Avicenna: The Leading Sage
In terms of Avicenna&#x27;s mentioned contingency argument for proof God, one way I think of it is a football analogy. You can’t have a series of backward passes into infinite, which is impossible. There has to be a first cause that doesn’t have a cause.<p>Also good is one of Avicenna’s biggest critics, Al-Ghazali. His view on occasionalism makes it easy to believe in miracles and is sunni orthodoxy in creed. Basically if you believe that God is the creator of causes, effects, and their relationship which is being upheld in every instance, then a suspense of such a relationship is possible. Al-Ghazali, unlike Avicenna, is also considered a heavy weight in sufism. For example, one critique I heard a while back from Neil deGrasse Tyson on Al-Ghazali was that his writings is basically what caused the end of the Islamic Golden age, because the focus became on more on spirituality than intellectual pursuits afterwards. There could be some truth in that. I got my first B in university when I started reading Rumi. This was probably just laziness and not some spiritual opening.<p>Also popular is Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. He said something a long the lines that if you hid behind a wall and threw a pebble in front of a baby, even a baby will turn around and see where the pebble came from. There’s a popular story that he was walking on the streets with a large entourage and some old lady asked “who is that guy?” and someone responded “Don’t you know! This is Fakhr al-Din al-Razi! He has 70 proofs of God’s existence!” To which the old lady laughed and responded “If he did not have seventy doubts for the existence of God he would not need seventy proofs!” Upon hearing this al-Razi said everyone should be like the old lady.<p>If you’re interested in islamic theology, Dr. Umar Faruq And-Allah is good. You can find lecture series for his courses on YouTube. This is also a good series by him (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qadriyya.org&#x2F;lessons&#x2F;aqeedah&#x2F;dr-umar-faruq-abd-allah-video" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qadriyya.org&#x2F;lessons&#x2F;aqeedah&#x2F;dr-umar-faruq-abd-allah-...</a>). It’s a bit advanced as he’s giving the class to a muslim audience. Also good is TJ Winters&#x2F;Abdal Hakim Murad at Cambridge. I found them both to be honest to the tradition and intellectually honest. For Quran translations, I was told Abdel-Haleem’s is the clearest.