What is Divine Elegance?
What is Divine Elegance?
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Theistic models of theology generally fall into two major categories: Divine Simplicity and Complex Theism. The Divine Simplicity idea starts with a God that has no attributes or conditions, it goes back to Plato and Hindu thinkers before him, and usually entails emanations of finite entities that subsequently create the world we know, and takes root in the Catholic and Protestant flavors of Christianity. Complex Theism, usually involves interpreting revealed scripture at its word and assuming God is a composite of different attributes, this describes Athari, Ashari, Maturidi theologies in Islam as well as Orthodox Christianity's model of monarchical trinity. What if there was a 3rd more complex option? This is Divine Elegance, that God is at a minimum attributional complexity to satisfy cosmological, ontological and theodicy (problem of evil) understandings.
What is Mu'tazilite theology?
The Mu'tazila were a group of early Muslims who gained cosmopolitan favor during the early Abbasid Caliphate, their theology assumed that God's attributes were not distinct from God's essence, they focused on justice but also did not embrace the divine simplicity of neo-Platonism. They were persecuted and driven underground, their ideas adopted by Twelver Shiism in large part and the Ashari theological school in minor part, we did not get to witness an additional 1200 years of Mu'tazalite thought. Coupling with a roulette of modern philosophers from Wittgenstein, Hegel, Nietzsche, Deluze and non-philosophers like Godel, Cantor, Lewis Carroll and Hofstader, we will attempt to take the Mu'tazilite theology forward in time, renew it, and arrive at a beautiful understanding of God that can reinvigorate faith in Islam in a strongly Quranic sense, refreshed appreciation of science and math, and a precise calculus of justice in a modern world gone genocidal, while staying more strongly grounded in scripture than Neo-Platonism. Insha'Allah.