. 524.
[84] Tasalsul (تسلسل) here meaning perpetual or sequential.
[85] J. Hoover (2004), Perpetual Creativity in the Perfection of God: Ibn Taymiyya’s Hadith Commentary on God’s Creation of this World, (Journal of Islamic Studies 15:3, pp. 287–329, Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies), p. 324.
[86] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., pp. 263-4.
[87] Craig here is raising the why-not-sooner conundrum by asking Brian Leftow, a committed proponent of the timeless ontology, “why, if the past is infinite, did God’s anticipation peak at t rather than sooner”?

According to Ajhar, Ibn Taymiyya also raised this query:

[88] J. Hoover (2007), Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, (Brill), p. 84.
[89] Fn. 57: Minhaj, 1:356/1:99. Cf. Irada, MF 8:147–9.
[90] Ibid., pp. 84-5.
[91] S. Vasalou (2018), Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics, (Oxford University Press), p. 140.
[92] J. Hoover (2004), op. cit., p. 294.
[93] Y. Rapoport, S. Ahmed (2013), Ibn Taymiyya and His Times, (Oxford University Press), p. 68.
[94] Ibid., p. 74.
[95] J. Hoover (2004), op. cit., p. 87.
[96] Abdel Hakim Ajhar’s thesis The Metaphysics of the Idea of God in Ibn Taymiyya’s Thought presents a detailed exposition of Shaikh al-Islam’s theology-proper. It should be noted, however, that his dissertation is certainly not without serious mistakes, with Farid Suleiman describing his treatment of God’s essence and attributes as “often imprecise and at times even seriously misleading”. Take the following examples, where Ajhar’s “claim that Ibn Taymiyya advocated tafwid is decidedly incorrect”, as are his assertions that the Shaikh was “a mutakallim (speculative theologian) and a philosopher”, and that he shared “the same goal” as al-Ghazali in synthesising kalam and falsafa. (F. Suleiman (2023), Ibn Taymiyya and the Attributes of God, (Leiden; Boston: Brill), p. 8) It should be noted, therefore, that we have only cited Ajhar insofar as we consider him to be correct in his assessment of Ibn Taymiyya.
[97] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., p. 159.
[98] Fn. 70: Minhaj, 1:336/1:92.
[99] Fn. 71: Minhaj, 1:359/1:100. Cf. Minhaj, 1:298/1:81.
[100] J. Hoover (2004), op. cit., pp. 87-88.
[101] F. Suleiman, op. cit., p. 286.
[102] While the word extant has been opted for in place of pre-existing matter in this context (the latter is preferred by Hoover), both are open to being used interchangeably. These terms, however, should not be confused with the pre-existing prime matter of the philosophers. The difference between the two, as this paper seeks to demonstrate, is that Ibn Taymiyya’s concept comprises of finite things with a definite beginning and a possible end, while prime matter is an eternal entity that paradoxically co-exists alongside God with no beginning and no end.
[103] Fn. 249: Ibn Taymiyya, Dar’, vol. 3, p. 405, states that “the affirmation of the prime matter is a false doctrine: things become by transforming from one substance into another substance.” Ibn Taymiyya adds that “the affirmation of the prime matter goes back to Plato and his followers, while Aristotle and his followers deny it.”
[104] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., p. 209.
[105] Ibid., p. 208.
[106] Ibid., p. 208.
[107] Ibid., p. 209.
[108] Originally made famous in a paper John McTaggart published back in 1908, Landon Hedrick defines both far more simply and succinctly as follows:

[109] The application argument, according to Herbert Davidson, “involves applying one magnitude to another” (H.A. Davidson (1987), Proofs for Eternity, Creation and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy, (Oxford University Press), p. 126). This argument would be equivalent to the absurdity brought about by Hilbert’s Hotel which, despite seeing an infinite number of guests checking out to try and make room for an infinite number of new guests checking in, would still result in the hotel being full.
[110] J. Hoover (2007), op. cit., pp. 101-3.
[111] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., p. 209.
[112] The author of the book Ibn Taymiyyah on Creation ex Materia (Dar al Arqam, published 2023; pp. 25-6, 27-8, 163) has stated that the Shaikh’s theory of substance, which holds that “there is more to God’s creative agency than mere rearrangement” of the indivisible atoms (jawahir mufradah) proposed by the ancient Greeks, might be deemed “incompatible with modern science” for the simple fact that, “at the deeper and more fundamental levels”, objects are “destroyed and new things are originated by God in their place, such that nothing of the prior substance continues to exist in the new creation after these natural processes have been completed”. Ibn Taymiyya is later quoted to this effect:

