 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, God Willing the Asharites. If there were any justice in this world, most major philosophical problems would be named after Platonic dialogues. There would be the feto problem of the relationship between soul and body, the cratilis conundrum of how words acquire their meanings, the riddle of the republic, which asks what reason we have to be moral. But as Plato's Republic itself shows, there probably isn't any justice in this world. So Plato has to be content with lending a name to only two famous philosophical difficulties, Minos Paradox and the Euthyphro Dilemma. We all know about Minos Paradox, which shows that it is impossible to seek knowledge, but what about the Euthyphro Dilemma? It takes its name from the dialogue of the same name, in which Socrates asks a man named Euthyphro to define piety. When Euthyphro suggests that whatever the gods love is pious, Socrates asks whether this may not be the wrong way around. Don't things rather become pious because the gods love them? Just like that, Plato set down a problem which still concerns philosophers of religion. Does God determine what is moral? Some say yes, holding that if God is dead, everything is permitted. Sometimes that view is called a divine command theory of morality. Certain actions become morally good or evil because God declares them to be so. For instance, in general it is evil to kill your children, but when God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac, it became right for him to do so, until the command was revoked at the last moment. Others have a hard time believing this theory. Could God really make it a good thing to murder the innocent or a bad thing to offer help to suffering children? If we are believers, shouldn't we rather say that God wants us to help children and avoid murdering them because the first is good and the second bad? Indeed, doesn't God himself have to obey certain moral rules if he is to be a good god and not an all-powerful tyrant? The dilemma may take its name from the Euthyphro, but the first time it takes central stage in our story comes more than a millennium after Plato, in a debate between two groups of theologians. One group we have already met, the Moautazilites. They assumed that there are moral laws which we can discover using our own reason, and by which even God is bound. We know it would be wrong for him to punish the innocent and reward the guilty, or to punish those who had no choice about their actions. From this, the Moautazilites inferred that humans must have power over their own actions, since in the Quran we hear that God will indeed reward and punish us. But the problem can't be resolved that easily. If God is really to be just, then doesn't he also have to deal fairly with his creatures? Yet doesn't he obviously fail to do so? A famous story discussed by several Islamic theologians illustrates the point. In the afterlife, three brothers find themselves in paradise, hell, and limbo. The first led a virtuous life, the second was wicked, and the third died in childhood before he could come to deserve either reward or punishment. This third one, who is in limbo, complains that God should have allowed him a longer life, giving him a chance to earn a place in paradise. God replies that had he been allowed to live to adulthood, he would have sinned and gone to hell. By letting him die early, God was doing him a favor. At which point the second brother cries out, why didn't you kill me as a child too? Then I wouldn't be in hell. Supposedly, this story helped to turn one of the greatest of all Muslim theologians away from the Moautazilite way of thinking. This was Abul Hasan al-Ash'ari, who lived in Iraq from 874 to 936. In case you're keeping track, this makes him a rough contemporary of philosophers like Ahrazi and Saadia Gaon, and a generation younger than Al-Farabi. Al-Ash'ari was first a Moautazilite theologian, in fact a student of al-Dubai, head of the Moautazilites in the city of Basra. This student-teacher relationship worked out much like the one between Plato and Aristotle, although as far as I know no one ever compared al-Ash'ari to a pony kicking its mother once it was born. Al-Ash'ari devised his own rival theological theory which rejected nearly every tenet of Moautazilism despite retaining its rational approach and its conceptual tools. He drew also on previous theologians who were at least in the orbit of Moautazilism. His most famous doctrine centers on the use of a technical term, acquisition, that had already been used by several other theologians. Yet his synthesis and his critique of the Moautazilites was original and coherent enough that he would lend his name not just to a puzzle or two, but to the dominant theological tradition of Sunni Islam, Ash'arism. Al-Ash'ari wrote several works that survive today, including a vast survey of previous theological opinions that remains one of our main sources for previous thinkers. In fact, when I was telling you in a previous episode about the early Moautazilites, a lot of what I said was based on reports found in al-Ash'ari. His ideas were then further developed by generations of like-minded theologians, for instance al-Baqilani and al-Jawaini, both of whom lived around the time of Avicenna and died in