Begetting & Self-Sufficiency

Begetting & Self-Sufficiency

Article:

In one of his articles[1]

Mr. Jochen Katz has criticized the implication of Yunus 10: 68.

The verse reads as:

They say that God has taken a son – He is absolutely clear of all fault,

He is not in need of any thing. All that lies with the heavens and the earth

is His.

Mr. Katz has preferred the translation of Yusuf Ali, who has translated the

verse as:

They say, “Allah hath begotten a son!” Glory be to Him! He is

Self-Sufficient! His are all things in the heavens and on earth.

Mr. Katz criticism is primarily based on this translation. He writes:

This above verse

1. denies that God has a begotten Son, and
2. explains this by saying that God is self-sufficient; he doesn’t need

   anyone to depend on.

Explaining his objection, Mr. Katz writes:

10:68 tells us the reason God wouldn’t have a begotten Son is because

God is self-sufficient. We are going to use a rule from formal logic to make

another statement about what this verse tells us. The rule is that (A implies

B) is equivalent to (not B implies not A).

IF: It tells us that:

God does not have a begotten Son, for He is self-sufficient.

THEN, according to the Law of Contrapositives, the Qur’an also tells us:

If God HAS a begotten Son, then God is NOT self-sufficient.

Since “not self-sufficient” means the same as “dependent” the

above can be restated as:

If God HAS a begotten Son, God is dependent.

This reasoning is very Qur’anic, as we find it this implication clearly

spelled out for example in Sura 6:101 (see below).

According to C.S. Lewis, “To beget is to become the father of: to create

is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something of

the same kind as yourself. But when you make, you make something of a

different kind from yourself. What God begets is God; just as what man begets

is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man.”

So, what God begets is God; so if God had a begotten Son, it would not mean

he would be dependent on some other entity; it would mean that He would be

dependent on Himself. DEPENDENT ON HIMSELF. That is the very meaning of self-sufficience.

So that verse is obviously self-contradictory and therefore wrong.

What Mr. Katz seems to have missed is that the Qur’an has not just given

one but two arguments for rejecting the idea of God’s begetting a son. The

word

(Subhanahu) – translated by Yusuf Ali as ‘Glory be to Him’ – i.e.

‘He is absolutely clear of all fault’ is the first and the basic argument.

While ‘Self-sufficient’ or what I have translated as ‘not in need of any

thing’ is the second argument. In fact, it would not be incorrect to say that

the second argument is one of the corollaries of the first and the basic

argument.

What the Qur’an has, in fact, stated in this (and all such other verses) is

simply that because is ‘clear of all fault’, therefore He did not beget any

son. This is it!!!

It may surprise many readers to note that the argument of the Qur’an ends

here. However, what the Qur’an has given in just one small word ,

is actually a sufficient argument to negate all the explanations  that may

be presented to answer the question ‘why did God beget a child?’ Those who

have any doubt in this may try giving an explanation and I shall, insha’Allah,

show them how their explanation is adequately answered by just this one word.

As far as the ‘Self-sufficiency’ or ‘not in need of anything’

argument is concerned, it simply means that because God is not in need of

anything, why would He need a ‘son’?

© Copyright March 2001. All Rights Reserved

with the Author