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No Rabbanite after Maimonides would think of going back to the old arguments made popular by the Mutakallimun the theory of atoms, of substance and accident in the Kalamistic sense of accident as a quality which needs continuous creation to exist any length of time, the denial of law and natural causation, the arguments in favor of creation and the existence of God based upon creation, the doctrine of the divine will as eternal or created, residing in a subject or existing without a subject, the world as due to God's will or to his wisdom, the nature of right and wrong as determined by the character and purpose of the act or solely by the arbitrary will of God these and other topics, which formed the main ground of discussion between the Muʿtazilites and the Ashariya, and were taken over by the Karaites and to a less extent by the early Rabbanites in the tenth and eleventh centuries, had long lost their significance and their interest among the Rabbanite followers of Maimonides.
Ibn Daud follows in the path of Ibn Zaddik and discusses the relevant concepts of potentiality and actuality and the nature of motion and infinity, upon which his proof is based of the existence of God. Maimonides clears the ground first by a thorough criticism and refutation of the Kalamistic physics, but he does not think it necessary to expound the Aristotelian views which he adopts.
We also sketched briefly the schools of philosophy which influenced the Jewish writers and determined their point of view as Kalamistic, Neo-Platonic or Aristotelian.
But the moment we say anything positive we do become thus liable to comparing God with other things; and such circumlocutions as the Kalamistic "Living without life," and so on, do not help matters, for they are contradictory, and take away with one hand what they give with the other.
Finally, in refuting the second theory of creation, which combines Platonism with atomism, he argues against an atomic theory primarily because of its implications of eternity of the atoms, but partly also on other grounds, which would also affect the Kalamistic conceptions of the atoms.
The important principle at the basis of this proof is the well-known Kalamistic one that if an object cannot do without an attribute originating in time, the object itself has its origin in time.
The Kalamistic proofs for the unity of God are similarly identical for the most part with those found in Saadia, Bahya and others, and we need only mention Maimonides's criticism that they are inadequate unless we assume with the Mutakallimun that all atoms in the universe are of the same kind.
It covers the topics usually treated by the Mutakallimun in the division of their works, known by the name of "Bab al Tauhid," treatise on Unity. The fourth part corresponds to the "Bab al Adi" of the Kalam, i. e., the second division of Kalamistic works devoted to theodicy, or vindication of God's justice in his dealings with mankind.
He does not seem to favor the atomic theory, but he devotes no special treatment to the subject, and in his arguments for creation as opposed to eternity he makes use of the Kalamistic concepts of substance and accident and composition and division. The same is true of Bahya Ibn Pakuda.
The circumstance that it was most likely from Karaite writings, which found their way into Spain, that Ibn Zaddik gained his knowledge of Kalamistic ideas, was not exactly calculated to prepossess him, a Rabbanite, in their favor.
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