Reason Reconstituted: The Divine Attributes and the Question of Contradiction between Reason and Revelation

In chapter 5, we discussed Ibn Taymiyya’s charge against the philosophers that their reasoning about the world and metaphysical realities rests upon a fundamentally unsound ontology that confuses, on numerous levels, the realm of external ontological existence with the realm of notional or logical existence in the mind. Specifically, we have seen that the philosophers adopt a realist conception of universals on the basis of which they accord objective ontological status to notional realities (such as universals) that, Ibn Taymiyya insists, enjoy no more than intramental existence. As such intellectual realities are, by definition, unseen (ghayrmashhūd) and imperceptible (ghayrmaḥsūs), the philosophers identify them with the ghayb spoken of in revelation, in contrast to the shāhid realm of our ambient empirical reality. The result is a philosophical ontology that confines the perceptible (maḥsūs) to the empirical (shahāda) while reducing the unseen (ghayb) to themental or intellectual (maʿqūl). Such a scheme entails—incoherently, for Ibn Taymiyya—the affirmation of externally existent realities that are entirely notional and unperceivable (such as universals). Worse, insofar as the ghayb is reduced to the maʿqūl, the philosophers’ schemaat the same timenecessarily precludes the existence of any independent, self-standing entities (aʿyān qāʾima bi-anfusihā) in the ghayb, entities that are inherently perceptible (though veiled to our senses at the current time) and that exist independently of human reason and human minds. It is on the basis of this ontology that the philosophers end up “intellectualizing” the various unseen (ghāʾib) realities affirmed in revelation, as in their identification of angels with the “intellects” of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic traditions or the broader philosophical view that the events of the afterlife, including the pleasures of paradise and the pains of hell, are merely graphic metaphors for what will essentially be experienced in intellectual, rather than sensory, terms in the hereafter. This confusion in ontology, according to Ibn Taymiyya, has led to a parallel confusion in the rational inferences the philosophers draw about the world.