Given that conventional scientific knowledge is “convinced that natural processes are necessarily a rearrangement of already existing matter and therefore nothing really comes into existence during these processes”, the author speculates that “Ibn Taymiyyah probably would have criticized how scientists interpret natural processes at the larger scales, especially at the molecular level”.

The author, however, does attempt to reconcile between the two seemingly conflicting positions by suggesting, firstly, that “Ibn Taymiyyah believed that substances are created out of other substances in what is today described as processes of chemical reaction, such as those present in biological development”, before tentatively proposing:

Despite being “inclined to believe that Ibn Taymiyyah’s view of Creation applies not only at the subatomic level (which seems to be supported by particle physics), but also at the molecular level”, the author offers nothing by way of an evidence-based argument to support this assertion, except to contend:

Although we would concur that Ibn Taymiyya’s theory of substance is certainly supported by particle/ quantum physics at the subatomic level and, more crucially, at the inception of this universe, we would further suggest that both the concept of origination, as represented by chemical change at the molecular level, and substantial change, which occurs through the cumulative chemical changes at the macro-molecular level, support the Shaikh’s ontological conception of matter and its distinction into substantial and accidental forms. In principle, there appears to be no scientific reason for questioning change occurring at the subatomic level, let alone the macro-molecular level, during the complete transformation of a universe into a new one.

[113] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., p. 206.
[114] As Craig and Copan attribute to traditional Christianity: W.L. Craig, P. Copan (2004), Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration, (Baker Academic, Michigan), pp. 148-9.
[115] (Eds.) K.J. Clark, J. Koperski (2022), Abrahamic Reflections on Randomness and Providence, (Palgrave Macmillan Cham), pp. 244-5.
[116] (Eds.) M. Schmücker, M.T. Williams, F. Fischer (2022), Temporality and Eternity: Nine Perspectives on God and Time, (Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/ Boston), p. 93.
[117] Y. Rapoport, S. Ahmed, op. cit., p. 60.
[118] Fn.10: Ar-Razi, Al-Maṭalib al-‘aliya, 2:106-111.
[119] (Eds.) M. Schmücker, M.T. Williams, F. Fischer, op. cit.
[120] Y. Rapoport, S. Ahmed, op. cit., pp. 68-9.
[121] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., p. 261.
[122] Ibid., p. 554.
[123] Ibid., p. 276.
[124] W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2003), op. cit., p. 479.
[125] W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2003), op. cit., p. 560.
[126] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., p. 278.
[127] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., p. 233.
[128] Fn. 58: Ibn Taymiyya, Majmu’at al-Rasa’il wa ‘l-Masa’il, 5 vols., ed. M. R. Rida (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 1983) vol. 3, p. 373.
[129] Fn. 64: Ibn Taymiyya, Muwafaqat, vol. 2, pp. 129-30.
[130] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., p. 152.
[131] J. Hoover (2004), op. cit., p. 316.
[132] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., p. 200.
[133] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., p. 275.
[134] W.L. Craig, P. Copan, op. cit., p. 70.
[135] Why not root the argument of causal simultaneity and its non-durationality in the doctrine of creatio ex deo rather than ex nihilo, given that God in the former is purported to be the actual material cause of the world? A single ontological reality would seemingly eliminate the difficulty of counterintuitively affirming a cause and its effect originating simultaneously from two mutually-exclusive ontological points of origin. A model that entails a single point of origin for both the creator and the creation strikes us as far more intuitive in arguing for a non-durational causal event than Craig’s KCA.
[136] E.J. Wielenberg (2021), Craig’s Contradictory Kalam: Trouble at the Moment of Creation, (TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology, 5(1)), p. 82.
[137] Craig’s Creation Hypothesis, says Erasmus, “refer[s] to Craig’s (and my) view… that God was timeless or atemporal without the universe, but created the universe (including time itself) and entered into time (or became temporal) at the moment of creation. In other words, according to CCH, God is timeless without the universe (or timeless ‘prior’ to creating the universe, so to speak) because He alone existed at that point and His existence involved no change (which implies that reality, at that point or in that state, involved no temporal change or flow). However, at the moment of creation, God enters into time, or becomes temporal, because of His interaction with the temporal, created world. Consequently, God is timeless without the universe, and temporal from the moment of creation onwards”.

