Professor of Higher Learning in the Islamic Seminary of Qom and Faculty Member of the University of Tehran.
Abstract
The first part of this paper takes a cursory glance at the various arguments for the existence of God that can be found in the works of the scholars of the East and the West from times immemorial. In the Islamic world, three approaches [to prove God] were generally accepted. These were the approach of the philosophers, the approach of the theologians and that of the physicists. The philosophers tried their utmost to keep the premises of their arguments for the existence of God to a minimum. Also, from the time of Ibn Sina, they called the manner of their argument, ‘the Argument of the Veracious.’ The late Ashtiyani mentions nineteen versions of this type of argument If we add to these the version of Allamah Tabatabai, then the number of versions of the argument of the Veracious’ would extend to twenty. One of the scholars who actively pursued this problem was Allamah Khafri. After mentioning the argument of Khwajah Nasir al-Din Tusi in the Tajrid al-Itiqad, he mentions four versions of the same in his footnotes to this book. Following this, he also presents two new arguments in which there is no reference to the impossibility of an infinite regress of causes. Then, he states the second argument in two other ways. What is more, he considers this a version of the Argument of the Veracious. Mulla Sadra, who sometimes remembers Khafri as ‘one of the Persian sages’ and at other times as an ‘Allamah’ (a very learned man), objected to the two arguments of Khafri as well as the two innovative explanations of this sage. In this paper, we hope to defend Khafri from these objections.
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