Is the Distinction between Revealed and Natural Theology Applicable to Ibn Rushd’s Islamic Theism? Aristotelian Deistic Theism in Ibn Rushd

In this article, I examine whether the distinction between revealed theology and natural theology applies to Ibn Rushd’s (Averroes’s) conception of Islamic theism. My analysis proceeds in two stages: (i) a structural-historical account of Ibn Rushd’s Aristotelian theory of religion; and (ii) its broader philosophical implications, especially how suspending that distinction yields a deistic form of theism. Whereas Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between revealed and natural theology, Ibn Rushd rejects a strict bifurcation and articulates a unified epistemological vision (the no-bifurcation thesis). Within this vision, Aristotelian demonstrative truths occupy a higher ‘religious’ status, while literal/apparent beliefs have a lower status (the priority thesis). Unlike in Aquinas, natural theology is not the preserve of a philosophical elite: it is also open to ordinary people, whose faith counts as knowledge (ʿilm) – hence a natural theology of common sense. In Part II, I turn to Ibn Rushd’s Aristotelian deistic Islamic theism, where the ‘religion peculiar to philosophers’ is understood as Aristotelian metaphysics, that is, natural theology in its narrow sense. On the identity thesis, Ibn Rushd makes Aristotelian metaphysics the knowledge peculiar to God and thus the philosopher’s highest religion, grounding revelation and regulating literal religion.