The Problematic Passage inGuide for the Perplexed2:24

Abstract

The passage that concerns us appears at the culmination of a series of carefully reasoned arguments. Part 2 of the Guide for the Perplexed opens with Maimonides undertaking to demonstrate the existence of God. In order to keep the question of the eternity or creation of the world open, he proceeds on parallel tracks.1 On the hypothesis of the eternity of the world, he offers four philosophic demonstrations for the existence of a first cause of the universe, and on the hypothesis of its having come into existence after not existing, he reasons that its coming into existence entails an agent that brought it into existence. A full demonstration of the existence of God requires that the cause of the universe be shown to be one and incorporeal, and Maimonides establishes the unity and incorporeality of the first cause on both tracks. Of the four demonstrations constructed on the hypothesis of eternity, he marks the one that argues from the motion of the heavens