– J. Erasmus (2021), Can God Be Timeless Without Creation and Temporal Subsequent to Creation? A Reply to Erik J. Wielenberg, (TheoLogica), pp. 1-2.

[138] Ibid., p. 3.
[139] Ibid., pp. 4-5.
[140] Ibid., p. 5.
[141] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., p. 72.
[142] J. Erasmus, op. cit., p. 6.
[143] (Ed) G.E. Ganssle (2001), God & Time – Four Views, (InterVarsity Press, Illinois), p. 125.
[144] W.L. Craig, P. Copan, op. cit., p. 264.
[145] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., p. 57.
[146] (Ed) G.E. Ganssle, op. cit., pp. 185-6.
[147] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., p. 275.
[148] W.L. Craig (1994), Creation and Big Bang Cosmology, (Reasonable Faith; accessed: 25 Oct. 2023).
[149] W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2003), op. cit., p. 470.
[150] W.L. Craig (2001), Time & Eternity, Exploring God’s Relationship to Time, (Crossway Books, Illinois), p. 221.
[151] W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2003), op. cit., p. 470.
[152] Ibid., p. 470.
[153] W.L. Craig, P. Copan, op. cit., p. 165.
[154] Ibid., p. 158.
[155] Ibid.
[156] The closest Craig has come to addressing the TCM directly, is on his apologetics website Reasonable Faith, where he responds to a question from an anonymous Saudi questioner who, in addition to crudely raising the aforementioned issue of a timeless God transitioning without cause, inquires that “if you claim that an infinite regression of events into the past are impossible, then that means that you claim that it was impossible for God to be creating from eternity. If you claim that, then that means that you are claiming that there was a point in which God wasn’t able to create, hence compromising His attribute of Omnipotence. So basically you are claiming that God ‘LATER ON’ had the ‘ability’ to create. But if you do affirm that it was always possible for God to create, then basically you would be conceding that an infinite regression of creations are possible, hence rendering your argument to be false”. Understandably, Craig is quick to latch on to the presupposition of a time before its actual existence by reminding the questioner that “there is no ‘later on’ or ‘earlier than’ in God’s state of timeless existence”.

– W.L. Craig (2014), #360 Theological Arguments in Support of an Infinite Past, (Reasonable Faith; accessed: 25 Aug. 2021).

[157] (Ed.) W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2012), op. cit., p. 115.
[158] W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2003), op. cit., p. 471.
[159] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., p. 226.
[160] W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2003), op. cit., p. 471.
[161] Muslim apologist Hamza Tzortzis also adopts this same line of argumentation:

For more on Tzortzis’ position on the KCA, see: Appendix A – Modern Muslims’ Misplaced Mistrust of the TCM.

[162] W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2003), op. cit., pp. 471-2.
[163] (Eds.) P. Copan, W.L. Craig, op. cit., p. 204.
[164] Ibid., p. 5.
[165] Ibid., p. 303.
[166] Ibid., p. 114.
[167] We do not take space-time here to be an actual thing in the realist sense, let alone united as a single entity, substance, or four-dimensional continuum modern physicists typically call spacetime.
[168] (Ed.) W.L. Craig, J.P. Moreland (2012), op. cit., pp. 117-8.
[169] El-Tobgui concurs with Hoover that “Ibn Taymiyya was a strict nominalist, refusing to accord any reality whatsoever to abstract concepts or notions outside of the mind” (C.S. el-Tobgui (2013), Reason, Revelation & the Reconstitution of Rationality: The Refutation of the Contradiction of Reason and Revelation’, (Institute of Islamic Studies McGill University Montreal), p. 95). In his more recent work, El-Tobgui, in citing von Kugelgen, does suggest instead that the Shaikh might have been more a moderate realist in certain areas:

[170] (Ed.) A. Shihadeh, J. Thiele (2020), Philosophical Theology in Islam Later Ashʿarism East and West, (Brill), p. 109.
[171] W.L. Craig (2007), God and Time, (Reasonable Faith; accessed: 29 Jan. 2023).
[172] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., p. 180.
[173] Ibn Taymiyya holds that the ontological reality of any extra-mental particular existent must necessarily be qualified of an essence and attributes – both of which exist only as abstract mental notions – as one inseparable and indivisible whole. Because attributes cannot exist outside the mind as self-standing particulars, their ontological reality can only be known by firstly knowing the essence to which they necessarily subsist in. In the case of God, because His essence is uncreated, then all His attributes are uncreated.

Since Ibn Taymiyya holds metaphysical time to be a divine attribute; he thus considers it to be uncreated. As for physical time, then this is seen by him to be only a mental notion that inheres within a created object as an attribute.

[174] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., pp. 215-6.
[175] There could be two plausible answers to why the Shaikh did not consider an equivalent to cosmic time. The first and most obvious is the historical separation of both figures, and how their respective views would have been shaped and motivated by the polemics of their time. Although Craig has evidently attempted to tightly align the notion of time in his theological model with that of modern science, including in particular the two competing theories of relativity (one posited by Einstein and the other by Lorentz-Poincaré), Ibn Taymiyya sufficed in delineating just the two categories of time in response to his opponents.

Second, even if a motivation similar to Craig’s had existed for the Shaikh, it is hard to see how he could have accounted for cosmic time’s privileged frame of reference over all local times in the present, given his nominalist leanings. It is not difficult to surmise Ibn Taymiyya’s response towards demonstrating the superfluity of this approach by arguing for the sufficiency of any given local time (zaman) being an approximate measure of God’s metaphysical duration of waqt in the present.

[176] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., pp. 159-60.
[177] T.M. Zeni (2021), Ibn Taymiyya on Causality and Reliance on God, (Jarir Bookstore, USA), p. 45.
[178] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., p. 160.
[179] Although the term waqt can and has been used more generally to refer to the contingency of clock time, it appears that Ibn Taymiyya strategically restricted its usage, when speaking of time in this context, to the duration of God’s discrete activities. See, for example, the Shaikh’s Minhaj al-Sunnah (1:173), (accessed: 03 May 2023; our thanks to Mohammad Abu AbdurRahman for this reference and clarification):

فَالرَّبُّ تَعَالَى إِذَا [كَانَ] لَمْ يَزَلْ مُتَكَلِّمًا بِمَشِيئَتِهِ، فَعَّالًا بِمَشِيئَتِهِ كَانَ ‌مِقْدَارُ كَلَامِهِ وَفِعَالِهِ الَّذِي لَمْ يَزَلْ هُوَ ‌الْوَقْتَ الَّذِي يَحْدُثُ فِيهِ مَا يُحْدُثُ مِنْ مَفْعُولَاتِهِ، وَهُوَ سُبْحَانَهُ مُتَقَدِّمٌ عَلَى كُلِّ مَا سِوَاهُ التَّقَدُّمَ الْحَقِيقِيَّ الْمَعْقُولَ.

As for the term zaman, then Suleiman cautions that, although the Shaikh’s use of the word may come across as “inconsistent”, this is “only an apparent contradiction”, since Ibn Taymiyya “cites different meanings of the term zaman without subjecting them to evaluation. Thus, he mentions in one passage that zaman can, in addition to its conventional meaning, also be understood in the sense of day and night just as the term makan can be understood as a reference to the heavens and the earth” (F. Suleiman, op. cit., p. 124), as the Shaikh highlights below in Bayan (2:282/287):

.يوضح ذلك أن الزمان قد يراد به الليل والنهار، كما يراد بالمكان السموات والأرض

This contextually-driven approach is, thus, critical in averting any misinterpretations, with Ibn Taymiyya’s application of the term zaman to the perpetual alteration of the day and the night a good example of this. In the following Hadith Qudsi – a particular type of prophetic tradition whose wording is rendered by Prophet Muhammad, but whose meaning is derived from God – the Prophet cites God as declaring: “The son of Adam offends Me. He inveighs against ad-dahr; but I am ad-dahr. In My hand is control; I alternate the night and day.” (al-Bukhari, Muslim) In this respect, the Shaikh explains:

