The intended meaning
Shahrur maintains that human knowledge is not absolute; rather, it is relative and gradually develops over time. This relativity is set against God’s encompassing and absolute knowledge, while the human being moves in understanding from contingency to necessity.
The atom’s structure in the atlas
- Type of argument: methodological
- Argument movement: Treating human knowledge as relative and cumulative over time.
- Central terms: human knowledge, relative, developing, God’s knowledge.
- Degree of centrality: primary.
It establishes a reading criterion that prevents claims of absoluteness in human understanding and makes knowledge a historical process open to increase, while preserving complete comprehensiveness for God alone.
Links that help with reading
- Muhammad Shahrur the Book and the Qur’an
- the methodology of contemporary reading
- Human knowledge is relative and progresses from sense perception to mathematics
Support
- Supporting text: «It affirms that human knowledge is relative and developing, whereas God’s knowledge is encompassing and absolute, and that human beings move cognitively from contingency to necessity».
Place of support in the book
- Book: the Book and the Qur’an.
- Location: at the beginning of the book
- Type of support: close evidence.
- Mark helpful for verification: relativity
- Reading note: This passage is suitable as support because it explicitly states the relativity of human knowledge and examines its kinds and development.
Degree of documentation
- Level: directly documented
- Meaning of the level: the atom relies on an explicit witness close to the wording of the claim.
- Limits of reading: the wording above is an analytical summary and should not be treated as a verbatim quotation unless the witness is quoted textually.
Its function in the book
Its function here is declarative; it establishes a conclusion on which what follows in the argument depends.
Related to
Editorial note
The atom is central because it governs the entire horizon of interpretation.