Fundamental Questions of Philosophy

Is the Universe a fundamentally orderly place, in which effect flows from cause? Or is it, on the other hand, essentially disordered and chaotic, and brought to some appearance of order only by the providential intervention of God. Do miracles occur? Or is everything that happens in a sense a miracle, in showing God's hand at work? Does a tree fall in the forest--or do tree and forest exist in the first place--save by divine action?

These are fundamental questions over which Western philosophers (and theologians) have argued for some twenty-five centuries. The discussion has, moreover, been by no means confined to the West. The other great philosophical traditions, such as the Chinese and the Indian, have also touched upon these problems. Until quite recent times, however, these other traditions of inquiry were so isolated from the Western philosophical tradition that they might as well have been on other planets.

In contrast to this mutual isolation of Western and Eastern thought, the Western and Islamic philosophical traditions have been deeply intermixed. When in the early centuries of Islam, Muslim scholars sought to systematize and argue the world view that is only implicit in the Qur'an, it was from the ideas and techniques of argument of Greek philosophy that they drew their intellectual tools. A few centuries later, when Western Europe was rousing itself from the isolation and rusticity of the Dark Ages, it was largely through Muslim channels that they

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hout ever reaching a starting point. The believer rejects the latter, partly for reasons of faith, but also because such an endless chain ultimately explains nothing. Nor, however, is the believer wholly satisfied with the former, which leaves God performing a first big miracle, Creation, followed sporadically by lesser, interventionary miracles. The believer may, moreover, ask what the use is of that chain of causation--itself increasingly tentative and doubtful, the further one regresses--to explain those events that are not specifically miracles in the sense of overt supernatural intervention. When the followers of the Prophet Muhammad conquered the Asian and African provinces of the Byzantine Empire in the seventh century, the tradition of Greek philosophical thought was part of what fell to them, and Muslim philosophers presently addressed themselves to the task of applying Greek thought to gain a fuller understanding of the implications of their faith. The Greek tradition had been crowned by Plato and Aristotle, but the Muslim scholastics, the Mutakallim, also found themselves drawn to the pre-Socratic philosophers, and in particular to the theory of atomism. Atomic theory (not to be confused with atomic theory in th

Category: Philosophy - F