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God, Information and the World: The Metaphysics of William Dembski and Al-Ghazālī

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2019

Shoaib Ahmed Malik
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Abstract

This article intends to review William Dembski's recent monograph entitled Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information, in which he establishes an entire information-centric metaphysics. This viewpoint is compared with al-Ghazālī’s perspective, a Muslim philosophical theologian from the Medieval period. It is concluded that what Dembski defines as information, which for him is the ontological basis of the natural world, seems remarkably close to al-Ghazālī’s notion of God's will and omnipotence. This article is an explorative comparison of their metaphysical frameworks that are discussed in light of modern scientific developments, highlighting their differences and similarities.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 94 , Issue 4 , October 2019 , pp. 547 - 576
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2019 

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References

1 Gregersen, Niels, ‘God, Matter, and Information: Towards a Stoicizing Logos Christology.’ In Davies, Paul and Gregersen, Niels Henrik, eds, Information and the Nature of Reality (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2014), 319–348Google Scholar.

2 For example, see Scott, Eugenie C. Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction 2nd Edition (University of California Press: California 2009), 97–118Google Scholar.

3 Dembski, William A. Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information (Ashgate: Surrey 2015)Google Scholar.

4 As an example of this, recently Brill have published two volumes on al-Ghazālī’s works in memory of his 900th birthday. Tamer, Georges, eds, Islam and Rationality: The Impact of Al-Ghazālī Volume 1 (Brill: Leiden 2018)Google Scholar; Griffel, Frank, eds, Islam and Rationality: The Impact of Al-Ghazālī Volume 2 (Brill: Leiden 2018)Google Scholar.

5 Hodgson, Peter, Theology and Modern Physics (Ashgate: Aldershot 2005)Google Scholar.

6 It needs to be stressed that whether their frameworks hold up to scrutiny isn't discussed in this article.

7 I should stress that this is just one school of thought within the Sunni Muslim world. Other groups that can also be classed under the kalamic rubric would be Mutazilites and the Maturidis though the former were eventually classed as being outside of orthodoxy. Blankship, Khalid, ‘The Early Muslim Creed.’ In Winters, Timothy, ed, Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008), 33–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this article I will be strictly focusing on the Ash'arite worldview because that is the specific group to which al-Ghazālī had affinity towards.

8 This statement requires some unpacking. There is a contemporary debate amongst academics regarding the true nature of al-Ghazālī’s metaphysics. The debate originates from the Avicennan impressions that can be found in al-Ghazālī’s works. Since Avicenna was a Neoplatonist, it has stirred controversy as to whether al-Ghazālī was an Ash'arite or a Neoplatonist. One interpretation suggests that he actually was a Neoplatonist. This interpretation can be found in the following works; Frank, Richard M. Al-Ghazālī and the Ash'arite School (Duke University Press: Duke 1994)Google Scholar; Frank, Richard M. Creation and the Cosmic System: Al-Ghazālī and Avicenna. (Universitätsverlag: Heidelberg 1992)Google Scholar. The other interpretation seems to square him within the traditional Ash'arite school. This interpretation can be found in the following works: Marmura, Michael E., ‘Ghazali and Ash'arism Revisited,’ Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 12(1) (2002): 91–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dallal, Ahmed, ‘Ghazali and the Perils of Interpretation’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 122(4) (2002): 773–787CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My personal opinion is that he was an idiosyncratic thinker who was an Ash'arite theologian and appropriated a lot of Avicennan ideas and terminology within that rubric and this is how I shall be interpreting al-Ghazālī when discussed in this paper. For a similar perspective see al-Akiti, Afifi, ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly of Falsafa: Al-Ghazālī’s Madnun, Tahafut, and Maqasid, with Particular Attention to their Falsafi Treatments of God Knowledge of Temporal Events’ In Langermann, Y. Tzvi, ed, Avicenna and His Legacy (Brepols: Turnhout 2009), 51–100Google Scholar. For another interesting reading of al-Ghazālī see Griffel, Frank Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology (Oxford University Press: Oxford 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/information (accessed 11th of March 2019).

