Hi professor, and thank you so much for joining us. As a practicing Jew, I would like to ask several questions from a rather different angle. One of the most striking similarities between Judaism and Islam is that both have created an encompassing and complex legal and social code: the Jewish halakha and the Muslim fiqh. Do the competing schools of fiqh see themselves as the law, such as a Talmudist would vis a vis a Karaite; or do they see themselves as merely bearers of an alternate tradition, with their rival schools of thought being equally legitimate against the general Quranic revelation, like the Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews? 

Hi, Etzelnik.  I'm pleased to know there are also Jews on this board.

Etzelnik wrote:

Hi professor, and thank you so much for joining us. As a practicing Jew, I would like to ask several questions from a rather different angle. One of the most striking similarities between Judaism and Islam is that both have created an encompassing and complex legal and social code: the Jewish halakha and the Muslim fiqh. Do the competing schools of fiqh see themselves as the law, such as a Talmudist would vis a vis a Karaite; or do they see themselves as merely bearers of an alternate tradition, with their rival schools of thought being equally legitimate against the general Quranic revelation, like the Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews? 

It's much more the second thing you mentioned.  The four Sunni schools of fiqh differ one from another on the proper approach to deriving law from the sources, more a difference of legal philosophy than competing traditions.  All are valid.  Different schools of fiqh tend to predominate in different regions due to fairly contingent circumstances.  For example, the Hanafi school was carried by the Ottomans all the way from Seljuk origins in Central Asia to Asia Minor and then to lands they subsequently dominated, and so there is a lot of Hanafi fiqh  for example in northern Egypt, near the capitol, Cairo.  But Ottoman penetration into southern and eastern (Bedouin controlled) Egypt was relatively weak, so one sees Shafi'i fiqh in the east and Maliki in the south.  For example, my wife is Cairene, and we were married according to Hanafi principles, but I tend to follow Imam al-Shafi'i.  No one thinks this is odd in the least.

Sometimes people will consult with opinions of more than one school, then take the easiest of the opinions they find.  And no one thinks this as cheating, since religion is not supposed to be a burden, but rather easy and inviting.

O.K., here is the discussion I mentioned (the quotations are translations by me, drawn from Chatton's Reportatio distinction 39):

Chatton's critique of Scotus is, I think, difficult to answer:
 
(a) "If God only cognized future contingent things through their cause [viz., through his own will], it would follow that he did not cognize them with the greatest possible degree of evidence, because a thing is known more evidently if known through its cause and itself than if known only through its cause."
 
(b) "Secondly, the will of God is not the total determinate cause with respect to future contingents, because some such future object depends on the determination of my own will as well, otherwise, my act would not issue from my own will, nor could it be imputed to me.  Hence, God does not know such a future contingent act solely through the determination of his own will."
 
(c) "Similarly, God's cognition is infinite in its own right (ex se est infinita), and therefore [in general] all God's cognitions of any of his own acts of will are likewise infinite in their own right."  [Perhaps the absurd implication for Scotus's view is that while God's cognition of his own acts of will is infinite, his cognition of the creation is finite, because the creation is finite, so it makes no sense to say that he knows the finite creation by looking at his infinite will.]
 
(d) "Similarly, if God's cognition of future contingents is only cognition of the determination of his own will, then he has no [direct] cognition."
 
Problem (b) is very tough for Scotus.  If God can know everything about what I'm going to do simply by knowing his own will, which is the cause of everything, then what role is there in my free actions for my free will?  None, it seems.  But if my actions are not in any interesting sense fundamentally caused by me, why should I be punished for them?

Problems (a), (c), and (d) are distinct problems but they come down to the same thing.  You can't know a thing in the fullest sense if you only know its cause.  According to Scotus, God can't know us directly or his perfect knowledge implies we can't be free.  But if God therefore only knows his own will, which is the cause of us, then it seems he doesn't know 'we the creation' directly at all, and is not really omniscient.  Scotus's God doesn't really know the creation at all.

Now, Chatton sometimes talks as if he is defending Scotus in distinction 39, but he really isn't.  Although he fusses a bit that Scotus has been misunderstood, his own solution to the problem of future contingents isn't compatible with Scotus's either.  That solution is quite radical, and draws strongly upon Auriol (and, I suspect, Campsall).  I have a short discussion of it here.