Role of Causality in the Interaction of Reason and Religion, in the Philosophy of Ibn Sina and Malebranche

Using a descriptive-analytical method, this study seeks to find the interaction between wisdom and religion based on the causality proven in the philosophy of Ibn Sina and Malebranche. These two philosophers, with a God-oriented view, sought for presenting a causality under which a divinity compatible with religion has been proven, illustrating a rational picture of the world that is compatible with religious principles. At the apex of Ibn Sina’s world, it is God who is the cause of the causes, and at the length, there are the second causes that play roles in a chain of causes and effects. Malebranche reduced the causal relations to a kind of sequence of phenomena. Occasionalism is a unipolar causality, on one side of which, there exists the omnipotent God as the real cause, and on the other side, there is an inanimate and ineffective matter. Malebranche attributed all the effects and impressions of the world to God. Malebranche’s God-oriented perspective and his direct attribution of man’s volitional action to God made him oriented toward determinism, opening the way for extreme empiricists such as Hume. Conversely, under the proof of abstracts, active intellect, and the Ten Intellects (longitudinal order), Ibn Sina recognized the free will of man and considered man’s will to be effective.