[180] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., pp. 180-1.
[181] C.S. El-Tobgui (2020), op. cit., (Brill), p. 256.
[182] Y. Rapoport, S. Ahmed, op. cit., p. 66.
[183] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., p. 194.
[184] Y. Rapoport, S. Ahmed, op. cit., p. 66.
[185] T.M. Zeni, op. cit., p. 149.
[186] We have modified and corrected Ajhar’s translation where required, which originally read: “If somebody says that God is sufficient in inventing and creating what He has created, His action is not conditioned by something else, we say that every action whereby God acts is conditioned by the action that God has created in Himself, the created object comes after it, this action in turn is conditioned by something else.” This includes his use of the term created in reference to God’s actions, which could be misunderstood as being equivocal to the created, contingent objects existing external to Him. His word choice in this context is certainly aberrant, especially since he makes it emphatically clear elsewhere:

Zeni also repeats Ibn Taymiyya’s position in this regard:

[187] It should be noted that Ajhar’s citation here (referenced: Ibn Taymiyya, Muwafaqat, vol. 1. pp. 259-60) is an interpretive summation rather than a verbatim translation (we have highlighted the parts Ajhar intended to translate) of the following (credit to Dar al Arqam’s Mohammad Abu AbdurRahman for this clarification):

ولكن مثاب الغلط والاشتباه هنا: أن لفظ التسلسل إذا لم يرد به التسلسل في نفس الفعل فإنه يراد به التسلسل في الأثر، بمعني أنه يحدث (شيء بعد) شيء، ويراد به التسلسل في تمام كون الفاعل فاعلاً، وهذا عند من يقول: إن المؤثر التام وأثره مقترنان في الزمان كما يقوله هؤلاء الدهرية، فيقتضي أن يكون ما يحدث من تمام المؤثر مقارناً للأثر لا يتقدم عليه، فتبين به فساد حجتهم.

وأما من قال: إن الأثر إنما يحصل عقب تمام المؤثر فيمكنه أن يقول بما ذكره الأرموي، وهو أن كونه مؤثرا في الأثر المعين يكون مشروطاً بحادث يحدث يكون الأثر عقبه، ولا يكون الأثر مقارناً له.

ولكن هذا يبطل قولهم بقدم شيء من العالم، ويوافق أصل السنة وأهل الحديث الذين يقولون: لم يزل متكلماً إذا شاء.

فإنه على قول هؤلاء يقال: فعله لما يحدث من الحوادث مشروط بحدوث حادث به تتم مؤثرية المؤثر، ولكن عقب حدوث ذلك التمام يحدث ذلك الحادث، وعلى هذا فيمتنع أن يكون في العالم شيء أزلي، إذ الأزلي لا يكون إلا مع تمام مؤثره، ومقارنة الأثر للمؤثر زمانا ممتنعة. وحينئذ فإذا قيل: هو نفسه كاف في إبداع ما ابتدعه، لا يتوقف فعله على شرط، قيل: نعم كل ما يفعله لا يتوقف على غيره، بل فعله لكل مفعول حادث يتوقف على فعل يقوم بذاته يكون المفعول عقبه، وذلك الفعل أيضاً مشروط بأثر حادث قبله.

فقد تبين أن هذه المعقولات التي اضطرب فيها أكابر النظار، وهي عندهم أصول العلم الإلهي، إذا حققت غاية التحقيق: تبين أنها موافقة لما قاله أئمة السنة والحديث العارفون بما جاءت به الرسل، وتبين أن خاصة المعقول خادمة ومعينة وشاهدة لما جاء به الرسول صلى الله عليه وسلم.

قلت: المقصود هنا أن الأرموي ضعف الجواب بأن التسلسل المنكر هو تسلسل المؤثرات التي هي العلل، وأما تسلسل الآثار فليس بمنكر، وإذا كانت المؤثرية مسبوقة بمؤثرية، لم يلزم إلا التسلسل في الآثار.

وقوله: إن هذا يقتضي التسلسل في الآثار لا في المؤثرات كلام صحيح على قول من يقول: إن الأثر لا يجب أن يقارن المؤثر في زمان بل يتعقبه لأن المؤثرية المسبوقة بمؤثرية إنما حدث بالأولى كونها مؤثرة، لا نفس المؤثر.

– Dar’ Ta’arud al-‘Aql wa al-Naql, vol. 1, pp. 345-6.

[188] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., p. 215.

Pointing to the Shaikh’s context-driven use of the term athar, Ajhar cautions:

[189] T.M. Zeni, op. cit., p. 149.
[190] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., pp. 211-14.
[191] T.M. Zeni, op. cit., p. 150.
[192] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., p. 197.
[193] Ibid., p. 215.
[194] Hoover’s charge that “Ibn Taymiyya does not explain how this eternal and necessary First Cause gives rise to a regress of temporally originating events” is misplaced (Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, (Brill), pp. 84, 86). The Shaikh would not be required to ground this regress in a first cause, for the reason that, under the doctrinal rubric of the TCM’s presentist ontology, there is no first cause. Rather, each event is brought about by the instantiation of a temporal cause in the present now.

Presentism is also the crucial detail missing in Hoover’s assessment that leads him to question whether “Ibn Taymiyya’s notion of God’s decisive and necessitating willing as a complete cause faces philosophical difficulties” on account of his “adherence to the principle of preponderance”, where “every possibility requires a complete preponderator (murajjih tamm) that tips the scales in favour of its existence over its nonexistence”. But Hoover labours under the false assumption that because God’s “‘decisive will’ must be activated by a prior originating cause that makes its existence preponderate”, the former would require being causally connected to and directly dependent upon the latter. To the contrary, all prior causes in the past would necessarily lack any causal relations with the present for the obvious reason that, on the presentist theory of time, they would no longer exist and, thus, lack any causal powers. Hence, if these prior causes are perceived to play any role at all, it would be a purely conditional one that is causally effete; but one which marks the boundary for the next instant at which God wills to act in the present, as Ajhar articulates below:

[195] Ibid., p. 200.
[196] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., p. 60.
[197] Craig acknowledges that a being with tensed facts is more excellent than one without:

[198] W.L. Craig (2001), op. cit., pp. 82-3:

[199] Muhammed Hijab’s Kalam Cosmological Arguments, published in 2019, although nothing more than an overview of “the logical forms and consistency of the[se] arguments”, does briefly make mention of Ibn Taymiyya’s “claim that there is nothing in the Quran which explicitly details creation ex nihilo”, before observing simply: “This, of course, is a theological area of research which may be the subject of another paper.” (pp. 8, 46)
[200] N. Pike (1970), God and Timelessness, Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion, (New York: Schocken Books), p. 165.
[201] (Eds.) P. Copan, W.L. Craig, op. cit., p. 1.
[202] T.M. Zeni, op. cit., p. 8.
[203] Ibid., p. 54.
[204] Ibn Taymiyya comments on this tradition stating:

[205] T.M. Zeni, op. cit., p. 26.
[206] Ibid., p. 27.
[207] Ibid., p. 54.
[208] Ibid., p. 55.
[209] Ibid., p. 27.
[210] Ibid., p. 26.
[211] Ibid., p. 54.
[212] Ibid., pp. 54-5.
[213] Ibid., p. 16.
[214] Ibid., pp. 23-5.
[215] An article on arguably the first online fatwa website, Islam Q&A, which was founded by the Saudi-based academic Muhammad Saalih Al-Munajjid, not only cites both Ibn Taymiyya and Ibnul Qayyim as affirming the throne being created, but also the prominent companion of the Prophet, Abdullah ibn Amr:

More significantly, the prominent Saudi scholar, Muhammad Ibn Saalih al-‘Uthaimeen, cites a tradition (see Sunnah.com: Sunan of al-Tirmidhi, Sunan Ibn Majah) in which Prophet Muhammad explicitly describes the throne as having been created:

قَالَ قُلْتُ يَا رَسُولَ اللَّهِ أَيْنَ كَانَ رَبُّنَا قَبْلَ أَنْ يَخْلُقَ خَلْقَهُ؟ قَالَ :‏ كَانَ فِي عَمَاءٍ مَا تَحْتَهُ هَوَاءٌ وَمَا فَوْقَهُ هَوَاءٌ وَخَلَقَ عَرْشَهُ عَلَى الْمَاءِ

