From Contingency to Design: Reassessing al-Ghazali’s Arguments for God in Philosophy, Theology, and Contemporary Science

Abstract

The study traces the arguments about God’s existence by Medieval Islamic philosopher and theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111), their philosophical foundations, and creates a unique link with contemporary discourses on philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. This reassessment is situated in classical kalam metaphysics and contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, especially debates on contingency, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and fine-tuning in cosmology. The problem this study addresses is whether classical kalam arguments can still provide a coherent framework within modern scientific and philosophical debates on cosmology and design. Despite renewed interest in the kalam cosmological argument and fine-tuning reasoning, it remains unclear how al-Ghazali’s synthesis of reason and revelation can be reconstructed in terms that engage current naturalistic explanations, including multiverse proposals and causal indeterminacy. This study addresses the philosophical and theological challenge of reconciling classical Islamic thought with modern debates on cosmology, causality, and design, situating al-Ghazali within both medieval and contemporary frameworks. He criticized certain aspects of Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist philosophy and challenged the rationalistic paradigms of his era. His arguments for God’s existence are mainly in two propositions: the cosmological argument and the teleological argument. The objective of this research is to critically examine the logical structure of al-Ghazali’s cosmological and teleological arguments and to evaluate their resonance in modern philosophy of religion and science. Specifically, it asks whether his arguments can be reformulated with contemporary logical clarity while retaining their original theological commitments. Methodologically, the study employs qualitative textual analysis of al-Ghazali’s primary works alongside comparative engagement with modern philosophical and scientific perspectives. It also explores the contemporary philosophical implications of his arguments, specifically discussions about cosmology, fine-tuning, and theism versus atheism discourses. By reanalyzing his works such as The Incoherence of the Philosophers and The Revival of the Religious Sciences in modern philosophical context and scientific discourse, the study highlights the continuing relevance of al-Ghazali’s thought in the ongoing discourses about God’s existence and non-existence. The analysis reconstructs the premises and inferential steps of both arguments and then evaluates them against representative contemporary objections in philosophy of science and cosmology. The findings reveal that al-Ghazali’s synthesis of reason and revelation not only anticipates aspects of the modern kalam cosmological argument but also offers a constructive response to naturalistic and atheistic critiques. Results indicate that his contingency-based reasoning aligns closely with modal formulations of the cosmological argument, while his design reasoning supports a restrained, cosmological teleology compatible with fine-tuning discussions rather than biological Intelligent Design claims. Accordingly, al-Ghazali emerges not merely as a historical critic of the falasifa but as a constructive interlocutor for twenty-first-century debates on the rationality of theism at the intersection of theology, philosophy, and contemporary science.