Atheism and Skepticism - the perspective of Islamic epistemology скачать в хорошем качестве

Atheism and Skepticism - the perspective of Islamic epistemology

Lecture delivered September 2021 at the 17th Annual Imam's conference of the American Muslim Jurists Assembly (AMJA). Introduction: Why do we demand proof for some concepts and not for others? The answer goes back to epistemology, the academic discipline which addresses the question, “How do I know that something is true?” Whether or not someone is justified in believing something without proof leads to a deeper question of whether or not they have a coherent epistemology. One would readily acknowledge that people are justified in believing in certain things without demanding proof for them, like the existence of good and bad, cause and effect, truth and falsehood, the reliability of their senses and memories, and so on. More importantly, one should recognize that to demand proof for such things would be perfectly nonsensical. In the history of Islamic thought, the term for those who denied such obvious realities was safsaṭah (lit. sophistry, the term was used for radical skepticism). While denying the senses was recognized to be a type of safsaṭah before, Ibn Taymiyyah pointed out that atheism is ultimately just another form of safsaṭah because belief in God is the foundation that underlies all other concepts necessary to make sense of reality. Pursuit of meaning: The big questions of life tend to aggregate into three clusters—intellectual, moral, and spiritual. No matter what culture or ideology one is raised in, one seeks to answer questions such as ‘What makes my life worth living?’ (spiritual), ‘How do I live a good life?’ (moral), and ‘What is worth knowing?’ (intellectual). Pursuing truth means to search for the answers that serve a purpose in making sense of these fundamental questions. Every human being intuitively prefers a system of belief and value that is able to yield meaningful answers to questions in these three domains rather than answers that are incoherent and meaningless. Ultimately, the human being is confronted with a basic choice, between meaningfulness or meaninglessness. In Islam, the three domains—spiritual, moral, and intellectual—are perfectly aligned and connected. The paradigm of tawḥīd (Divine Oneness) presented by Islam successfully incorporates all of these three domains into an understanding that renders life meaningful, and thus it serves as an ontological anchor—a necessary grounding for all meaningful conceptions about life. To subject ontological anchors to skepticism results only in the collapse of the very framework that renders meaningful those notions of truth and falsehood upon which the skeptical endeavor itself is predicated. Conclusion: Many people attempt to address atheism by offering ‘philosophical proofs’ for the existence of God, thus inadvertently reinforcing the ‘Pyrrhonian fallacy’ behind atheism - that belief in God is something uncertain to begin with and in need of substantiation. When we understand the Qur’anic approach which presents faith as an ontological and epistemological foundation, then it becomes clear that no meaningful construal of reality is possible without faith in the Divine. Thus, faith in the Divine is the bedrock for everything else to be rendered meaningful. Rather than requiring substantiation, it substantiates all else. See also: https://yaqeeninstitute.ca/read/paper...