[216] The author, Mohammad Fikri, highlights an interesting observation (p. 31) that underscores a potential absurdity which we intend to briefly pre-empt:

The author, however, does clarify that this party of Muslims were mistaken in their understanding that Ibn Taymiyya held this view of, what we might call, relative-Creatio ex Nihilo (rCeN), which sees creatio ex nihilo obtain under the rubric of the TCM. He also notes that the Shaikh abandoned this position, which was recorded in his earlier work Huduth al-Ajsam, in favour of his final version of the TCM as penned down in one of Ibn Taymiyya’s last major works, Nubuwwat (pp. 39-40).

The notion of rCeN may either be interpreted in the radical occasionalist sense, wherein creation is perpetually recreated anew ex nihilo from moment to moment, or more intermittently. However, this approach to obviate creation existing eternally with God can be shown to be a non-solution by simply taking any arbitrary point tn in the past, and finding that it will necessarily be preceded by matter qua the TCM a moment earlier at tn-1.

How, then, might any perceived first moment of time – what we might call in contrast to rCeN absolute-Creatio ex Nihilo (aCeN) – differ from all subsequent moments of rCeN? It would appear that the same timeless states of affairs that obtain for aCeN would also obtain for rCeN; thus also rendering this differentiation, and any similar such conceptions of a creative hiatus, a non-solution.

[217] H.A. Tzortzis (2019), The Divine Reality – Newly Revised Edition, (Lion Rock Publishing), pp. 82-3.
[218] Ibid., pp. 84-5, 90.
[219] Ibid., p. 100.
[220] S. Randhawa (2011), The Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Problem of Divine Creative Agency and Purpose, (Academia.edu; accessed: Aug. 2021), p. 11.
[221] Ibid., p. 17.
[222] Ibn Taymiyya considers Kalam’s dichotomy of God’s properties into essential and non-essential to be purely arbitrary and a product of the imagination. Ajhar says in this regard:

[223] Ibid., p. 11.
[224] Ibid., p. 7.
[225] Ibid., p. 14.
[226] Ibid., p. 16.
[227] Perhaps the word thing or creation would have been clearer in meaning than being – AN.
[228] Ibid.
[229] Ibid., pp. 15-6.
[230] Ibid., pp. 14-5.
[231] S. Vasalou, op. cit., p. 140.
[232] It is on this basis that Randhawa has the temerity of suggesting that the “need to modify the maxim that this world is the ‘best possible world,’ held by Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyya, and Liebniz, to in fact be ‘one of the best possible worlds,’ since given these considerations there will be other possible worlds in which there is an equal amount of good as this one”.
[233] Ibid., p. 15.
[234] Ibid., p. 11.
[235] Saudi scholar, Muhammad ibn Salih al-‘Uthaimeen, warned against the inherent dangers of interpreting the Qur’an and Islam via science:

