←IndexThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Lecture 3: The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer

Section 3 of 12

Creativeness — God's relation to the world

Section summary

In brief

Creation is not a past event but a continuous act: the world is not a manufactured article abandoned by its maker but the ongoing expression of divine creative energy. Whether a civilisation faces the future with confidence or retreats into nostalgia depends entirely on which of these two pictures of God it inherits.

Sections 1 and 2 established that God is an individual and that His infinity is intensive rather than extensive. Now Iqbal turns from the formal attributes of the divine ego to the first of four substantive ones: Creativeness, to be followed in subsequent sections by Knowledge, Omnipotence, and Eternity. The question of Creativeness is, in one sense, the most fundamental of the four — for without a coherent account of the relationship between God and the world, the other attributes have nothing to operate on.

The section is short but philosophically explosive. Its argument advances through three tightly linked moves.

First, Iqbal diagnoses the root error that has generated centuries of 'meaningless theological controversies': the finite mind's tendency to regard the universe as a manufactured article produced at a specific past moment by a God who then stands apart from it as a spectator. This picture — creation as a datable event, the world as an artifact, God as a retired engineer — reduces God and the world to two separate entities confronting each other across an empty space. The entire framework of the question is wrong.

Second, Iqbal dissolves the problem by recalling the result established in Lecture II: space, time, and matter are not independent realities but intellectual modes of apprehending the free creative energy of God. If this is so, then there is no 'space' intervening between God and the world, because space itself is an interpretation that thought imposes on divine creative activity. The world is not something other than God's act; it is God's act, apprehended by finite minds under the forms of spatial extension and temporal succession. To drive the point home, Iqbal recruits the ninth-century Sufi master Bāyazīd of Bisṭām, whose single sentence — 'It is just the same now as it was then' — captures in the language of mystical experience exactly what Iqbal is arguing in the language of philosophy: there is no moment 'before' creation, because creation is not an event within time; time is an aspect of creation.

Third, Iqbal enlists the physicist Arthur Eddington to supply scientific corroboration. Eddington's argument that 'the mind's search for permanence has created the world of physics' supports Iqbal's contention that the apparently solid, enduring world of matter is an artefact of the mind's selective attention, not an independent reality. But Iqbal pushes beyond Eddington: the physicist has not yet recognised that the mind's construction must itself be rooted in something more permanent than either mind or matter — a Self that uniquely combines the attributes of change and permanence. The section thus ends by pointing toward the concept of the Ultimate Ego as the ground of both the physical world and the finite minds that interpret it.

The theological stakes are immense. If creation is a past event, then the world has been abandoned by its maker, and divine creativity is exhausted. If creation is a continuous act, then God is intimately present in every moment of the world's existence, and divine creativity is inexhaustible. The entire practical orientation of a civilisation's religious life — whether it faces the future with confidence or retreats into nostalgia for a lost golden age — depends on which of these two conceptions it adopts.

Original text

The other important elements in the Quranic conception of God, from a purely intellectual point of view, are Creativeness, Knowledge, Omnipotence, and Eternity. I shall deal with them serially.

Finite minds regard nature as a confronting ‘other’ existing per se, which the mind knows but does not make. We are thus apt to regard the act of creation as a specific past event, and the universe appears to us as a manufactured article which has no organic relation to the life of its maker, and of which the maker is nothing more than a mere spectator. All the meaningless theological controversies about the idea of creation arise from this narrow vision of the finite mind. Thus regarded the universe is a mere accident in the life of God and might not have been created. The real question which we are called upon to answer is this: Does the universe confront God as His ‘other’, with space intervening between Him and it? The answer is that, from the Divine point of view, there is no creation in the sense of a specific event having a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. The universe cannot be regarded as an independent reality standing in opposition to Him. This view of the matter will reduce both God and the world to two separate entities confronting each other in the empty receptacle of an infinite space.

We have seen before that space, time, and matter are interpretations which thought puts on the free creative energy of God. They are not independent realities existing per se, but only intellectual modes of apprehending the life of God. The question of creation once arose among the disciples of the well-known saint Bāyazīd of Bisṭām. One of the disciples very pointedly put the common-sense view saying: ‘There was a moment of time when God existed and nothing else existed beside Him.’ The saint's reply was equally pointed. ‘It is just the same now’, said he, ‘as it was then.’ The world of matter, therefore, is not a stuff co-eternal with God, operated upon by Him from a distance as it were. It is, in its real nature, one continuous act which thought breaks up into a plurality of mutually exclusive things.

Professor Eddington has thrown further light on this important point, and I take the liberty to quote from his book, Space, Time and Gravitation:

‘We have a world of point-events with their primary interval-relations. Out of these an unlimited number of more complicated relations and qualities can be built up mathematically, describing various features of the state of the world. These exist in nature in the same sense as an unlimited number of walks exist on an open moor. But the existence is, as it were, latent unless some one gives a significance to the walk by following it; and in the same way the existence of any one of these qualities of the world only acquires significance above its fellows if a mind singles it out for recognition. Mind filters out matter from the meaningless jumble of qualities, as the prism filters out the colours of the rainbow from the chaotic pulsations of white light. Mind exalts the permanent and ignores the transitory; and it appears from the mathematical study of relations that the only way in which mind can achieve her object is by picking out one particular quality as the permanent substance of the perceptual world, partitioning a perceptual time and space for it to be permanent in, and, as a necessary consequence of this Hobson's choice, the laws of gravitation and mechanics and geometry have to be obeyed. Is it too much to say that the mind's search for permanence has created the world of physics?’

The last sentence in this passage is one of the deepest things in Professor Eddington's book. The physicist has yet to discover by his own methods that the passing show of the apparently permanent world of physics which the mind has created in its search for permanence is rooted in something more permanent, conceivable only as a self which alone combines the opposite attributes of change and permanence, and can thus be regarded as both constant and variable.

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2. The infinity of God

4. Ash'arite atomism and the method of creation

Original text

The other important elements in the Quranic conception of God, from a purely intellectual point of view, are Creativeness, Knowledge, Omnipotence, and Eternity. I shall deal with them serially.

Professor Eddington has thrown further light on this important point, and I take the liberty to quote from his book, Space, Time and Gravitation:

‘We have a world of point-events with their primary interval-relations. Out of these an unlimited number of more complicated relations and qualities can be built up mathematically, describing various features of the state of the world. These exist in nature in the same sense as an unlimited number of walks exist on an open moor. But the existence is, as it were, latent unless some one gives a significance to the walk by following it; and in the same way the existence of any one of these qualities of the world only acquires significance above its fellows if a mind singles it out for recognition. Mind filters out matter from the meaningless jumble of qualities, as the prism filters out the colours of the rainbow from the chaotic pulsations of white light. Mind exalts the permanent and ignores the transitory; and it appears from the mathematical study of relations that the only way in which mind can achieve her object is by picking out one particular quality as the permanent substance of the perceptual world, partitioning a perceptual time and space for it to be permanent in, and, as a necessary consequence of this Hobson's choice, the laws of gravitation and mechanics and geometry have to be obeyed. Is it too much to say that the mind's search for permanence has created the world of physics?’