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16 As a real life example I would also compare the Stonehenge, which shows significant marks of intelligence without which it would not be of considerable interest to historians and archaeologists, and random pieces of rock lying about. It may very well be possible in the space of logical possibilities that such an occurrence could come about by chance, and thus give the appearance of intelligence, but from our experience with nature we usually and intuitively attribute such appearances to intelligence rather than to random processes. For a more thoroughly discussed conceptual scheme on semiotics or design in nature I recommend the reader to Ratzsch, Del Nature, Design and Science: The Status of Design in Natural Science (State University of New York Press: New York 2001)Google Scholar.

17 von Baeyer, Hans Christian Information: The New Language of Science (Harvard University Press: Massachusetts 2003), 25Google Scholar.

18 Seife, Charles Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From Our Brains to Black Holes (Penguin Books: New York 2006), 2Google Scholar.

19 Ben-Naim, Arieh, Information, Entropy, Life and the Universe: What We Know and What We Do Not Know (World Scientific: Singapore 2015), 124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Note the similarity with von Bayeur.

21 Dembski Being in Communion, 29–36.

22 Dembski Being in Communion, 27.

23 Dembski Being in Communion, 32.

24 Dembski Being in Communion, 32.

25 Hodgson, Theology and Modern Physics, 125–143.

26 Dembski Being in Communion, 93–113.

27 Dembski Being in Communion, 25. This point will be of particular importance when discussing some issues that were discussed by the early Muslim theologians.

28 Dembski Being in Communion, 25.

29 Dembski Being in Communion, 95.

30 Dembski Being in Communion, pp. 87–88.

31 Clayton, Philip, ‘Unsolved Dilemmas: The Concept of Matter in the History of Philosophy and in Contemporary Physics.’ In Davies, Paul and Gregersen, Niels Henrik, eds, Information and the Nature of Reality (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2014), 47–82Google Scholar. A similar perspective is shared by Max Jammer: “Mass may be compared with an actor who appears on stage in various disguises, but never as his true self. Actually mass – like the Deity – has a triune personality. It may appear in the role of gravitational charge, or of inertia, or of energy, but nowhere does mass present itself to the senses as its unadorned self.” Jackson, Herbert L., ‘Presentation of the Concept of Mass to Beginning Physics Students’, American Journal of Physics, 27, (1959), 278–280CrossRefGoogle Scholar quoted in Jammer, Max Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics (Dover Publications: New York 1997), 2–3Google Scholar.

32 Dembski Being in Communion, 48–52.

33 Dembski Being in Communion, 25–26.

34 Dembski Being in Communion, 198. I say this with uncertainty because in one place he says regarding the connection between detection of patterns and the observer: ‘A God's eye view that sees things as they are without interacting with them seems not to exist, perhaps not even for God. The measurement problem in quantum mechanics is a special case of this general problem.’ (emphasis my own) Dembski Being in Communion, 86. I am not too sure what he means by here by ‘sees things as they are’ nor if he is using the word ‘perhaps’ heuristically or assertively. If he indeed does believe that elements of quantum mechanics can escape God's knowledge, then this would be a specific point in his metaphysical makeup which would conflict with al-Ghazālī, i.e. he wouldn't be able to forego the theological commitment that God knows and controls absolutely everything. Regardless, this specific point should not detract us from the overall presentation of this article.

35 As far as my reading goes he defines information somewhat more restrictively to shaping information. This is because his entire project is premised on providing an alternative worldview to materialism, as mentioned earlier, and thus focuses primarily on shaping information. However, I don't see any contradiction nor problem in broadening his definition to include the other types of information that we looked at earlier.

36 Consider the sign board below (left) that says ‘STOP.’ It has a quantitative dimension of being a single sign board, or alternatively it can be quantified has having four letters. It also has the semantic content which is how drivers recognize to slow down because of the word ‘STOP’ and potentially also because of the red circle indicating alertness or danger. It also has a shaping content either in the form of being a square or a triangle, or by having the colour red. An empty sign board (below, right) without any letters nor any symbols and colours won't have the semantic component but might still have the other two kinds of information, i.e. shaping and mathematical information.

37 I should add that Dembski hints how God cannot create certain possibilities, e.g. ‘the Judeo- Christian tradition maintains that some possibilities are never actualized (for example, the pardoning of sin apart from sacrifice).’ Dembski Being in Communion, 15. For this reason, I refrain from saying claiming that Dembski permits for an infinite number of possible worlds and instead, how he words it, for ‘the most inclusive’ possible worlds. On this point also see Dembski Being in Communion, 26. This is somewhat different to al-Ghazālī’s viewpoint who believed that God can create any possible world as long as it is logically permissible, i.e. God is only bound by the law of non-contradiction. This entails that God can create worlds with different moral orders than the one He has instilled in our (or the actual) world. See footnote 63.

38 This also has parallels with the laws of nature: ‘God can be conceived as acting through the laws, but the ones through which God is acting principally are not ‘our laws,’ but rather the underlying relationships and regularities in nature itself, of which ‘our laws’ are but imperfect and idealised models … We experience them only ‘from the outside,’ as it were, that is, only in some of their outward manifestations and only in some of their important relationships. God knows and experiences them intimately from ‘within’ in all their relationships and connections – including those which determine their possibilities and necessities and grounding in God. We need to model physical reality, its relationships and its laws, representing them through language and theoretical concepts. God has no need to do that.’ Stoeger, William R. S. J., ‘Contemporary Physics and the Ontological Status of the Nature.’ In Russel, Robert John, Murphy, Nancy and Isham, C. J., eds, Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action 2nd Edition (Vatican Observatory and The Center for Theology and Nature Sciences: Notre Dame 1996), 207–234Google Scholar.

39 Dembski Being in Communion, 29.

40 Dembski Being in Communion, 125–144.

41 Recall that there were other kalamic schools as highlighted earlier in footnote 7.

42 For a great historical review on the topic see Rudolph, Ulrich, ‘Occasionalism,’ In Schmidtke, Sabine, ed, The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology (Oxford University Press: Oxford 2016), 347–363Google Scholar.

43 For an easy introduction to the ontology of kalam see Sabra, Abdulhamid Ibrahim, “The Simple Ontology of Kalam Atomism: An Outline,” Early Science and Medicine 14, (2009), 68–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 For an excellent juxtaposition of the kalamic tradition versus the philosophical tradition within Islamic history relevant to this point see Yazacioglu, Isra Understanding the Qur'anic Miracle Stories in the Modern Age (The Pennsylvania State University Press: Pennsylvania 2013), 15–70Google Scholar; Altaie, Basil, ‘Daqiq al-Kalam: A Basis for an Islamic Philosophy of Science,’ Cambridge Muslim College Papers 4, 2017Google Scholar; Leaver, Oliver, ‘Islamic Philosophical Theology.’ In Flint, Thomas P. and Rea, Michael C., eds, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (Oxford University Press: Oxford 2013), 556–573Google Scholar.

45 Bargeron, Carol L., ‘Re-thinking Necessity (al-Darura) in al-Ghazālī’s Understanding of Physical Causation,’ Theology and Science, 5(1), (2007), 21–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Morrison, Robert G., ‘Islamic Perspectives on Natural Theology’ In Re Manning, Russell, ed, The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (Oxford University Press: Oxford 2015), 151–165Google Scholar.

47 ‘If one accepts al-Ghazālī’s necessary conditions for causal agency, it seems clear that only an omnipotent, omniscient, free being can be the causal agent of all occurrents. This Ash'arite occasionalism has a peculiar consequence. Since God is the exclusive and direct causal agent of all occurrents and since the human acts of volition are occurents, God must be the creator of these acts together with the specific will and power that are associated with these acts. This is the famous Ash'arite doctrine of acquisition (kasb), which states that when God creates an act for a person, He also creates in the person, at the moment of creating the act, the specific power for performing this act. However, in reality, the human power is causally inert, since it does not actually produce the act; rather, God's power does. This shows how thorough Ash'arite occasionalism is.’ (emphasis my own) Yaqoub, Aladdin M., ‘Al-Ghazālī’s View on Causality.’ In Muhtaroglu, Nazif, ed, Occasionalism Revisited: New Essays from the Islamic and Western Philosophical Traditions (Kalam Research and Media: Abu Dhabi 2017), 22–40Google Scholar.

48 McGinnis, Jon, ‘The Establishment of the Principles of Natural Philosophy’ In Taylor, Richard C. and Lopez-Farjeat, Luis Xavier, eds, The Routledge Companion to Islamic Philosophy (Routledge: Abingdon 2016), 117–130Google Scholar.