[236] S. Randhawa, op. cit., p. 6.
[237] Ibid., p. 9.
[238] Ibid., p. 6.
[239] R.T. Mullins (2016), The End of the Timeless God, (Oxford University Press), p. 209.
[240] Ibid., p. 26.
[241] S. Randhawa, op. cit., pp. 6, 17.
[242] Ibid., pp. 11-2.
[243] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., p. 159.
[244] S. Randhawa, op. cit., p. 12.
[245] Ibid.
[247] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., pp. 9-10.
[248] Ibid., p. 56.
[249] Ibid., p. 117.
[250] Ibid., pp. 56-7.
[251] Ibid., p. 50.
[252] Ibid., p. 154.
[253] Fn. 26: Hoover 2007:81, quoting Ibn Taymiyya 1986:1.117.
[254] (Eds) M. Schmücker, M.T. Williams, F. Fischer, op. cit., p. 100.
[255] J. Hoover (2004), op. cit., pp. 324-5.
[256] We would object to Hoover’s use of the term vicissitude, given its negative connotation. If this sequence principle is in reference to God’s metaphysical time, then we have already explained how God’s time is privileged over that of physical time in the conception of Ibn Taymiyya.
[257] Y. Rapoport, S. Ahmed, op. cit., pp. 56, 59, 61.
[258] S. Randhawa, op. cit., p. 12.
[259] Having been an active apologist for Islam in the West for well over a decade, Bassam Zawadi is known for running the highly beneficial website: www.call-to-monotheism.com, which mainly focuses on facing the challenges of Christianity. He was also a vocal member of the now defunct ahlalhdeeth.com forum, which, during its decade-long stretch, was one of the most influential forums for both English- and Arabic-speaking adherents to the Salafi-Athari creed. In his spirited defence of Islam, he also participated in a number of high profile public debates against Evangelical Christians during his earlier days.
[260] URL to the now defunct website: www.ahlalhdeeth.com/vbe/showpost.php?p=45428&postcount=50
[261] B. Zawadi, op. cit., p. 10.
[262] Ibid.
[263] H. Fazli (2013), Ibn Sina, Al-Gazali and Ibn Taymiyyah on the Origination of the World, (International Journal of Humanities and Religion (IJHR), 2(1), February, 19-30), pp. 356-7.
[264] Fn. 268: Ibn Taymiyya, Muwafaqat, vol. 1. pp. 259-60.
[265] Fn. 18: Hoover 2004: 326, quoting Ibn Taymiyyah 1961-7: XVIII, 239.
[266] (Eds.) M. Schmücker, M.T. Williams, F. Fischer, op. cit., pp. 95-6.
[267] H. Fazli, op. cit., pp. 356-7.
[268] Y. Rapoport, S. Ahmed, op. cit., p. 66.
[269] H. Fazli, op. cit., p. 345.
[270] Ibid., pp. 343-4.
[271] Ibid., pp. 358-9.
[272] Ibid., p. 346.
[273] Ibid., pp. 358-9.
[274] Ibid., p. 358.
[275] B. Zawadi, op. cit., p. 10.
[276] W.B. Hallaq (1993), Ibn Taymiyya against the Greek Logicians, (Clarendon Press, Oxford), p. 69.
[277] Fn. 58: Ibn Taymiyya, Majmu’at al-Rasa’il wa ‘l-Masa’il, 5 vols., ed. M. R. Rida (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 1983) vol. 3, p. 373.
[278] A.H. Ajhar, op. cit., p. 151.
[279] Fn. 64: Ibn Taymiyya, Muwafaqat, vol. 2, pp. 129-30.
[280] Fn. 65: Ibn Taymiyya, Majmu’at al-Rasa’il, vol. 3, p. 373.
[281] Ibid., pp. 152-3.
[282] W.B. Hallaq, op. cit., p. 68.
[283] Fn. 122: Irada, MF 8:146.
[284] J. Hoover (2004), op. cit., p. 101.
[285] B. Zawadi, op. cit., pp. 7-8.
[286] J. Hoover (2019), Ibn Taymiyya, (Oneworld Academic), p. 114.
[287] B. Zawadi, op. cit., pp. 7-8.
[288] M. A-H. Ansari (2000), Ibn Taymiyyah Expounds on Islam: Selected Writings of Shaykh al-Islam Taqi ad-Din Ibn Taymiyyah on Islamic Faith, Life, and Society, (The Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America), p. 98.
[289] J. Hoover (2004), op. cit., pp. 324-5.
[290] W.L. Craig (2002), God, Time, and Eternity, (Reasonable Faith; accessed: 02 Jan. 2022).
[291] URL to the now defunct website: www.ahlalhdeeth.com/vbe/showpost.php?p=45490&postcount=59
[292] URL to the now defunct website: www.ahlalhdeeth.com/vbe/showpost.php?p=29590&postcount=112
[293] During a lecture at an Oxbridge conference on God, Time, and Eternity, Craig includes “God’s knowledge of tensed facts” – tensed facts here being defined simply as “facts about the relationship of certain events to the present moment” – as part of his defence of divine temporality:

When asked about the immutability and changelessness of God, Craig, while reminding the questioner that he “spoke of His undergoing extrinsic change, change in relationships”, goes on to reveal:

The point of discussion concludes with Craig embracing the astute inquirer’s inferential entailment that, following God’s brute causality, “He must no longer remember the timelessness that He had before. He can’t remember it because He’s no longer timeless”, by effusively remarking:

This, admittedly, less than technically-precise communication is expounded by Craig more formally in his book that goes by the same name as said lecture: