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postgraduate student in Islamic philosophy and theology
Abstract
The problem of creation or eternity of the world has been the origin of many controversies among Islamic philosophers and theologians. Early Muslim philosophers maintained the eternity of world, which was opposed by theologians who held it to be created in time. In explaining the view of temporal creation some of theologians assumed a concept of time devoid of any properties of real time which was called by them as “imaginary time”. In abstracting this concept of time they mainly rely on divine subsistence and continuance of his existence. Opponents, on the other hands, have taken the divine subsistence to be supra-temporality i.e. beyond any time so that it is impossible to abstract an entity in flux by nature from an essentially self-Subsistent Essence. Using rational-analytic method, the present article is to examine the arguments for and against imaginary time which if proved will have a lot of significance in discussing motion, creation and eternity.
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