ender7227 said:
It predates Probot by a long shot. The way I see it, Dave Grohl's contribution was mostly preaching to choir.
For those you wanted to know what Abbath has been up too since Immortal splited
- Thread starter AsModEe
- Start date
It predates Probot by a long shot. The way I see it, Dave Grohl's contribution was mostly preaching to choir.
Carcassian
Utopian Blaster
Dodens Grav said:
The nature of Motorhead is IRREPRESSIBLE.
In the beginning, God made Motorhead. After that, everything sucked ass.
Actually, Abbath covering the 'head is coolsville, Arizona.
I'm really looking forward to "I" though. At the risk of Dodens ire, can anyone recommend me any albums not by Immortal in the vein of "At The Heart of Winter" or "Sons of Northern Darkness" ? Alas, my inherent hatred of 99% of BM means that I haven't been able to stumble across any other BM albums that sound remotely similar.
skeptik
Member
- Feb 7, 2003
- 24,413
- 71
- 48
Al-Ghazali and Averroes on Causality
In the Middle Ages of philosophy, one of the most prevalent disagreements among philosophers and theologians was concerning the idea of causality, and two of the most prominent thinkers on the subject were Al-Ghazali, widely referred to as the critic of philosophy, and Averroes, who defended the Aristotelian ideas that Al-Ghazali attacked. The difference in the conception of actuality and potentiality between the two parties has been in large part responsible for this disagreement. Similar to occasionalist and Ash’arite thought, Al-Ghazali maintained that God is the cause of all things, and his views on causality have caused him to distinguish between logical causality and natural causality, the latter of which he fully rejects; unlike the Ash’arriya, however, Al-Ghazali used philosophical principles and arguments to give more weight to his views within the realm of philosophical thought. Averroes’ views on causality hold that there are necessary causes, that each event has four causes – agent, form, matter, and end – and that to deny the existence of such necessary or efficient causes, in refutation of Al-Ghazali, is to deny the intellect and the demonstrative knowledge of all things. Al-Ghazali’s defense of God as the only essential cause of all things seems to be, at least in part, in order to account for the possibility of God’s intervening in the world through miracles, something that Averroes, because of its essence being of a supernatural origin, says cannot even be discussed within the realm of human knowledge. The best demonstration of the debate between Al-Ghazali and Averroes on the principles of causality and the necessity of the causality of natural agents would be Al-Ghazali’s example of a piece of cotton which, upon being exposed to a fire and assuming that the essences of both are as universally understood, the cotton does not burn.
The Aristotelian conception of actuality and potentiality is that of a continuous process with regard to change, which is much unlike the views on the subject held by Islamic theologians and Al-Ghazali, who holds that “a metaphysics of atoms and accidents [. . .] are continually being re-created by God” ( Leaman 94). Accordingly, the theologians must reject the Aristotelian account of causality, which holds that causation occurs “when an actual being actualizes some potency,” because they could not accept such an action of one thing upon another (94). For the theologians, because atoms do not endure through time, the atoms themselves could not be the actualizers of any potentiality, and accordingly change could only be brought about by God’s re-creating atoms in a new state of being at every moment in time. This discrepancy between theological and philosophical interpretations of actuality and potentiality and their relation to change is the catalyst of a great controversy in Islamic philosophy between Al-Ghazali and Averroes.
Al-Ghazali seems to have borrowed from the school of occasionalism, a view prominent among theologians in order to give God due credibility for being the cause of all things and generally absent among major philosophers. His occasionalist views on the concept of causality conflicted with the Aristotelian principles in the belief of emanation of Al-Farabi and Avicenna, two of Al-Ghazali’s most noteworthy contemporaries. One of Al-Ghazali’s chief “objections to the emanationist scheme was that it was necessitarian and denied God the freedom due to him as creator and as the author of miracles,” because for Al-Ghazali, human free will did not appear to be of major concern (Hasker 1). He also purports the Ash’arite position that natural beings are incapable of being necessitating agents and are, therefore, not in the position to have the ability to constrain the will of God. Unlike the Ash’arites, however, Al-Ghazali uses philosophical argument instead of appeal to faith to express his views. He says that “the relation between what we take to be causes and effects is merely one of correlation and is purely contingent; the one real, productive cause of all things is God” (1). This contingency in the sufficient cause of an effect following from the occurrence of a cause does not at all prove a necessary cause, and thus is traced back to God, the First Cause.
According to Al-Ghazali, using the strong notion of causality purported by his contemporary philosopher peers, namely that “given the existence of a cause, the existence of its effect is necessary,” Al-Ghazali holds that only God is a cause (Adamson 1). God is the only essential cause of all things because he is the creator of all things and has full knowledge of the essence of all things, and therefore only He can necessitate the effect of any given event. Based on a weaker notion of causality, however, he does admit that “a natural cause has a nature which gives rise to certain effects” (1). This does not mean, he says, that such a thing that gives rise to an effect is a necessary cause in the sense that said cause would logically entail that the effect come about. This is because the nature and essence of the cause is derived from God, and therefore it is upon God that it is determined whether or not the nature of the cause will derive the effect, and not from the cause in and of itself. This causal relationship that we can see in nature is not of an essential or necessary quality, but proves “merely a simultaneity, not a causation” (Leaman 97). Al-Ghazali gives an example of how we mistakenly appropriate causality to incidents where the only factor that can be deduced logically is a mere simultaneity:
Suppose that a man blind from birth, whose eyes are veiled by a membrane and who has never heard people talk of the difference between night and day, has the membrane removed from his eyes by day and sees visible things, he will surely think then that the actual perception in his eyes of the forms of visible things is caused by the opening of his eyelids, and that as long as his sight is sound and in function, the hindrance removed and the object in front of him visible, he will, without doubt, be able to see, and he will never think that he will not see, till, at the moment when the sun sets and the air darkens, he will understand that it was the light of the sun which impressed the visible forms on his sight. (Averroes 5)
In this example, Al-Ghazali demonstrates that the blind man, whom has never seen anything in his life, appropriates a causality between “the actual perception in his eyes” and “the opening of his eyelids.” There is no necessary causation between the cause and the effect because, as Al-Ghazali says, “each of two things has its own individuality and is not the other, and neither the affirmation nor the negation, neither the existence nor the non-existence of the one is implied in the affirmation, negation, existence, and non-existence of the other” (4). This is much like the way that the philosophers prescribed the idea of causality to such things merely by observation, and why “the satisfaction of thirst does not imply drinking, nor satiety eating, nor burning contact with fire, nor light sunrise, nor decapitation death” (4).
Averroes, who was born after Al-Ghazali had already died, came from the philosophical, and not theological, approach to the question of necessary causality and natural necessity. Averroes was the chief philosopher of his time reviving the Aristotelian principles that had been prominent in past philosophers such as Avicenna and Al-Farabi, the two that Al-Ghazali had written against in The Incoherence Of The Philosophers. In response the The Incoherence..., Averroes wrote his Incoherence Of The Incoherence, an expansive criticism of Al-Ghazali’s work. One of the most well known discussions in The Incoherence Of The Incoherence is the Seventeenth Discussion, in which Averroes addresses the denial of a logical necessity between cause and effect. This is where he responds to Al-Ghazali’s claim that only God is the necessitating cause and that there is no natural necessity because it can all be traced back to the First, or Essential Cause, that being God. While Averroes’ work would continue to shape the advancement of Western thought, Al-Ghazali effectively marginalized “reflection on metaphysical matters in the Islamic world to the activities of an elite,” namely the philosophers, “whose adherence to Quranic faith would often be suspect” (Burrell 2). This last sentiment is important because one of the goals of Al-Ghazali’s work was to hinder the process of philosophical thought that impedes upon theological principle, and he had successfully done so by causing the philosophers to be questioned in their faith and thus having their ideas discounted as heretical.
The main objective that Averroes seems to want to make clear is that, granted that Al-Ghazali’s argument is true, what follows is the absence of human free will, in addition to an impossibility of true knowing, because to deny cause implies a denial of knowledge, and accordingly implies that nothing can be known, but is merely opinion or a probability. The stronger claim from this sentiment is that Al-Ghazali’s argument, granted its truth, defeats itself in that “his proposition would have no sense” due to his inability to have any knowledge of God, so he would not know that God is the necessary cause of all things. Averroes’ position maintains that “the connection between a concept of a thing and its causal properties is not just accidental, but it is rather a question of meaning. A concept of a thing has as part of its meaning various causal properties, and denying the necessary nature of this relation is to reject the meaning of the term itself” (Leaman 97). Thus, in Al-Ghazali’s example, decapitation would be the necessary cause of the death of the person decapitated because part of the concept of decapitation entails the death of the victim. In other words, decapitation would not be decapitation if the victim did not die, because a necessitating factor in classifying decapitation as such entails that the victim die. Leaman conveys the same idea with a different example: “a pencil with which it is impossible to write because it has no lead might well be denied the name ‘pencil’ given its lack of the causal power generally associated with pencils” (97). In this example, the essential quality of being able to write is tantamount to the object in question being identified with the concept of ‘pencil.’
Possibly Al-Ghazali’s most well known assertion in all of his writings is his suggestion that “there is not logical flaw in one’s reasoning were one to deny that [a piece of cotton subject to fire] must catch fire” (96). He says that:
We regard it as possible that the contact might occur without the burning taking place, and also that the cotton might be changed into ashes without any contact with fire, although the philosophers deny this possibility. The discussion of this matter has three points.
