Zain's Guide to Overthinking Everything

Ibn Taymiyyah on God’s Perpetual Creation            This blog post explores Ibn Taymiyyah’s philosophical perspectives on God as it relates to creation and time. Drawing from Jon Hoover’s work, “The Muslim Theologian Ibn Taymiyyah on God, Creation, and Time,” we uncover Ibn Taymiyyah’s doctrine of perpetual creation.          Ibn Taymiyyah’s sophisticated philosophy agrees with al-Ghazali and the Kalam scholars that created objects are not eternal and that they come into existence after a period of non-existence. Only God is eternal and uncreated which led to Ibn Taymiyyah to reject Avicenna’s Neoplatonic concept of eternal emanation. There is no sequence of eternal intellects and souls flowing from God to the realm of generation and decay beneath the moon. Everything apart from God comes into existence after it did not exist.          However, Ibn Taymiyya...

Challenging the Trinity: Indexicals and the Leftow Dilemma     The Doctrine of the Trinity stands as a central tenet of Christian belief, positing the existence of three distinct persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—within the divine unity of God. However, a nuanced examination reveals intriguing challenges that will be discussed in detail. This blog post will present two more arguments against the Doctrine of the Trinity. I have already discussed the Logical Problem of the Trinity (LPT) and how the Trinity contradicts Divine Simplicity elsewhere on my blog.   The Argument from Indexicals:   Indexical: A linguistic expression whose reference can change based on the context. Examples of indexicals include I, he, she, here, that, etc. If Person A says I am happy and Person B utters the same sentence, even though the sentence is the same, Person A is saying it while person B is saying it. In the orthodox conception of the doctrine of the Trinity, there is only one mind ...

Dialogue with Aquinas: A Systematic Refutation of Divine Simplicity     Introduction:            The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DS) has been held by the Church for centuries through the works of great theologians such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. However, under scrutiny it will be demonstrated that the doctrine has no legs to stand on. Firstly, a systematic articulation of DS will be provided for background context. Secondly, I will offer several objections and incoherencies that DS entails. Thirdly, I will provide a possible alternate solution to understanding the relationship between God’s attributes and essence. This essay-style blog post will replace all of my other blogs on the same subject as this is the synthesis of them.   Chapter I: What is Divine Simplicity? Divine simplicity (DS) is the idea that God's attributes are identical to each other in His reality. Attributes, for example, are love, wrath, know...

The Paradox of Multiplicity in Divine Simplicity According to many Aristotelian philosophers, all bodies have the inseparable property of motion and it does not proceed from the nature of bodies themselves and thus motion demands an external source or a prime mover. The series of moving causes must stop at an immovable object that moves everything else to avoid an infinite regress of movers. This first mover is God. Since the transition from non-existence to existence is a form of motion and motion requires matter then God must be immaterial and eternal while all things created by it are material and in motion. God is free from matter and therefore is free from motion and therefore cannot change and therefore is pure act ( actus purus ) and also therefore God must be completely simple as God is not made of parts. Now the question is in regards to creation, how can the many be created by one or how can something like God who is completely simple create multiplicity or how can a single c...