Conclusions

Fakhr al-Din al-Razi’s philosophical books argue for a God who acts out of pure necessity and whose creative activity goes on forever, creating a pre-eternal world. His books of kalam, however, argue for a freely choosing creator who creates a world that began at one point in time. The Conclusions explain this contradiction by suggesting that for al-Razi the rational evidence for both understandings of God was equally strong and one could not trump the other. While he never wrote a text where the arguments for both sides are compared, he wrote different kinds of books that argue forcefully for the one position or the other. Unlike al-Ghazali, al-Razi acknowledged that a pre-eternal world is possible and that Avicenna had strong arguments in favor of it. Triggered by 12th century developments on the method of philosophy and the genre of philosophical texts, al-Razi developed a new type of philosophical summa of which his Eastern Investigations (al-Mabahith al-mashriqiyya) and his Compendium on Philosophy and Logic (al-Mulakhkhas fi l-hikma wa-l-mantiq) are the prime examples.