←IndexThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Lecture 2: The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience

Section 1 of 10

The Three Proofs Demolished

Section summary

In brief

Iqbal dismantles the three classical proofs for God's existence — cosmological, teleological, and ontological — not as superstition but as the symptoms of a defective picture of thought as something that stands outside reality. The cure he announces: thought reconceived as 'a potency formative of the very being of its material,' worked out across the rest of the lecture by examining matter, life, and mind in turn.

This is the opening section of Lecture II — and it is an opening in two senses. It opens the lecture's central question, which is whether the deliverances of religious experience defended in Lecture I can survive philosophical scrutiny. And it opens by clearing the ground: before Iqbal can put forward his own method, he must dismantle the three arguments that have stood, for nearly a thousand years across both the Christian and Islamic traditions, as the philosophical case for the existence of God. The cosmological, teleological, and ontological proofs are not dismissed as superstition — Iqbal explicitly honours them as 'a real movement of thought in its quest after the Absolute.' What he rejects is their form, and behind the form, the picture of thought on which all three depend.

The section advances through four connected moves. First, Iqbal demolishes the cosmological argument: it invokes the law of causation to climb the chain of causes and then violates that very law by declaring one member of the chain to be uncaused, producing what Hegel called a 'false infinite' — an infinite defined by negating the finite, and therefore still trapped in opposition to it. Second, he turns to the teleological argument and shows that it can at best deliver a contriver working on pre-existing intractable material — never a creator — and that the artificer analogy on which it rests is worthless because nature is not an assembly of isolable parts but a system of wholly interdependent members. Third, he endorses Kant's classic refutation of the ontological argument — the notion of three hundred dollars in my mind cannot prove that I have them in my pocket — and extends it: the gulf between the concept of a perfect being and the objective reality of that being cannot be bridged 'by a transcendental act of thought.' Fourth, he diagnoses the common root of all three failures: they treat 'thought as an agency working on things from without.' Thought, on this picture, stands outside reality and tries to reach it by inference; but if thought is fundamentally external to what it is trying to know, it can produce only a 'mere mechanician' or an 'unbridgeable gulf.'

Having located the disease, Iqbal names the cure — though only in outline, since the rest of the lecture will be its execution. Thought must be reconceived not as a faculty that organises material from outside but as 'a potency which is formative of the very being of its material.' On this view, thought is not alien to things but their ultimate ground; the universe does not point to God as an external cause, it expresses God as its internal principle. To demonstrate this, however, requires more than assertion — and Iqbal is honest that our actual situation forces us to operate as if knower and known are separate. The method must therefore be patient and bottom-up: a careful examination of experience at its three levels — matter, life, and mind — to show the bifurcation progressively dissolving as we move through them. The 'clue furnished by the Qur'an' is not a proof-text but a hermeneutic: the verse describing God as 'the First and the Last, the Visible and the Invisible' (57:3) instructs the reader to stop arguing toward God from outside experience and start reading experience itself — within and without — as the field in which God's signs appear.

For the Tadreej project, this section is the methodological gateway to the entire Reconstruction. The proofs Iqbal demolishes are exactly the kind of arguments that have allowed Pakistan's intellectual culture to treat Islam and modern knowledge as separate domains — God in the mosque, matter in the laboratory, and never the twain shall meet. The diagnosis Iqbal offers cuts deeper than any individual logical error: the bifurcation itself rests on a defective picture of what thought is and how it relates to being. And the alternative he announces — thought as a formative potency, the Qur'an as a provocation to read experience harder rather than as a substitute for thinking — is the precise inversion of taqlīd. It is the move from receiving the Qur'an as an authority that settles questions by fiat to receiving it as a clue that demands the reader's own intellectual and experiential engagement. Every section that follows in Lecture II is the working-out of this single methodological commitment, and every capacity Tadreej is trying to build in its readers is, in the end, in service of it.

Original text

Scholastic philosophy has put forward three arguments for the existence of God. These arguments, known as the Cosmological, the Teleological, and the Ontological, embody a real movement of thought in its quest after the Absolute. But regarded as logical proofs, I am afraid, they are open to serious criticism and further betray a rather superficial interpretation of experience.

The cosmological argument views the world as a finite effect, and passing through a series of dependent sequences, related as causes and effects, stops at an uncaused first cause, because of the unthinkability of an infinite regress. It is, however, obvious that a finite effect can give only a finite cause, or at most an infinite series of such causes. To finish the series at a certain point, and to elevate one member of the series to the dignity of an uncaused first cause, is to set at naught the very law of causation on which the whole argument proceeds.

