Abstract

Although we intuitively feel that we have the freedom to choose what we want to do and what we do not, in the philosophical explanation of various events and realities there is a recurring suspicion that we are not really as free as we think. God's omniscience and His absolute power are established facts which some Muslims have failed to reconcile with the aforementioned sense of free will. On the opposite side of the spectrum there have been Muslim thinkers who, for the sake of preserving man's freedom and of the survival of man's responsibility, have advocated the idea that man's voluntary actions are exempt from God's absolute attributes. The Islamic philosophers and the representatives of doctrinal gnosis in Islam reject both of the preceding opinions and express a moderate view according to which the divine attributes do not impinge on man's free will. In the opinion of Islamic philosophers, man's sense of free will is equal to immediate understanding of one's own truth and therefore cannot be wrong. In order to establish this conviction demonstratively, Mulla Sadra Shirazi presented the ontological position of a copulative being that signifies a state of complete dependence on the independent source of being, which is God. According to Mulla Sadra, people and all other God's creatures are completely dependent on the divine being in the sense that without the being provided to them by God they do not possess independently even their own essence. On the basis of this complete ontological dependence, free will as God's gift to man can also be, genuinely, attributed to man. In fact, the freedom of man's will is just as real and genuine as man's being itself, which is also given to him by God.