Jon McGinnis 3 S The Ultimate Why Question Avicenna on Why God Is Absolutely Necessary

The question “Why is there anything at all rather than absolutely nothing?” was not a question medieval Arabic-speaking philosophers were prone to raise, at least not in this exact wording. Instead, they were more concerned with the related question, “Why is there a world rather than no world at all?” or more exactly, “Why does the world have the particular features that it has?” Certainly in the classical and medieval periods the standard answer to this latter question was simply, in one form or another, ‘God.’ Plato invoked the need for a demiurge to explain the orderly existence of our world; Aristotle argued that there must be an unmoved mover to explain the manifest motion in the world; and Neoplatonists later appealed to the One to explain the unified existence of the world. What is common to all of these thinkers is that they began with what might be called a ‘physical fact’, that is to say, some particular feature about the way the world actually is, whether it be its order, motion, unification or the like, and then they invoked God as the required cause of these physical facts. Since all these proofs for the existence of God begin with what I am calling a ‘physical fact’ about the world, one might call them ‘physical’ arguments for the existence of God. The medieval Arabic philosopher Ibn Sīnā (980–1037), the Latin Avicenna, found the use of ‘physical’ arguments to prove the existence of God wanting and complained that what was needed was a ‘metaphysical’ proof for the existence of God.1 I understand his complaint to be that