ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad b. Aḥmad Ibn Rushd (d. 595/1198), the purest representative of the Aristotelian branch of the falsafa tradition, whose thought represents the fullest synthesis of philosophy, law, and theology in Islamic Spain. Deeply committed to both reason and revelation, Ibn Rushd sees no contradiction between them, regarding philosophy as the study of beings that reveals God's wisdom and, thus, as a religious duty. He privileges demonstrative reasoning as the highest form of knowledge and insists that revelation itself commands rational enquiry. His rationalism grounds an objective ethics that rejects divine voluntarism, holding that good and evil are intrinsic to things and that divine law mirrors, rather than defines, moral truth. Against Ashʿarī occasionalism and Avicennan emanationism alike, Ibn Rushd maintains the necessity and regularity of natural causes, conceiving of God as the unmoved mover who brings pre-existing matter into actuality and sustains it through purpose rather than intervention. The natural order is teleological, rational, and unbroken, leaving no place for ontological chance or for miracles understood as disruptions of causality. Miracles, for Ibn Rushd, are ethical and pedagogical principles that guide virtue, with the Qurʾān as the supreme and enduring miracle whose law ensures human happiness. His hermeneutics reserves allegorical interpretation for the philosophical elite while urging the public to accept scripture's apparent meanings, which promote piety and harmony. Human beings occupy a special place in creation as rational beings whose intellect links them to the universal intellect, granting them limited freedom within a divinely determined order. Ibn Rushd's science is Aristotelian and empirically grounded, affirming the stability of nature's laws and advocating the study of causes as the path to knowing God. Though not a metaphysical naturalist, his outlook embodies a form of pragmatic methodological naturalism, presenting a unified vision in which philosophy, religion, and science express a single rational order grounded in divine wisdom.
