Zain's Guide to Overthinking Everything

Notes on the Basics of Gnosticism            The Gnostics were an early sect of Christianity who had various beliefs, scriptures, and branches. Gnosticism derived its name from the Greek word “gnosis” which means knowledge. However, for them it signified an intimate, experiential knowledge of the divine and esoteric wisdom that are necessary for liberation. The Gnostics generally claimed that this world was created by a false God known as the Demiurge who is the god of the Hebrew Bible and is an evil vengeful god. While the Demiurge claims to be the highest God, in reality it is a creation of an emanation or Aeon, Sophia, of the absolutely transcendent real God, the Monad or the Neoplatonic idea of the One. Human beings are essentially divine spirits trapped within physical bodies and through proper gnosis or knowledge, one can achieve spiritual enlightenment and salvation and this gnosis was taught by Jesus Christ. In their cosmology, Aeon...

Ibn Taymiyya on Ethics Utilitarianism as propagated by Jeremy Bentham states that an act is good when it produces the maximum happiness and benefit for the greatest number. Then religious utilitarianism would be maximizing happiness and benefit for this world and for the hereafter. For Ibn Taymiyya, worship of God alone is the ultimate purpose of humanity and leads to the ultimate happiness and benefit of humans. Therefore, Ibn Taymiyya thought in terms of religious utilitarianism. He applied this framework to understand God’s actions as well. Furthermore, in his ethics, “The Book and justice are inseparable. The Book explicates the law. The law is justice, and justice is the law. Anyone who judges with justice judges with the law… The entire revealed law is justice’ (MF 35:366). Law and human benefit are equivalent such that there is no benefit outside of the law as benefit is the law and law is benefit. “The principle overall is that the law never neglects a benefit. Indeed, God – Ex...

Notes on the Basics of Neoplatonism   Neoplatonism revolves around the idea of an all-powerful transcendent divinity, The One, and its emanation. The movement was founded by the Greek Platonist philosopher, Plotinus (204-270 AD). According to The Enneads , Plotinus’ primary text of Neoplatonism, The One is an omnipotent force which exists beyond all categories and is the single source of light from which the entire universe is illuminated. The One, however, is not directly the creator of our universe. Rather, The One represents a higher level of divinity and reality than the Demiurge or the divine intellect which is the creative element of the divine and a manifestation of the radiance of The One which permeates the lower levels of the cosmos which are visible to man. The One is so simple such that it does not contain any parts or be divided and beyond reality that it cannot even be said to exist or to be a being since it is utterly beyond. The system can be divided between the inv...

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...

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...