We cannot simply look at the answers Christians have given...

We cannot simply look at the answers Christians have given and then search for an appropriate, hadith to make them seem Islamic. Serious full time work has to be done to begin to formulate contemporary Islamic theologies which are in harmony with the tradition of Islamic sciences, especially kalam , falsafah , and*`irfan* . With these points in mind, we can turn to some examples of the sorts of questions raised by the philosophy of religion for the theologian.

One of the deepest areas to be surveyed is that of epistemology. This is also an area to which medieval thinkers devoted less attention than our contemporaries. How do we know that God exists? The traditional answer given by Christians as well as Muslims was that we can formulate sound deductive proofs whose premises are self-evident and whose conclusions state the existence of God.

The problem with this answer is that many of the premises which seemed self-evident enough in the past have now come to be questioned. Consider, for example, the role of the principle that an actual infinity of causes is impossible. A number of Western philosophers, physicists and mathematicians have come to doubt this principle.

In defense of the principle, an important book has been written in which some of the ideas of Muslim philosophers are given attention: William Lane Craig's The Kalam Cosmological Argument (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). This is one of the rare cases in which ideas from the Islamic tradition (particularly those of Abu Humid Ghazali) have been the subject of discussion in the contemporary philosophy of religion.

The continued discussion of this work in scholarly journals sixteen years after the publication of the book is testimony to its significance. The important point is that what has seemed for centuries to be a self-evident principle is now the topic of vigorous debate. At first glance it seems that what we have here is a case of a principle of reason defended in Islamic philosophy and theology pitted against the modem skeptics of the West.

If we look closer, however, we find that the principle has undergone its own evolution within the tradition of Islamic philosophy. By the time we get to Sadr al-Muta'allihin the principle is limited to series of actual causes of existence occurring simultaneously.