I wanted to share this Wikipedia rabbit hole, please bare with it if you decide to read it:
“Although a fashioner, the demiurge is not necessarily the same as the creator figure in the monotheistic sense, because the demiurge itself and the material from which the demiurge fashions the universe are both considered consequences of something else. Depending on the system, they may be considered either uncreated and eternal or the product of some other entity.”
God commands it because it is right: “The Mu’tazilah school of Islamic theology also defended the view (with, for example, Nazzam maintaining that God is powerless to engage in injustice or lying),[4] as did the Islamic philosopher Averroes.” (edited)
Criticisms: “Omnipotence: These moral standards would limit God’s power: not even God could oppose them by commanding what is evil and thereby making it good. This point was influential in Islamic theology: “In relation to God, objective values appeared as a limiting factor to His power to do as He wills… Ash’ari got rid of the whole problem by denying the existence of objective values which might act as a standard for God’s action.”” (edited)
Islam’s Ash’arite theologians, al-Ghazali foremost among them, embraced voluntarism: scholar George Hourani writes that the view “was probably more prominent and widespread in Islam than in any other civilization.”
Philo’s deployment of allegory to harmonize Jewish scripture, mainly the Torah, with Greek philosophy was the first documented of its kind, and thereby often misunderstood.
Philo affirms a transcendent God without physical features or emotional qualities resembling those of human beings. In Philo, God exists beyond time and space and does not make special interventions into the world because he already encompasses the entire cosmos.
Philo’s notion is even more abstract than that of the monad of Pythagoras or the Good of Plato. Only God’s existence is certain, no appropriate predicates can be conceived.[29] Following Plato, Philo equates matter to nothingness and sees its effect in fallacy, discord, damage, and decay of things.[30] This view enables Philo to combine the Jewish belief in creation with the Greek conviction about the formation of all things from the permanent matter.
Philo wrote that God created and governed the world through mediators. Logos is the chief among them, the next to God, demiurge of the world. Logos is immaterial, an adequate image of God, his shadow, his firstborn son.[32] Being the mind of the Eternal, Logos is imperishable.[33] He is neither uncreated as God is, nor created as men are, but occupies a middle position. He has no autonomous power, only an entrusted one.[34]
Philo probably was the first philosopher who identified Plato’s Ideas with Creator’s thoughts. These thoughts make the contents of Logos; they were the seals for making sensual things during world creation.[35] Logos resembles a book with creature paradigms.[36] An Architect’s design before the construction of a city serves to Philo as another simile of Logos.[37] Since creation, Logos binds things together.[38] As the receptacle and holder of ideas, Logos is distinct from the material world. At the same time, Logos pervades the world, supporting it.[39]
Logos has the function of an advocate on behalf of humanity and also that of a God’s envoy to the world.[40] He puts human minds in order.[41] The right reason is an infallible law, the source of any other laws.[42] The angel closing Balaam’s way (Numbers XXII, 31) is interpreted by Philo as manifestation of Logos, which acts as man’s conscience.[43]
According to pseudo-Dionysius, God is better characterized and approached by negations than by affirmations.[4] All names and theological representations must be negated. According to pseudo-Dionysius, when all names are negated, “divine silence, darkness, and unknowing” will follow.
Theologians such as John of Damascus and Germanus I of Constantinople also made ample use of Dionysius’ writing.
He then became a priest and monk at the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem. One source suggests John left Damascus to become a monk around 706, when al-Walid I increased the Islamicisation of the Caliphate’s administration.[28] This is uncertain, as Muslim sources only mention that his father Sarjun (Sergius) left the administration around this time, and fail to name John at all.[20] During the next two decades, culminating in the Siege of Constantinople (717-718), the Umayyad Caliphate progressively occupied the borderlands of the Byzantine Empire. An editor of John’s works, Father Le Quien, has shown that John was already a monk at Mar Saba before the dispute over iconoclasm, explained below.[29]
From Wikipedia in Arabic
كان الجعد يعيش في حي للنصارى، حيث تأثر هناك بجو الآراء الفلسفية المسيحية التي كانت تثار حول طبيعة الإله. وكان يكثر من التردد إلى وهب بن منبه (أحد كبار التابعين)، وكان كلما راح إلى وهب يغتسل ويقول: «اجمع للعقل»، وكان يسأل وهباً عن صفات الله عز وجل، وكان وهب ينهاه عن ذلك. وقد أُعجب محمد بن مروان به وبعقليته فاختاره ليكون معلماً لابنه مروان بن محمد آخر خلفاء بني أمية.
“Al-Ja’d lived in a Christian monastery, and it was there that he was affected by Christian philosophical thought, revolving around the nature of God.”
“John worked as a high financial officer to the Muslim Caliph Abd al-Malik”
Establishing the positive content of Jahm’s doctrines is difficult, as they are reproduced (in an abbreviated form) only in later polemical works that are impossible to verify. However, it is said that he taught that only a few attributes can be predicated to God, such as creation, divine power and action, whilst others such as speech cannot. Therefore, he believed that it was wrong to talk about the eternal word of the Qur’an, since God (according to Jahm) is not a speaker in the first place.
