Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 2, 2025
There is a tacit opposition to the Mutakallimun in Ibn Zaddik's arguments against the view that the soul is an accident, as well as in his statement in the preceding paragraph that the bad qualities and evil generally are not opposites of the good qualities and good respectively, but that they are merely privations, absences, and hence not created by God. This is a Neo-Platonic doctrine.
The atomic theory is defensible on its own merits, and the motives of the Mutakallimun in adopting it are purely scientific, as follows: According to the Mutakallimun there are only body or substance and its accidents or qualities. This is the constitution of material objects. There are, however, two kinds of qualities or attributes, viz., "characters," and accidents.
All these indications in the Bible show that the doctrine of creation is capable of apodeictic proof. The reader will see that all this is directed against Maimonides, though he is not mentioned by name. Maimonides claimed against the Mutakallimun that it is not safe to base the existence of God upon the theory of creation, because the latter cannot be strictly demonstrated.
Some base their proofs on the assumption of the creation of the world, others on that of the world's eternity. The Mutakallimun follow the former method, the philosophers, the latter. Their respective views of the origin of the world are determined by their opinions concerning the principles of existence and the existent, that is, the fundamental principles of physics and metaphysics.
From the Kadariya, and in opposition to the Aristotelian movement which had in the meantime gained ground, developed the school of theologians known as the "Mutakallimun." They were the first among the Arabs who deliberately laid down the reason as a source of knowledge in addition to the authority of the Koran and the "Sunna" or tradition.
Possibly the example of Islam was lacking in Israeli's environment, as he does not seem to be acquainted with the theories and discussions of the Mutakallimun, and draws his information from Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic sources. Saadia was in the very midst of Arab speculation as is evident from the composition of his chef d'œuvre, "Emunot ve-Deot," Beliefs and Opinions.
And thus while we see him in the manner of Saadia and Bahya follow the good old method, credited by Maimonides to the Mutakallimun, of starting his metaphysics with proofs of the world's creation, and basing the existence of God, his unity, incorporeality and other attributes on the creation of the world as a foundation, he turns into an uncompromising opponent of these much despised apologetes when he comes to discuss the nature of God's attributes, of the divine will, and of the nature of evil.
He takes pains to show the absurdity of the view that the divine will is a momentary entity created from time to time to make possible the coming into being of the things and processes of our world a view held by the Mutakallimun as represented by their spokesman al-Basir, but when it comes to explaining his own view of the nature of the divine will, and whether it is identical with God or not, he suddenly becomes reticent, refers us to the writings of Empedocles, and intimates that the matter is involved in mystery, and it is not safe to talk about it too plainly and openly.
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.
In the same way these people regard it as possible that an infinite number of accidents have succeeded each other on the universal matter, because here too they are not all present now, the previous having disappeared before the succeeding ones came. The Mutakallimun do not admit of any kind of infinite. They prove it in this way.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking