Purva Mimamsa's Case Against a Creator God

Among the six classical schools of Hindu philosophy, Purva Mimamsa is unusual for arguing its case without a creator god at all. Jaimini's Mimamsa Sutra grounds the authority of Vedic ritual injunction not in the will of a divine author but in the Veda's own nature: the text is apaurusheya, authorless, eternally existent rather than composed by any being, human or divine, and its authority is therefore self validating rather than borrowed from a speaker whose reliability would need separate proof. Later Mimamsa philosophers, working out the sutra's implications, went further and argued explicitly against a creator god's existence, holding that the moral and causal order of the universe, why a ritual act performed correctly produces its promised result, needs no governing deity to enforce it, since the connection between an authorless Vedic injunction and its effect is built into the nature of dharma itself rather than administered by anyone. Francis Clooney's study of the Mimamsa Sutra's own argumentative structure traces how thoroughly this move shapes the school's method: because the Veda requires no author to guarantee it, Mimamsa built an entire system of textual interpretation, establishing what a ritual passage means and what obligation it creates, that operates without appeal to authorial intention at any point, divine or human. The result is a system committed to strict orthodox performance of Vedic ritual while remaining, in the technical philosophical sense, without a god.