An Examination and Critique of the Present-Absent Analogy in favor of the Theory of Distinctness of Divine Attributes from His Attributes

Document Type : The Quarterly Jornal

Authors

1 استادیار دانشکده معارف و اندیشه اسلامی دانشگاه تهران

2 MA student, Islamic Philosophy, University of Tehran, Farabi College

Abstract

A challenging problem in theology is that of the ontology of divine attributes. In ontology of divine attributes, what is discussed is how the divine essence is related to divine attributes. Ash’arīs believe that divine attributes are distinct from his essence. One significant argument they present is the present-absent analogy (qīyās al-ghā’ib bi-l-shāhid). In this analogy, our judgments about the present—that is, humans—are generalized and ascribed to the absent—that is, God. Although this is a kind of jurisprudential qīyās or analogy, it is valid in that the ground of analogy is a full ground of the ascription of the relevant judgments to humans. Opponents of Ash’arīs leveled objections to the analogy, but most of these are implausible. In this paper, we seek to formulate the analogy and examine objections raised against it. We conclude that the analogy can just show the existence of principle for divine attributes, and thus, it fails to account for how the principle is related to the divine essence. Therefore, if the analogy is deployed to substantiate the theory of distinctness of divine attributes from his essence, it would go beyond the scope of the claim.

Keywords

References

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