by Bazila Bilal
A close reading of the Akhtar–Nadwi exchange shows how incompatible epistemologies, shifting registers, and linguistic gaps caused a philosophically rich debate to collapse without resolution.
In the opening arguments of the December 2025 exchange between Javed Akhtar and Mufti Shamail Nadwi, one witnessed a rare departure from the predictable scripts of public debate. The most striking element was the sharpness of the framing and the identity of the speaker.
Nadwi, a religious figure, explicitly barred several traditional modes of proof, including empirical evidence, and most notably ruled out religious scripture as an acceptable term of engagement. This was a highly unusual move for a cleric in such a public forum. Even more striking was his declaration that if Akhtar could offer a reasonable argument supported by definitive logical evidence, Nadwi would openly announce that he “accepts it” and would “think over it.”
As a philosophy student who has studied formal logic as part of my coursework, what drew me to the Akhtar–Nadwi exchange was not doctrinal allegiance but the opportunity to witness logic applied beyond the classroom. We engage deeply with logical systems in theory, but rarely see them enacted with such stakes in public discourse. I approached the encounter expecting a structured argument governed by internal consistency. Within this architecture, Nadwi presented a version of the Avicennian contingency argument, an ontological claim distinguishing between contingent beings (mumkin al-wujūd) and a Necessary Being (wājib al-wujūd) as the ground of existence.
Central to his position was a formal exclusive disjunction: one must either accept an infinite regress of causes or concede to a Necessary Being as the final terminus of explanation. Within the tradition of classical metaphysics, infinite regress is not treated as a neutral alternative but as a failure of explanation, since it endlessly defers the reason for existence without ever satisfying the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
To shield this framework from empirical counter-arguments, Nadwi deployed his metal-detector analogy to pre-empt a category error by invoking the Law of Non-Contradiction. He argued that one cannot logically demand empirical evidence in a domain where such evidence is categorically inapplicable. By doing so, he asserted that an argument supported only by laws of logic rather than empirical data would be the only acceptable term of engagement. Whether one accepts his premises or not, this was a deliberate attempt to define the epistemological boundaries of the debate and to force it to remain within a metaphysical register where his dilemma appeared absolute.
While much of the public focused on the clash between theism and atheism, from the standpoint of logic, what unfolded was a slow, exhausting, and gradual demise of the debate. The most significant failure was linguistic and pragmatic rather than ideological. Nadwi operated within the rigour of logic, but his technical precision, when addressed to an interlocutor unaccustomed to philosophical vocabulary, was often mistaken for obfuscation.
Conversely, Akhtar’s arguments, though philosophically relevant and ethically significant, lacked the formal structure and translatable logical language required to directly engage the claim being made. Consequently, his arguments repeatedly lapsed into rhetoric and informal reasoning, eroding the logical continuity of the exchange and reducing the debate to an unsettling spectacle, with excessive time devoted to terminological clarification at the expense of sustained argumentative engagement.
Akhtar’s rebuttals were often directed at a position that was not actually being defended. An ontological claim concerning the existence of a Necessary Being was repeatedly met with moral critiques concerning divine justice. This produced a series of non sequiturs, in which conclusions about non-existence were drawn from premises addressing moral conditions rather than metaphysical necessity.
Akhtar’s reasoning frequently followed the following pattern:
If a Necessary Being (God) exists, then we would observe a particular moral order.
We do not observe this moral order.
Therefore, a Necessary Being does not exist.
While this was not presented as a formal syllogism, it closely resembles the fallacy of denying the consequent. Even if one accepts the conditional premise, the conclusion does not logically follow. At most, such reasoning challenges a specific moral or interventionist conception of God. It does not negate the ontological claim being advanced, leaving Nadwi’s contingency argument formally untouched.
The debate’s structural coherence collapsed precisely at the very moment Javed invoked human suffering and the problem of evil, arguably the exchange’s most rhetorically forceful and philosophically substantive concern. The argument, though rooted in classical debates within the philosophy of religion, still failed to directly refute the contingency argument, which establishes only the existence of a Necessary Being, not a morally perfect or interventionist one. Moreover, when examples of suffering are presented primarily to provoke moral outrage, the argument risks slipping into an appeal to emotion, substituting affect for analysis.
This does not invalidate the concern, but it weakens its philosophical precision. At this juncture, Nadwi himself abandoned the ontological register he had so carefully established. By describing life as a “divine test,” and later appealing to the Islamic concept of recompense, he shifted the debate from metaphysics to theology.
Another one of Akhtar’s principal rebuttals at this stage focused on religion as a source of violence, hate crimes, and moral corruption, likening its spread to an intoxicant such as alcohol. While rhetorically powerful, these objections again did not directly address the contingency argument itself. They spoke to the social consequences of religion and to particular conceptions of God, not to the ontological question of whether a Necessary Being exists.
In effect, the debate shifted from the existence of God to the character and historical impact of religious belief. This move was analytically disastrous. In response, Nadwi, by appealing to a specific religious conception of an “all-wise” God, again rendered his earlier logical framework irrelevant and forfeited the philosophical neutrality he had insisted upon. The appeal to recompense further weakened his position by introducing theological commitments that the contingency argument does not require.
The discussion thus drifted, creating the impression of refutation without the original argument ever being met on its own terms. The speakers increasingly spoke past one another, culminating in what can best be described as a meta-debate failure. They were not offering opposing answers to the same question but addressing fundamentally different questions altogether. Akhtar’s concerns were empirical, humanistic, and ethically grounded. They were relevant and potentially powerful, but remained untranslatable into the metaphysical vocabulary required to directly counter Nadwi’s claim.
The standoff over the burden of proof further exposed the absence of shared epistemic standards and criteria of relevance. Akhtar’s insistence that he bore no obligation to disprove God unless its existence was proven to him gestured towards an appeal to ignorance. At the same time, Nadwi’s counter-accusation of burden-shifting led the discussion into a deadlock.
Ultimately, neither side decisively prevailed, not as a result of lack of intelligence or seriousness, but because their arguments appealed to incompatible epistemological foundations. Without a shared language and explicitly negotiated standards of argumentation, even well-constructed arguments cannot meet.
What could have been a disciplined ontological inquiry dissolved into parallel monologues, each coherent within its own register but incompatible with the other. The exchange remains instructive precisely because it yields no resolution. Its value lies in the clarity with which it reveals how readily public discourse disintegrates when language, framing, scope, and categorical boundaries are left unchecked.
(The author, a Srinagar-based freelance Journalist, is a student of Philosophy and English Literature. Ideas are personal.)
