The moral argument in Islam

The moral argument has an unusual structure in Islam because the tradition never reached internal consensus on metaethics. The Mu'tazila, the rationalist theological school of the eighth through tenth centuries, held that right and wrong are objective features of actions that human reason can discover; God commands the good because it is good. The Ash'ari school, which displaced them as orthodox in Sunni Islam, held that actions are good or bad because God commands or prohibits them — pure divine command theory. Both positions can be turned into moral arguments for God, but they yield very different arguments.

The Ash'ari line is simple: if there is no God, there is no ground for moral obligation at all, since moral facts just are God's commands. On the Mu'tazilite line, the argument is closer to the Christian Kantian strain — moral facts are real, but require a certain kind of rational, purposive universe to make sense, which is best explained by a rational creator. Both strands survive in modern Muslim thought: Ash'ari voluntarism in most traditional Sunni theology, Mu'tazilite-inflected reasoning in reformist thinkers like Abdolkarim Soroush or Ziauddin Sardar.

Modern Muslim apologetics, particularly in English, tends to adopt Christian-style framing without fully resolving the underlying metaethics. Hamza Tzortzis's argument draws on Craig's formulation almost verbatim. Critics — secular and Muslim — point out that divine command theory raises the Euthyphro dilemma in the Islamic tradition just as in the Christian one, and that the Qur'an itself contains passages (such as the Abraham-Isaac sacrifice, 37:100–107) that sit uneasily with the claim that God's commands track an independently knowable good.