Abstract

The relationship between the God’s Essence and His Attributes comprises the first and the most fundamental theological debates in the world of Islam, which is a point of conflict amongst the Muslim thinkers. Some have taken an excessive standpoint and believe in humanlike attributes for the High Necessary Being, which returns to the idea of corporality of God. On the other hand, others have gone to other extreme and have taken an absolutely reductionist view as to deny all existential and affirmative attributes for God. In this regard, the balanced and reasonable viewpoint shared amongst Imamiyyah philosophers and speculative theologians is the extensional union and conceptual difference of Divine Attributes. However, some of Avicenna’s utterances show conceptual and extensional union. The present paper seeks to criticize and analyze the theory of conceptual and extensional union of attributes of High Necessary Being, that is, God’s Attributes are identical with His Essence not only in terms of instance and external reality but also is terms of concepts. However, this seems difficult to prove, because no acceptable argument has been provided in this regard and the discourses and their wrong implications are ambiguous. Therefore, this paper attempts to revise this viewpoint and explain the reasons why it has not been accepted by Muslim philosophers.