The kalām method
from 750 Muʿtazilite beginnings; the classical form by the eleventh century
Argue for a revealed doctrine using only premises an opponent who does not accept the revelation would grant.
- Active
- from 750
- Where
- Basra and Baghdad
- Also
- ʿilm al-kalām
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Non-Western procedures
What it is
Kalām is argument in defence of doctrine conducted on ground the opponent shares. Its practitioners were arguing with Christians, Zoroastrians, materialists and each other, and quoting scripture at any of them settles nothing.
So the arguments are built from premises available to anyone: that things begin, that an infinite series of past events cannot be completed, that what begins has a cause. The theology enters at the conclusion, not the premises.
How it works
Identify the doctrine to be defended. Identify what the opponent will grant. Build the argument entirely from those premises. State the opponent's objections and answer them individually. Reach the doctrine as a conclusion rather than assuming it.
The discipline is that a premise the opponent rejects makes the argument worthless for its purpose, however true it is.
The moves, in order
- State the doctrine to be established
- Identify premises the opponent already grants
- Build the argument using only those
- State and answer the opponent's objections in turn
- Reach the doctrine as a conclusion, not as an assumption
The procedure
Proposition There is an original version of this document.
- The dispute is whether an original signed deed ever existed, and the other side will grant nothing about the document's history.
- What they do grant: that the version now held is an amendment, since it is headed as one; that every amendment is made to something; and that no amendment can be made to a document that does not yet exist.
- So this version was preceded by another. The same three grants apply to that one if it too is headed as an amendment.
- The chain of amendments cannot be endless, since each was executed on a date and the dates are finite and countable backwards from today.
- So the chain terminates in a document that is not an amendment to anything.
Therefore An original deed existed, and this has been shown without any evidence about the deed itself and without a single premise the other side rejects.
This is the kalām argument's shape exactly: a chain of caused things cannot regress without end, so it terminates in something uncaused. The theologians applied it to the world; here it applies to a filing cabinet, and the logic is identical.
What it is good for
Arguing with someone who shares almost none of your commitments. It is the most disciplined available method for finding the narrow ground two parties actually share and building on it.
Where it fails
The premises are less neutral than they look. That an actual infinite cannot exist, and that what begins must have a cause, are substantial metaphysical claims that opponents did contest — and once they are contested the argument has to defend them, at which point the common ground has gone.
Its sharpest critic was internal. Al-Ghazālī, who used the method, argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers that reason applied to these questions produces contradictions rather than results, and the tradition never fully recovered from being attacked by one of its own masters.
And the conclusion is always thinner than the doctrine. An argument from origination reaches a first cause; getting from there to any particular revealed doctrine requires everything the method was designed to avoid relying on.
Common misconceptions
That it is faith seeking justification after the fact. The Muʿtazilites held that reason has authority independent of revelation and were prepared to follow it against received readings — which is why they were eventually suppressed.
Where it came from
Muʿtazilite theologians in eighth-century Basra and Baghdad, developed by the Ashʿarī school from the tenth century into the classical form.
What became of it
Attacked from two sides — by Ibn Rushd for not being philosophical enough and by traditionists for being philosophical at all — and still taught in Islamic scholarship.
Lasting influence
The kalām cosmological argument entered Christian scholasticism through translation and was revived in the late twentieth century in analytic philosophy of religion, where it remains actively debated.
Why it still matters
Alive in Islamic theology and in analytic philosophy of religion.
Put another way
Meeting on the only patch of ground both of you will stand on.
Texts
Al-Ghazālī, The Incoherence of the Philosophers
By a master of the method, arguing against what reason can establish in this domain. The most interesting text in the tradition is the one attacking it.
Where to start
Read a summary of the argument from origination, then Ibn Rushd's reply to Al-Ghazālī. The exchange is the tradition at its best.
The surprising bit
An argument developed in ninth-century Basra is the subject of live technical dispute in twenty-first-century analytic philosophy journals, under the name its medieval opponents gave it.
In their own words
Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning
Who held it
the Muʿtazila
Connections
- Relies on
- The infinite regress, Reductio ad absurdum
- Parallel to
- The infinite regress
The verdict
The right discipline for arguing across a real disagreement, and it reaches a conclusion much thinner than the doctrine it set out to defend.