RTS Papers / A Christian Encounter with Islam / Spring 2019
When we conceive of the being that Muslims call “Allah,” central to our thoughts are his oneness (Tawhid) and his transcendence. That there is “no God but Allah” is the core of their great profession (Shahada). Muslims pray it everyday and it is necessary to conversion. The conception of Allah has a lofty reputation in the halls of comparative religion. However I would like to suggest that there are elements of Islamic theology proper which undermine that status. Central to these potential difficulties is the idea of divine will among Muslims. The doctrine we will examine is called voluntarism. This is not simply a “Muslim” doctrine, but this doctrine is more central to Muslim theology than among other religions. Indeed if we want to find supposed divine beings with the capacity for such whimsical action, we would have to harken back to the polytheism of the Greeks, Romans, or Norse.
We will proceed through six matters: from (1) the roots of voluntarism in general, and Islamic thought in particular, to (2) expressions of this doctrine in the Quran and Hadith. We will then (3) examine a variety of attributes Muslims hold to be eternal and measure them against this supreme will. Then follows three sections of implications of the doctrine: (4) on the revelation of Allah, (5) on the justice of Allah, and (6) on whether there is any love of Allah. What this paper will conclude is that there is neither a coherent revelation, nor justice, nor love, given this picture of Allah.
ROOTS OF VOLUNTARISM IN AND OUT OF ISLAM
The first thing to do is define what we mean by voluntarism. The word is derived from the Latin for the noun of “will or choice” (voluntas), or in verbal form, “to will” (volo). Voluntarism is contrasted to realism at least with respect to the ground of ultimate cause. We could ask this clarifying question: Did God decree all that he did on the basis of the real nature of things or entirely by his own good pleasure? The realist would see as much mischief in these horns as in the Euthyphro dilemma. Here the “nature of things” is made into a straw man, as if the only way for God to do according to nature is with respect to (a) created-finite and / or (b) separate-individual natures.
The classical realist would maintain that God is that essence (nature) according to which he is pleased to do. Thus there is no conflict between absolute sovereignty and rational causality: between divine freedom and divine necessity.
Nominalists, like William of Ockham, began to challenge this unity held by classical realism. Out east, Al-Ghazali attacked the realism of Avicenna on the ground that if God’s creation was necessitated by his essence, then it follows that it would be a contradiction in terms for God to have withheld creation [Popkin, ed. 164]. Hence God would not be free.
F. C. Copletson agrees that Avicenna taught that creation was necessary to God, but rejected that this was a result of his Aristotelian realism. Rather it resulted from the influence of Neo-Platonism; specifically from the notions of emanations and intermediaries between the One and the world [63-64].
This controversy is not defined merely by the degree of sovereign will one ascribes to God. Sovereignty per se regards both ability and right. While the realist would say that whatever God pleases is always according to the divine nature, as nothing could please God more than, or even equal to, his own glory, the crucial element in voluntarism is that will is set above all of the other divine attributes. This means that there is (at least often) no reason behind the choice. God can act unpredictability and capriciously. The moment we say, “No, he cannot: God can only choose according to his x,” whatever divine attribute x is, we are no longer voluntarists at that point, but have returned to classical realism.
In the Muslim view there is even a strong tradition that Allah is the sole cause to all things: a denial of real, secondary causes. W. S. Palgrave believed that this notion is even contained in the Arabic meaning of Allah [Zwemer, 42].
Though Duns Scotus and Ockham clashed over realism and nominalism, there seemed to be a growing consensus in both schools toward voluntarism in Late Scholasticism. According to Bavinck the brand of Scotus was based upon the notion of will as indifference: “That the will wills this thing is an immediate principle, because there is no intermediate cause … namely, why the will willed this thing, there is no reason other than that the will is will” [235]. The contingency of all created things demands this, reasoned the voluntarists. Bavinck then turns his reflection to our subject: “Scotus did not go as far as certain Muslim theologians, who asserted that by the will of God all things are created anew from moment to moment apart from any connection with each other, from any laws of nature, without substances or qualities” [236-37]. Is this an accurate description of the Islamic doctrine?
At the center of the Muslim doctrine is that Allah’s will is known while the rest of what we would call the divine character is not. This is what we might consider a doctrine of unintended consequences, because, as we will see, Muslim texts say all sorts of things about Allah, whether by naming or describing: attributions that do not exactly cohere with this notion of incomprehensibility.
One way to think of this is to say that volition and incomprehensibility are the two attributes that we do know with certainty about Allah. While that is paradoxical, the point for Muslims is that it is practical. One must not pry into the essence of Allah but one absolutely must know what Allah requires of mankind. There is thus a legal grounding to Islamic theology.
As this is a coin with two sides, so one can trace the roots of this in two main strands: first, the “legal” development of the Muslim sources; and second, the defeat of a school within Islam that would have been given to more rational theological reflection.
As to the first, there will be more to say in the below section on justice. But whether the priority of law over theology is a cause of the voluntarist doctrine, or vice versa, the consequence is that the Muslim mind, in contemplating revelation, is to be focused more with the command in itself than in the divine nature upon which the command is based. It may be crass to say, “Do as you’re told! Don’t worry about the reason.” There is some reason always to be given, but these reasons do not ultimately rise above the book, the prophet, and the rewards or punishments handed out by Allah.
Now as far as deeper theological reflection, that was a chapter of Muslim history that closed with the defeat of the Mu’tazilite tradition and triumph of the Ash’arite tradition. The Mu’tazilite school was what we might call rationalist, at least in the sense that for them God could be known through human reason [cf. Chapman, 107]. Their program to make theology intelligible had implications for their doctrines of revelation and of nature. God was First Cause, but worked through secondary causes. In other words, not only did God have an intelligible nature, but so did everything else, by the principle of sufficient reason. This had implications for free will and morality. But in addition, it meant that the Quran, while reflective of eternal truth, was not itself co-eternal with God. Since the divine word was communicated to man, in human language, this took into account the nature of that language (Arabic) as a developing thing.
Now the Ash’arite school met this point for point, siding with an unknowable God, who alone is causal (no secondary causes), and who spoke the truths of the Quran from all eternity. One account even has a perfect copy of the Quran in heaven with Allah (Q85:22).
Irrationalism resulted, since reason’s reflection upon natures—from God’s nature down to the nature of his effects—was discouraged.
One historian of philosophy sees Al-Ghazali’s “critique of causality” to be the root of his more famous case against the philosophers [Popkin, ed. 163]. So voluntarism in this case was the impetus for irrationalism, rather than the other way around. The link is simply this: if the nature of things is either the cause or explanation of other things, then there is genuine secondary cause. The converse of the proposition—All effects are participants in secondary causes—is No effects are participants in secondary causes. The implication to reason is simply that the act of reasoning about all such effects is rendered unintelligible.
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