49 Pines, Shlomo Studies in Islamic Atomism (The Hebrew University: Jerusalem 1997), 15Google Scholar.

50 Mehmet Bulgen Kalam Atomism and Modern Cosmology (Kalam Research and Media: Abu Dhabi forthcoming), 142–258.

51 This seems to be the opinion of Ibn ‘Arabi: ‘To put it bluntly, Ibn ‘Arabi asks a simple question of the Ash'arites: if you believe the world is re-created anew at each moment, then where do you get the idea of self-subsisting substance/s from? Substance-accident dualism is an absurdity in a world where everything is dependent on God for subsistence. According to Ash'arites, nothing can subsist by itself, yet they seem to hold that substances do subsist. Ibn ‘Arabi does not criticise the Ash'arites for their occasionalism, but rather for being inconsistent, for not following their theory of causation to its logical conclusions, for positing and maintaining the idea of self-subsisting substance/s, despite the fact that this contradicts the basic tenet of their world view, the continuous creation for the world.’ Koca, Ozgur, ‘Ibn ‘Arabi and the ‘Asharites on Causality.’ In Muhtaroglu, Nazif, ed, Occasionalism Revisited: New Essays from the Islamic and Western Philosophical Traditions (Kalam Research and Media: Abu Dhabi 2017), 41–60Google Scholar.

52 Interestingly, there was a further disagreement within the first group where theologians disagreed on what counted as an accident and what counted as being part of the substance. There was also substantial disagreement as to how many atoms would make up a body. See Pines, Studies in Islamic Atomism, 1–40.

53 Altaie, Basil God, Nature, and the Cause: Essays on Islam and Science (Kalam Research and Media: Abu Dhabi 2016), 16–18Google Scholar.

54 Al-Ghazālī, Incoherence of the Philosophers trans. Marmura, Michael E. (Brigham University Press: Utah 2000), p. 4Google Scholar.

55 Al-Ghazālī Incoherence of the Philosophers, 22.

56 Al-Ghazālī Incoherence of the Philosophers, 25.

57 Al-Ghazālī Incoherence of the Philosophers, 37. A qualification is needed regarding al-Ghazālī’s last comment on ‘ascending ad infinitum.’ This does not entail that al-Ghazālī himself believed the world was infinite in any shape or form. He was actually against the idea of an actual infinity. This is purely a statement for the sake of the argument. For an extensive analysis of al-Ghazālī’s arguments against actual infinity see his first discussion in IP in Al-Ghazālī Incoherence of the Philosophers, 12–46.

58 Al-Ghazālī Incoherence of the Philosophers, 38.

59 Al-Ghazālī Incoherence of the Philosophers, 175.

60 Al-Ghazālī, , Moderation in Belief trans. Yaqub, Aladdin M. (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago 2009), 104Google Scholar.

61 Al-Ghazālī, Moderation in Belief, 83–126.

62 For example, al-Ghazālī is thoroughly consistent with his stance on ethics, in that they are completely arbitrary and could have been anything else then what is considered normative by us as per the will of God. See Campanini, Massimo Al-Ghazālī and the Divine (Routledge: Abingdon 2018), 61–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; al-Ghazālī Moderation in Belief, 157–195. For a more detailed and nuanced look at al-Ghazālī’s modality see Kukkonen, Taneli, ‘Possible World in the Tahafut al-Falasifa: Al-Ghazālī on Creation and Contingency’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 38(4), (2000), 479–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kukkonen, Taneli, ‘Plenitude, Possibility and the Limits of Reason: A Medieval Arabic Debate on the Metaphysics of Nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 61(4), (2000), 539–560CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kukkonen, Taneli, ‘Mind and Modal Judgement: al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd on Conceivability and Possibility’, In Hirvonen, Vesa, Holopainen, Toivo and Tuominen, Miira, eds, Mind and Modality Studies in the History of Philosophy in Honour of Simo Knuuttila. (Brill: Leiden 2006), 121–139Google Scholar; Kraft, András, ‘A Nominalist Deliverance from Error: On al-Ghazālī’s Concept of Modality,’ Czech and Slovak Journal of Humanities: Philosophica 1, (2016), 26–36Google Scholar.

63 This positions seems to fall under the rubric of Scholastic realism as defined by Edward Feser. See Feser, Edward, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (Ignatius Press: San Francisco 2017), 87–116Google Scholar.

64 It should be noted that al-Ghazālī doesn't explicitly discuss atomism in the IP. See footnote 5 in Al-Ghazālī, Incoherence of the Philosophers, 232. See al-Ghazālī, Moderation in Belief, 27–37. Also see Frank, Al-Ghazālī and the Ash'arite School, 48–55.

65 Setia, Adi, ‘Atomism Versus Hylomorphism in the Kalam of al-Fakhr al-Din al-Razi’, Islam and Science, 4(2), (2006), 113–140Google Scholar.

66 Dhanani, Alnoor, ‘The Impact of Ibn Sina's Critique of Atomism on Subsequent Kalam Discussions of Atomism’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 25, (2015), 79–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Dembski, Being as Communion, 99.

68 On this point see Goodman, Lenn E., ‘Ghazali's Argument from Creation (I)’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2, (1971), 67–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ibn Hazm's – a well-known theologian – criticism comes to mind here. He is reported to have criticized the mutakallimūn with the accusation of believing in an indivisible particle that even God Himself cannot divide. See Bulgen, Kalam Atomism and Modern Cosmology, 131. This isn't an invalid criticism. Say for instance that physicists do indeed ‘discover’ the ‘strings’ from string theory. Wouldn't it be possible to conceive of another even more fundamental unit afterwards? And if yes, could it not be then possible to discover one after that? Indivisibility, then, seems to be however much we can conceive or choose to probe into the depths of the universe. Interestingly, Adi Setia provides an explanation of this in that the atomism of the mutakallimūn cannot but be thought of as a conceptual limit: ‘For kalam atomism to be self-consistent, even the indivisible, “self-subsisting” atomic substance has to be ultimately also “accidents” relative to God, so the distinction atom-accident is not absolute with respect to entities/events in creation, meaning A may be an atom/body/substance relative to B but an accident/event/happening relative to C, but, relative to God, all three are accidents undergoing a perpetual process of coming into and passing out of being. This means that the atom-accident distinction is only ‘i'tibari’ (i.e., cognitive, epistemological or mentally posited), for that is how our minds find the phenomenal world intelligible to the understanding. At a deeper, ontological level, though, all are accidents, so atomism can ultimately be reduced to occasionalism, or the metaphysics of direct, unmediated divine action. Therefore, kalam atomism can be seen as a monumental intellecto-scientific ijtihad [intellectual effort or progress] of the mutakallimūn to develop and refine a theory about the world that can account for its physical aspects in a way that is conceptually compatible with that metaphysics without compromising divine power or involvement in any way.’ Setia, ‘Atomism Versus Hylomorphism’, 140.

69 Coyne, George B. and Heller, Michael A Comprehensible Universe: The Interplay of Science and Theology (Springer: New York 2008), XIGoogle Scholar.

70 Ney, Alyssa, ‘Introduction.’ In Ney, Alyssa and Albert, David Z., eds, The Wave Function: Essays on the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics (Oxford University Press: Oxford 2013), 1–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 It needs to be added that I have ignored the scientific nuances in the ontological distinctions between fields and particles (see Sciamanda, Robert J., ‘There are no particles, and there are no fields.’ American Journal of Physics 81, 2013, 645Google Scholar.). This will hopefully be taken up in future research. The point of this article is to simply compare the metaphysics of Dembski and al-Ghazālī in light of these scientific developments without getting into the nuances.

72 Dembski, Being as Communion, 120.

73 Al-Ghazālī, Incoherence of the Philosophers, 166.

74 Al-Ghazālī, Incoherence of the Philosophers, 174.

75 For an excellent article on the metaphysics of indeterminancy of quantum states see Wilson, Jessica, ‘A Determinable-Based Account of Metaphysical Indeterminacy,’ Inquiry 56(4), (2013), 359–385CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 For a detailed presentation on the integration of kalam and quantum mechanics see Altaie, God, Nature, and the Cause, 85–118. Also see Harding, Karen, ‘Causality Then and Now: Al Ghazali and Quantum Theory,’ American Journal of Islamic Social Science 10(2), (1993), 165–177Google Scholar.

77 Campanini, Al-Ghazālī and the Divine, 109.

78 A very early (and somewhat different) version of this paper was selected for presenting at the Third Kuala Lumpur International Kalam Symposium (KLIKS3) held in March, 2018. I would like to thank hosting bodies for coordinating the event and the participants for their wonderful engagement. Also, I would like to thank Dr. Mehmet Bulgen for giving me access to his yet unpublished book and offering helpful comments in developing the paper. A final thanks to Dr. Edward Moad for giving me pointers on a few ideas that needed sharpening.