the early 11th century. The most famous Ash'arite of all, al-Ghazali, was a student of this Jawaani, and he would leave an indelible imprint on Ash'arite theology. We'll get to him in a future episode, but first I think we ought to consider al-Ash'ari's ideas in their own right. And let's start right there with the question of what we ought to do. We find the Ash'arites offering a bold defense of the divine command theory. Al-Ash'ari has no hesitation in embracing the most counterintuitive aspects of this theory, saying that God could torment innocent children in the afterlife, if he so chose. He could also punish those who believe in him and reward the unbelievers. Indeed, not only could he do these things, if he did them, his actions would be just, for justice means nothing more nor less than agreement with God's will. Al-Jawaani gives an ingenious argument to support these Ash'arite claims. If actions did not get their moral character from God, they would have to have that character in their own right as intrinsic features. For instance, murder would be wrong all by itself. But in fact, context makes all the difference. Were you to kill someone in self-defense, that would be morally justified. Thus, killing in its own right is morally neutral. Whether a given killing is right or not depends on its context, and for Al-Jawaani, that context is provided ultimately by God's law. That argument with its focus on how the attribute of justice or injustice belongs to actions illustrates a more general feature of the Ash'arite theology. Following the Mo'atazilites, they understand created things as atomic bodies which have properties, or accidents, that belong to them only for one moment at a time. Both schools also use this physical theory as a basis for a proof that the world was created by God. Accidents, or attributes, have only a fleeting existence, so obviously they cannot be eternal. Atoms might seem more stable, but they cannot exist without their accidents. From this, the theologians infer that atoms cannot be eternal either. After all, atoms need accidents to exist, and accidents come in and out of existence. Surely, therefore, atoms come in and out of existence too. For instance, no atom can exist without being either in motion or at rest. Inevitably, one of these two accidents must belong to any atom. But anything moving started to move at some point, and anything that is at rest started to be at rest. Thus, the atom must have started to exist, whether or not it first existed in a state of motion or in a state of rest. From this we can conclude that the world of atoms and their properties was brought into existence by some creator, namely God. It is He who creates every atom and every one of its attributes, giving them existence at each moment they exist. In Asharism, the radical implications of this conception become clear, as they emphasize the fleeting and utterly dependent nature of the accidents that belong to created things. In each and every instant, God has to choose to create every single attribute from scratch, so to speak. Things possess no stability or continuity in themselves. Rather, the fact that certain atoms continue to have certain motions and colors, for instance, is due to God's creating similar motion or color attributes in those atoms at successive moments. If I hit you in the face, it's not only the moral badness of this act that depends on God, also the motion of my hand, the pain in your nose, the red of the blood on your shirt and my knuckles. All these things are created by God. If He wished, He could create things differently so that when I hit you, it caused intense pleasure instead of pain, or turned you into a giraffe. The stability we experience in our everyday lives is thanks only to God's choice to make things appear stable. Something promised in the Qur'an in verses stating, you shall find no change in the way of God. This picture of constant creation, freely and arbitrarily willed by God at every moment, is often called occasionalism. It's especially associated with early modern thinkers, such as the seventeenth-century philosopher Malebranche, but al-Ash'ari articulated the view already here in the tenth century. He did so in full awareness of the awkward implications of the century, implications he was happy to accept. For instance, if it is God causing every attribute at each moment, then the apparent causes we see in the world around us are just that, only apparent causes. As we just saw, if I were to hit you, it wouldn't be me causing your nose to hurt or your shirt to be bloody. The Mu'tazilites would find this consequence intolerable. They believed that through our actions we engender certain effects, even chains of linked effects. For instance, a big game hunter might decide to pull a trigger, which causes his finger to move, which causes a gun to fire, which causes the motion of a bullet, which in turn causes the death of Hiawatha the giraffe. The hunter is the cause of all these events, not God, and the hunter bears moral responsibility. Don't worry, no actual giraffes were harmed in the making of this episode. Against all this, another ingenious argument was offered by the Ash'arites. Suppose that the hunter fires his gun but then has a well-deserved heart attack and dies before Hiawatha does. It seems absurd to propose that the hunter is causing Hiawatha's death, given that the hunter doesn't even exist at the moment that she expires. No, what is really happening is that all these events and attributes, from the pulling of the trigger to the last mournful flutter of Hiawatha's eyelashes, are being created by God. This brings us to the crux of the disagreement between Mu'tazilite and Ash'arite schools. The reason that the Mu'tazilites were so keen to say that the hunter, and humans in general, are genuine causes of effects in the world is that they wanted us and not God to be morally responsible for those effects. Better to say that a dead giraffe hunter takes the blame for this worst of all crimes than to blame it on God. The Ash'arites, though, were more concerned to preserve God's untrammeled power. Somewhat tendentiously, they characterized the Mu'tazilite position as follows. When God has power over something, it is outside human control, and when humans have power over something, it is outside God's control. It might seem that there is an attractive third alternative for the Mu'tazilites. Why not say that both God and humans have power over human actions? If God chooses to stop the giraffe hunter, he would have any number of ways to do so, a slightly earlier heart attack, for instance. But if God refrains from interfering, the hunter can carry out his nefarious crime. Against this, the Ash'arites argue that there can never be two causes for one and the same event or action. This would be what philosophers nowadays call over-determination. In our example, God and the hunter cannot both be the causes or creators of Hiawatha's cold-blooded murder. Here, the Ash'arites seem to have a point. If God is omnipotent, then ultimately it is up to God and not the hunter whether or not the giraffe dies, precisely because God's unlimited power can inevitably trump the hunter's finite power. Thus, God is the creator of the events in question, and the hunter is just playing out a role in a situation that is, in the last analysis, beyond his control. Of course, that is just what we would expect if God is the cause of the existence of all atoms and their attributes. If he is the creator of all things, then nothing can happen without his willing it to happen. Here al-Ash'ari refers to the Qur'anic verse which states, Al-Ash'ari adds that if humans could create their own actions, as the Maʿḥtazilites claim, this would undermine the argument for God's existence used by both schools. If attributes can be created without God's direct intervention, but instead by something like a human action, then the need for all atoms and attributes to be created proves nothing about God. So, there are significant advantages to the occasionalist view the Ash'arites put forward. On the other hand, there seems to be at least one huge disadvantage too. God winds up murdering giraffes. In fact, he winds up being the agent of all injustice and evil in the world. It looks as though the Ash'arites have secured God's unchallenged power at the price of his goodness. It was to deal with this problem that al-Ash'ari put forward what I have mentioned as his most famous, or perhaps I should say notorious, doctrine, the theory of acquisition. This word acquisition in Arabic qasp, or ʿqti sab, was also invoked by previous theologians, but it becomes a signature doctrine in Ash'arism. The basic idea here is that even if God creates an evil action, nonetheless, a human can be morally responsible for that action by acquiring it. One might also put the point by saying that the human carries out, or performs, the action. This doctrine is often dismissed as mere playing with words, but in fact it makes a good deal of sense, at least within the Ash'arites system. A good analogy might be color. Consider Hiawatha the giraffe's eyes, which are a beautiful and mysterious blue. On the Ash'arite analysis, God is the creator of this color, but obviously he doesn't thereby become colored, or take on any of the derivative features of Hiawatha's eye color. For instance, God is not visible, and does not call to mind the pellucid clarity of a summer sky over the African savanna. In just the same way, God creates evil actions without acquiring their derivative features. When he creates the action whereby I hit you, it is my arm that moves, while God remains unmoving. Likewise, I bear the responsibility, and will be justly punished in the afterlife. Yet, surely there is still a problem here, in that I have no choice but to hit you. Perhaps not. On al-Ash'ari's story, what happens here is that God creates in me the power to swing my arm and land my fist on your nose. And I can easily tell the difference between this kind of case, where I am voluntarily swinging my fist, and a different case, where I am forced to hit someone by an external power. The Ash'arites also contrast voluntary motions to the motions involved in shivering from fever and similar cases. There's an obvious difference here, and the difference is precisely that in the voluntary case, I am using a power God has created in me, whereas in the involuntary case I am using no power of my own. On the other hand, the Ash'arites are happy to admit that I must use this power that I have been given. If God determines that I will hit someone, He'll give me the power to do it, and I'm going to use that power come what may. This ensures that the entire event remains subject to God's will. But why not just say that it is up to me whether or not to use the power God gives me? For instance, God could empower me to hit you, but I might think better of it and shake your hand instead, leaving the power to hit you unused. This is exactly the Mu'tazilite view. They spoke of a so-called capacity to act which humans can use to perform an action if they choose to do so. Equally, they can refrain from using the capacity and do nothing. Against this, al-Ash'ari and his followers produce more clever arguments which show that there can be no such thing as an unrealized power. Consider my situation just before I decide whether or not to hit you. I have the power to hit you, and I am either going to use it or not. But that must mean my power to hit you isn't sufficient for my hitting you. Rather, I need to have a further power, my power to actually use that power of hitting you. This second power will be what enables me to realize the first power when I do in fact hit you. But what about this second power? Won't I need yet another power, a third one, in order to use that? This leads to an infinite regress, suggesting that if I really had an unrealized power, I would need to deploy an infinite number of powers in order for me to use it. But, if there are no unrealized powers, then obviously I cannot have both the power to hit you and the power to refrain from hitting you. Both powers would need to be realized, and then I would be both hitting you and not hitting you simultaneously, which is obviously absurd. With this line of argument, the Asherites are denying what is nowadays sometimes called the principle of alternative possibilities. That is, the principle that voluntary action and moral responsibility require the chance of acting in more than one way. In fact, they are denying that this principle is even coherent, or I can never have the power to do two inconsistent things at the same time. And, by the way, as Al-Jawaini adds, even if the Asherite reasoning is wrong here, and God winds up punishing us for actions we did not choose freely, then that doesn't really matter. As we saw, whatever God does will be just by definition, since justice just means conformity to His will. It may be inscrutable to us why He should determine that some will sin and some be righteous, but we're in no position to stand in judgment over such divine decrees. On this point, the Asherites are exploiting another idea of their opponents, the Mo'atazilites, in holding that God transcends human understanding. But, they stopped short of the Mo'atazilite position when it came to divine attributes. For the Asherites, it was no solution to deny the divine attributes entirely, or to reduce attributes like God's knowledge and justice to the essence of God Himself, as we saw the Mo'atazilites doing. Yet, the Asherites were also unhappy with traditionalist theologians who accepted, for instance, that God literally has hands, because of passages in the Qur'an which speak of God reaching out with both hands. Like the Mo'atazilites, the Asherites proposed a figurative reading of such texts, in this case suggesting that the hands referred to God's power. But, unlike the Mo'atazilites, they recognized that the power in question has a reality of its own. As to the question of how such attributes relate to God, this is a place where human comprehension fails. When we say that God has power, we should add the expression bila'qayf, that is, without saying how. This phrase is often taken to express a willfully obtuse or anti-rationalist position, and certainly the Asherites are here trying to demarcate the limits of our understanding. But adding bila'qayf is perhaps better understood as a caution against assuming that the familiar way, the how, or qayf, with which attributes belong to created things, is appropriate to the divine case. Thanks to al-Ash'ari and his first generations of disciples, there was a permanent change in Islamic theology. Mo'atazilism certainly did not die out, but Ash'arism would become the dominant school in centuries to come. As we'll be seeing, this had enormous consequences also for the history of philosophy. As I hope this episode has shown, the Asherites put forward numerous arguments of great philosophical interest. They did defend their system by quoting the Qur'an and the sayings of the Prophet, but the core of their method was rational argument, usually aimed dialectically against opponents. This method was itself something they shared with their chief opponents, the Mo'atazilites. Still, they did not consider themselves to be falasifa, or philosophers. That name was reserved for thinkers adopting methods and concepts drawn from the Greek texts that had been rendered into Arabic. And yet, when the greatest of the Asherites, al-Ghazali, wrote a work attacking the falasifa, he did not direct his critique at Aristotle, Plato, or Plotinus. His target was instead the greatest and most influential thinker of the Islamic world. A man we'll be starting to cover in the next episode. Please use all your power to join me next time for the Life and Times of Avicenna, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.