Further, the first cause reached by the argument necessarily excludes its effect. And this means that the effect, constituting a limit to its own cause, reduces it to something finite. Again, the cause reached by the argument cannot be regarded as a necessary being for the obvious reason that in the relation of cause and effect the two terms of the relation are equally necessary to each other. Nor is the necessity of existence identical with the conceptual necessity of causation which is the utmost that this argument can prove. The argument really tries to reach the infinite by merely negating the finite. But the infinite reached by contradicting the finite is a false infinite, which neither explains itself nor the finite which is thus made to stand in opposition to the infinite. The true infinite does not exclude the finite; it embraces the finite without effacing its finitude, and explains and justifies its being. Logically speaking, then, the movement from the finite to the infinite as embodied in the cosmological argument is quite illegitimate; and the argument fails in toto.

The teleological argument is no better. It scrutinizes the effect with a view to discover the character of its cause. From the traces of foresight, purpose, and adaptation in nature, it infers the existence of a self-conscious being of infinite intelligence and power. At best, it gives us a skilful external contriver working on a pre-existing dead and intractable material the elements of which are, by their own nature, incapable of orderly structures and combinations. The argument gives us a contriver only and not a creator; and even if we suppose him to be also the creator of his material, it does no credit to his wisdom to create his own difficulties by first creating intractable material, and then overcoming its resistance by the application of methods alien to its original nature.

The designer regarded as external to his material must always remain limited by his material, and hence a finite designer whose limited resources compel him to overcome his difficulties after the fashion of a human mechanician. The truth is that the analogy on which the argument proceeds is of no value at all. There is really no analogy between the work of the human artificer and the phenomena of Nature. The human artificer cannot work out his plan except by selecting and isolating his materials from their natural relations and situations. Nature, however, constitutes a system of wholly interdependent members; her processes present no analogy to the architect's work which, depending on a progressive isolation and integration of its material, can offer no resemblance to the evolution of organic wholes in Nature.

The ontological argument which has been presented in various forms by various thinkers has always appealed most to the speculative mind. The Cartesian form of the argument runs thus:

‘To say that an attribute is contained in the nature or in the concept of a thing is the same as to say that the attribute is true of this thing and that it may be affirmed to be in it. But necessary existence is contained in the nature or the concept of God. Hence it may be with truth affirmed that necessary existence is in God, or that God exists.’¹

Descartes supplements this argument by another. We have the idea of a perfect being in our mind. What is the source of the idea? It cannot come from Nature, for Nature exhibits nothing but change. It cannot create the idea of a perfect being. Therefore corresponding to the idea in our mind there must be an objective counterpart which is the cause of the idea of a perfect being in our mind.

This argument is somewhat of the nature of the cosmological argument which I have already criticized. But whatever may be the form of the argument, it is clear that the conception of existence is no proof of objective existence. As in Kant's criticism of this argument the notion of three hundred dollars in my mind cannot prove that I have them in my pocket.² All that the argument proves is that the idea of a perfect being includes the idea of his existence. Between the idea of a perfect being in my mind and the objective reality of that being there is a gulf which cannot be bridged over by a transcendental act of thought. The argument, as stated, is in fact a petitio principii:³ for it takes for granted the very point in question, i.e. the transition from the logical to the real.

I hope I have made it clear to you that the ontological and the teleological arguments, as ordinarily stated, carry us nowhere. And the reason of their failure is that they look upon ‘thought’ as an agency working on things from without. This view of thought gives us a mere mechanician in the one case, and creates an unbridgeable gulf between the ideal and the real in the other.

It is, however, possible to take thought not as a principle which organizes and integrates its material from the outside, but as a potency which is formative of the very being of its material. Thus regarded thought or idea is not alien to the original nature of things; it is their ultimate ground and constitutes the very essence of their being, infusing itself in them from the very beginning of their career and inspiring their onward march to a self-determined end.

But our present situation necessitates the dualism of thought and being. Every act of human knowledge bifurcates what might on proper inquiry turn out to be a unity into a self that knows and a confronting ‘other’ that is known. That is why we are forced to regard the object that confronts the self as something existing in its own right, external to and independent of the self whose act of knowledge makes no difference to the object known.

The true significance of the ontological and the teleological arguments will appear only if we are able to show that the human situation is not final and that thought and being are ultimately one. This is possible only if we carefully examine and interpret experience, following the clue furnished by the Qur'an which regards experience within and without as symbolic of a reality described by it, as ‘the First and the Last, the Visible and the Invisible’.

This I propose to do in the present lecture.

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2. The Nature of Matter

Original text

The ontological argument which has been presented in various forms by various thinkers has always appealed most to the speculative mind. The Cartesian form of the argument runs thus:

‘To say that an attribute is contained in the nature or in the concept of a thing is the same as to say that the attribute is true of this thing and that it may be affirmed to be in it. But necessary existence is contained in the nature or the concept of God. Hence it may be with truth affirmed that necessary existence is in God, or that God exists.’¹

This I propose to do in the present lecture.