Jahm was a proponent of extreme determinism, according to which a man acts only metaphorically in the same way in which the sun is said to set: according to Jahm, this is a linguistic convention rather than an accurate description, as it is actually God that makes the sun set.
Jahm’s doctrines about God and His attributes were taken up in criticisms of the Mu’tazila, who were sometimes called Jahmites by their adversaries. The Mu’tazila believed that the Qur’ān was created, a tenet which agreed[citation needed] with Jahm’s recorded view.
Jahm left no writings, but many Muslim scholars wrote about his doctrines and a few modern scholars have written studies of him.
A theologian by the name of Uthman bin Sa’id ad-Darimi (d. 280 H) (not to be confused with Al-Darimi the author of the Sunnan) also wrote refutations of Jahm and wrote a large refutation of a prominent Jahmite by the name of Bishr ibn Ghiyāth al-Mārisî wherein he declared him a Kafir (a disbeliever).[18] Like Muqatil, Uthman bin Sa’id himself received criticism and there have been scholars who have criticised him as going to the opposite extreme to Jahm, being a Mujassim (anthropomorphist). In particular the Sunni Hadith scholar and ascetic Al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi (d. ~280 H) wrote a response to him.
Many Hadith scholars wrote refutations of Jahm bin Ṣafwān’s doctrines, particularly the Sunni Hadith scholar Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 241 H) and his students like al-Bukhari (d. 256 H)and Abu Dawud as-Sijistani (d. 275 H).[22] Al-Bukhari adopted the teachings of the traditionalist and scholar of Kalam Ibn Kullab alongside al-Karabisi in matters of creed, who also repudiated the Jahmiyyah. Then later Sunni Kalam theologians continued to criticise him, in particular Abu Hasan al-Ash’ari (d. 324 H) and Abu Mansur al-Maturidi (d. 333 H), and he continued to be mentioned in later Ash’ari and Maturidi heresiology works.
Many of the views of the Jahmites are seen as heretical by Sunnis, and sometimes even resulted in their expulsion from Islamic society in general. Thus, the Jahmites deny all the names and attributes of Allah, faith in which is an important part of the religious doctrine of orthodox Muslims. On the issue of interpreting the concept of “Iman,” the jahmits are similar to the Murjites, and argue that faith is only knowledge of Allah, and unbelief is ignorance about him. They also stated that heaven and hell would disappear sooner or later, which contradicts both the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad.
In the matter of predestination, the Jahmites adhere to the fact that a person does not have free will and is forced into their actions. And on the question of the nature of Allah, the Jahmites are pantheists and say that he is everywhere and lives in all creatures. In addition, they deny the possibility of righteous Muslims seeing Allah in paradise.
The Ashʿarite view holds that:
God is all-powerful, therefore Good is what God commands and Evil is what God forbids.[22] What God does or commands – as revealed in the Quran and hadith – is by definition just. What He prohibits is by definition unjust.[22] Right and wrong are not objective realities.[23]
It is an error to insist–as did the opposing Muʿtazila–that, because God is just He cannot do/command something unjust (such as condemn someone to hell over something beyond their control), as this would limit His power and he is all-powerful. Some divine acts/commands might seem unfair/unjust to human beings, but this only demonstrates human error.[23]
The unique nature and attributes of God cannot be understood fully by human reasoning and the senses.[22]
Reason is God-given and must be employed judge over source of knowledge.[clarification needed][13]
Intellectual inquiry is decreed by the Qur’an and by Muhammad, thus interpretations of the Quran (Tafsir) and the Hadith should keep developing with the aid of older interpretations.[24]
Only God knows the heart and knows who belongs to the faithful and who does not.[25]
God may forgive the sins of those in Hell.[26]
Support of kalam.
Although humans possess free will (or, more accurately, freedom of intention), they have no power to create anything, thus simply decide between God’s given possibilities.[13] This doctrine is now known in Western philosophy as occasionalism. According to the doctrine of kasb (acquisition), any and all human acts, even the raising of a finger, are created by God, but the human being who performs the act is responsible for it, because they have “acquired” the act.[27]
The Quran is the uncreated word of God in essence; however, it is created when it takes on a form in letters or sound.[27]
Knowledge of God comes from studying the holy names and attributes in addition to studying the Quran and the Hadith of Muhammad.[citation needed]
Muslims must believe
in the Five pillars of Islam;[9]
in all the Prophets of Islam from Adam to Muhammad;[9]
and in angels.[9]
Ash’aris also have beliefs about Allah’s attributes that are unique to them such as:[28]
Existence
Permanence without beginning
Endurance without end
Absoluteness and independence
Dissimilarity to created things
Oneness
Allah is all powerful, willful, knowing, living, seeing, hearing and speaking (signifying attributes)
Ibn Taymiyyah criticised Ashari thought as (in the words of one historian, Jonathan A. C. Brown) “a Greek solution to Greek problems” that should “never” have concerned Muslims.[29] Both Shah Wali Allah and Ibn Taymiyyah rejected the lack of literalism in Ashʿari “speculative theology” and advocated “straightforward acceptance of God’s description of Himself”