The Undeniability of the Essence of the Necessary Existent

The qualification “besides God” means other than the God whose existence is accepted. “Besides” (dūn) in this verse means “other than,” therefore, the meaning of the verse under discussion is not that God addressed Jesus asking whether he told them to deny God and take him and his mother as gods, because the essence of God is not subject to any denial, and if there is disagreement and denial, it concerns the attributes of God, not His essence. For this reason, the Qur’an in most cases takes the existence of God as given and does not bring any proof for establishing the principle of the essence of the Necessary Existent, and if there is any argument, it is for unity (tawḥīd) and other attributes.

Our teacher, ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī, says that materialists (dahriyyūn) and materialists who do not consider God to be the maker of the world also say that the natural order provides for the system of the world. On this basis, their god becomes nature itself, because when they are asked whether it is possible for time (dahr) to perish and whether nature is subject to decay, they answer “never.” Thus nature is their Necessary Existent (wājib al-wujūd); but they differ regarding its unity and multiplicity, knowledge and life, consciousness and perception, hearing and sight.(296)

On this basis, he says that if there is disagreement between the monotheist (muwaḥḥid) and the atheist (mulḥid), it is regarding the attributes of God; but God, meaning the imperishable existent, is accepted by the materialist, naturalist, and polytheist as well.

This statement is apparently incomplete, because the materialist (dahrī) does not accept a specific real existent like time, which is a connected individual existent, but rather says that it is time (dahr) that appears in a different form every day and every moment. All these scattered forms are individually limited, and the totality has no separate existence; their unifying principle (jāmiʿ) is in the mind, and that mental existent is not God; if there is no mind either, that mental unifying principle will not exist either. The point is that time (dahr) is a collection of scattered things; not a gradual connected unity like time whose gradation is accompanied by concrete existence (ʿayniyya).