The first is that our opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the fire exclusively; this is a natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain from what is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive substratum. This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God, through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnexion of its parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation. For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? (Averroes 4)
In this excerpt from his work, Al-Ghazali here denies that a piece of cotton will inevitably burn when exposed to flame, given that the essences of each are as universally understood and not altered. This assertion is made from the idea that fire itself, as a “dead body,” is incapable of being an agent of causality, and therefore the creator of that body, God, must be the necessary cause of the fire having the ability to burn. This is in direct contrast to the views held by the philosophers of his time who held the Aristotelian account that “if there is material [cotton] which is capable of burning (its receptive substratum being disposed to burn) and a flame with the purpose and formal essence of bringing about burning, then we are dealing with entirely natural phenomena which must lead us to the conclusion that the cotton will, indeed must, burn” (Leaman 96). This position holds a natural necessity in the fire as a causal agent, an idea that Al-Ghazali denies. He suggests that this Aristotelian position breaks down of its own accord because, according to Aristotle himself, “matter is of itself incapable of movement [and] is passive until energized [. . .], so that the claim that physical objects have essences [that] make necessary certain processes in nature seems to be inconsistent with the philosophical view of the nature of matter” (96). This implies that God, being the “prime mover” that energizes the matter and the fire being the matter in question that is incapable of movement, must move the fire. Because the fire requires movement from an external source, namely God, then it is illogical to believe that the fire must burn cotton because God can choose to energize the fire, and thus burn the cotton, and equally not choose to energize the fire, accordingly not burning the cotton. It is important to note that Al-Ghazali does not challenge the idea that some events in the world bring about others, but merely that these relationships are necessary. He says that “causal relations are only as they are because of God’s organization of events in the world” (96). Thus, while fire may be an intermediary cause of burning a piece of cotton, it is ultimately God that is the cause of the cotton being burned.
Al-Ghazali explains the appearance and impressions of a uniformity in nature by saying that it is simply a tradition arbitrarily maintained by the divine will. Combinations of atoms and accidents give the impression of uniformity inherent in the actual nature of things themselves, though Al-Ghazali makes clear to point out that exceptions and such things as the possibility of miracles are easily conceivable in this scheme. Interestingly, in response to an Avicennan principle, he says that “a benevolent God has no desire to deceive us and so has organized nature in such a way that when he brings about [necessary] conditions [of causal power], but without causal properties in natural things, he creates simultaneously in us indubitable knowledge of the subject” (98). What Al-Ghazali is saying in this statement is that, while we do not have a natural connection between potentials and particulars, there is a supernatural connection through God. His ambition in this subject, however, seems to lie in his desire to account for miracles, as described in the Quran. He says that “there is no denying [the existence of miracles], except through a lack of understanding and unfamiliarity with higher things and oblivion of the secrets of God in the created world and in nature” (100). Despite Al-Ghazali’s persistence in the suggestion of miracles and his vehement attack on his opponents, Averroes appeared hesitant to discuss the issue. He said that “ancient philosophers deliberately omitted to mention miracles, not because they failed to acknowledge their reality but because they recognized that belief in miracles is one of the fundamental principles establishing religious laws” (101). Accordingly, miracles are events of a divine or supernatural nature, and therefore it is not logical to discuss miracles in human thought as if it was of a natural quality. Miracles, just as specifics about God, cannot be known by human comprehension. Though Al-Ghazali stresses that he believes that God cannot do what is not possible, he includes miracles in the range of possibilities, and Averroes, while a bit ambiguous, appears to favor the Aristotelian argument that qualitative change due to miracles may be logically impossible (102).
The history of Islamic thought has been hampered by one debate in particular, namely, the issues pertaining to causality, the major players being Al-Ghazali and Averroes. This debate has at its root a conflict of belief and in interest. Al-Ghazali believes that God is the only necessary cause of all things and that any change is due to his re-creating of the atoms. He also strongly favors the idea of God’s ability to perform miracles in the natural world. Averroes, contrary to Al-Ghazali, supports the idea of natural causality and suggests that if Al-Ghazali’s argument were true, there would be no definitive knowledge of anything. Al-Ghazali does not seem to imply otherwise, as human free will is not a major problem for him. The most obvious example of this clash between two schools of thought is Al-Ghazali’s example of fire’s potentiality to either burn or not burn cotton, contingent on God’s deliberation and not the fire itself because it is a “dead body.”
Works Cited
Adamson, Peter. “Al-Ghazali, Causality, and Knowledge.” University of Notre Dame. 20 Nov. 2002. < http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/gck.htm>.
