Abstract.Scientific achievements, especially in contemporary biology, have led and continue to lead to uncertainties for some believers with regard to their understanding of the role of God as the creator. This essay, avoiding philosophical jargon, expounds the stance of Islamic philosophy on this matter and argues that such anxiety and doubt are unfounded. Drawing upon the thousand‐year‐old distinction between two types of cause, real and preparatory, as formulated by Muslim philosophers, the argument demonstrates that seeing biological advances as rivaling God's (...) creation, as traditionally understood in the Abrahamic religions, is a premature judgment based on a faulty conflation. This comes to light most clearly through Mulla Sadra's analysis of causality, the far‐reaching implications of which are briefly mentioned. (shrink)

One of the most popular accounts of the teleological argument for the existence of God is the analogical account that is the center of Hume’s knocker criticisms. Since Hume’s age, many theist scholars have attempted to propose convincing responses. Motahari is one of the rigorous thinkers who tackled the challenges which Hume posed. The purpose of this paper is to address Hume’s criticisms and assess Motahari’s rejoinders to them. It will be argued that Motahari’s responses do not (...) seem successful. Although Motahari has tried to refute Hume’s criticisms in some of his works, he implicitly endorsed Hume’s assessment of the analogical account of the teleological argument in other works, and came ultimately close to the Hume’s view. As Hume believed that the argument from design is not a successful philosophical argument to prove God’s existence that the theist contend, Motahari also admits at the end that this argument alone cannot prove God’s existence and emphasizes that the argument from design cannot prove God of Abraham’s religions, that is a person with necessary being, who is immaterial and eternal, is omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good, and the creator of the universe. Motahari ultimately believed in deficiency of the argument from design too, and assessed it as an argument with limited functions for God’s existence. (shrink)