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 Taymiyyah agrees with the philosophers that God’s perfection necessitates continuous creation from eternity. He argues against the Kalam tradition that God could not have begun creating at some arbitrary point in the past without a preceding cause. Ibn Taymiyyah argues God changing from not creating to creating introduces imperfection into God. Therefore, perfect God will always be creating,

“As [God] is Creator of everything, everything other than Him is created and preceded by nonexistence. So, with Him there is nothing eternal by virtue of His eternity. When it is said that He has been creating from eternity, its meaning is that He has been creating one created thing after another from eternity just as He will be creating one created thing after another to eternity. That which we deny [i.e. eternity], we deny of originating events and movements, one after another. There is nothing in this except an ascription to Him of perpetuity of acting, not [an ascription] of one among the things [He has] done being with Him [eternally] in its concrete entity.” (Majmu Al-Fatawa 18:239)

However, Ibn Taymiyyah differentiates between God’s continuous creativity and the temporal existence of individual created things. While God’s creative activity is eternal, no single created thing is eternal. This allows him to uphold the view of God’s eternal creativity without asserting the eternity of the world. Nothing that God creates is eternal alongside Him as  everything comes into existence after not existing. The genus or species of created things is eternal, while no actual individual created thing is eternal.

         While Ibn Taymiyyah, at least to me, rejects an infinite regress of causes, he challenges two central Kalam theologian assertions against infinite regress in general. The first one was based on atomism and the materialism that the Kalam theologian held but the second one is the one of interest. He disagrees with the idea that an infinite magnitude cannot be increased as an infinite magnitude is not subject to measurement. One infinite magnitude may seem larger than another from a certain viewpoint, but both are still infinite such as the infinite set of all numbers and all even numbers.

         While the other Islamic philosophers believed in God being completely timeless, Ibn Taymiyyah also diverts from this as he argued that there are temporally originating events existing within God’s essence which are known as God’s voluntary acts or attributes. However, this does not make God temporally originated. God acts in temporal succession as well but this does not mean that God enters into His creation. He finds it illogical for a timelessly eternal will to generate something in the world at a specific point in time. Therefore,

“[God] has been active from eternity when He willed with acts that subsist in His self by His power and His will one after another…He has been speaking from eternity by His will, and He has been acting from eternity by His will one thing after another.” (Minhaj as-Sunnah an-Nabawiyyah 1:147)

While many Muslim philosophers and theologians affiliated with the Hanbali school of thought or Athari creed hold great respect for Ibn Taymiyyah and align with a significant portion of his theological ideas, not everyone agrees with his doctrine of perpetual creation.