The God of Islam
This is Part 5 is a series of posts comparing the Christian and Islamic worldviews. I have now discussed how both worldviews answer the questions of creation, the fall, and redemption. Now, I would like to spend a few posts fleshing out and evaluating the answers which Islam provides. To begin, I will look at the God of Islam.
Allah is absolute unity, absolute sovereignty, absolute justice, absolute mercy, absolute will, and absolutely unknowable. This statement might seem somewhat contradictory since it claims that God is unknowable, yet several characteristics of God have been provided as if we know these things about Him. The key to reconciling these concepts is to understand that everything is based on God’s will. The descriptions or names of Allah simply describe his effects and do not reveal his essence. For example, God is good only in the sense that he causes goodness, but he is not good in his essence.
This leads to a view of God which might be described as radical voluntarism (God is “willâ€) and nominalism (abstract concepts such as universals do not exist independently, but only as names). There is no basic essence or nature of God according to which he must act. If God is simply “willâ€, without a real essence, then right and wrong are arbitrary. There is no right or wrong as such, instead, right is whatever God wills to do. The acceptance that God has no real essence seems to lead to a form of agnosticism. Geisler and Saleeb state:
Indeed, the heart of Islam is not to know God but to obey him. It is not to meditate on his essence but to submit to his will.
Orthodox Islam embraces a god who is essentially unknowable. God’s names only tell us how he has chosen to act, but nothing of his essence or character. To be consistent, a Muslim should also be prepared to call God evil, since he causes evil. If he is unwilling to do so, it would seem he must give up on his view of God as being without essence and unknowable.
Next, a brief look at ethics according to the Islamic worldview.