A Reflection on the Inaccuracy of Attributing “Existence” to God from the Perspective of Mirza Mahdi Esfahani

“Existence” and “being” is the reality of God or one of His essential and ---attributes which its attribution to God is unanimously accepted among Muslim scholars. Yet “Mirza Mahdi Esfahani”, the founder of the school of tafkik (distinction), has rejected this attribution appealing to the special basis of “ordaining words for external realities; the equivocality of God’s attributes and the possible beings”. He has presented some reasons (ambiguity of existence, lack of having a conception for existence, God’s attributes indicates His essence, extracting existence from possible being and its essential poverty) to justify this idea. I have studied his writings to find the reasons and classify them. Analyzing these reasons, I have shown the weakness of his scientific bases and arguments. The most important problem found is that he denies that words are ordained for conceptual meanings and confuses concept and its referent; in other words, it is not possible for a word to imply an external referent without having a concept and a conceptual meaning. In addition, Isfahani’s “existence” has no concept or it is ambiguous, and he has confused the concept of God with its referent.