Averroes. Tahafut Al-Tahafut: E-text Edition. Trans. Simon Van Der Bergh. Ed. Muhammed Hozien. 20 Nov. 2002. < http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ir/tt/default.htm>.
Burrell, David. “Causality and Necessity in Islamic Thought.” Routledge. 21 May 2003. <http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/H005.htm>.
Hasker, William. “Occasionalism.” Routledge. 21 May 2003. <http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/K057.htm>.
Leaman, Oliver. An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
In the Middle Ages of philosophy, one of the most prevalent disagreements among philosophers and theologians was concerning the idea of causality, and two of the most prominent thinkers on the subject were Al-Ghazali, widely referred to as the critic of philosophy, and Averroes, who defended the Aristotelian ideas that Al-Ghazali attacked. The difference in the conception of actuality and potentiality between the two parties has been in large part responsible for this disagreement. Similar to occasionalist and Ash’arite thought, Al-Ghazali maintained that God is the cause of all things, and his views on causality have caused him to distinguish between logical causality and natural causality, the latter of which he fully rejects; unlike the Ash’arriya, however, Al-Ghazali used philosophical principles and arguments to give more weight to his views within the realm of philosophical thought. Averroes’ views on causality hold that there are necessary causes, that each event has four causes – agent, form, matter, and end – and that to deny the existence of such necessary or efficient causes, in refutation of Al-Ghazali, is to deny the intellect and the demonstrative knowledge of all things. Al-Ghazali’s defense of God as the only essential cause of all things seems to be, at least in part, in order to account for the possibility of God’s intervening in the world through miracles, something that Averroes, because of its essence being of a supernatural origin, says cannot even be discussed within the realm of human knowledge. The best demonstration of the debate between Al-Ghazali and Averroes on the principles of causality and the necessity of the causality of natural agents would be Al-Ghazali’s example of a piece of cotton which, upon being exposed to a fire and assuming that the essences of both are as universally understood, the cotton does not burn.
The Aristotelian conception of actuality and potentiality is that of a continuous process with regard to change, which is much unlike the views on the subject held by Islamic theologians and Al-Ghazali, who holds that “a metaphysics of atoms and accidents [. . .] are continually being re-created by God” ( Leaman 94). Accordingly, the theologians must reject the Aristotelian account of causality, which holds that causation occurs “when an actual being actualizes some potency,” because they could not accept such an action of one thing upon another (94). For the theologians, because atoms do not endure through time, the atoms themselves could not be the actualizers of any potentiality, and accordingly change could only be brought about by God’s re-creating atoms in a new state of being at every moment in time. This discrepancy between theological and philosophical interpretations of actuality and potentiality and their relation to change is the catalyst of a great controversy in Islamic philosophy between Al-Ghazali and Averroes.
Al-Ghazali seems to have borrowed from the school of occasionalism, a view prominent among theologians in order to give God due credibility for being the cause of all things and generally absent among major philosophers. His occasionalist views on the concept of causality conflicted with the Aristotelian principles in the belief of emanation of Al-Farabi and Avicenna, two of Al-Ghazali’s most noteworthy contemporaries. One of Al-Ghazali’s chief “objections to the emanationist scheme was that it was necessitarian and denied God the freedom due to him as creator and as the author of miracles,” because for Al-Ghazali, human free will did not appear to be of major concern (Hasker 1). He also purports the Ash’arite position that natural beings are incapable of being necessitating agents and are, therefore, not in the position to have the ability to constrain the will of God. Unlike the Ash’arites, however, Al-Ghazali uses philosophical argument instead of appeal to faith to express his views. He says that “the relation between what we take to be causes and effects is merely one of correlation and is purely contingent; the one real, productive cause of all things is God” (1). This contingency in the sufficient cause of an effect following from the occurrence of a cause does not at all prove a necessary cause, and thus is traced back to God, the First Cause.
According to Al-Ghazali, using the strong notion of causality purported by his contemporary philosopher peers, namely that “given the existence of a cause, the existence of its effect is necessary,” Al-Ghazali holds that only God is a cause (Adamson 1). God is the only essential cause of all things because he is the creator of all things and has full knowledge of the essence of all things, and therefore only He can necessitate the effect of any given event. Based on a weaker notion of causality, however, he does admit that “a natural cause has a nature which gives rise to certain effects” (1). This does not mean, he says, that such a thing that gives rise to an effect is a necessary cause in the sense that said cause would logically entail that the effect come about. This is because the nature and essence of the cause is derived from God, and therefore it is upon God that it is determined whether or not the nature of the cause will derive the effect, and not from the cause in and of itself. This causal relationship that we can see in nature is not of an essential or necessary quality, but proves “merely a simultaneity, not a causation” (Leaman 97). Al-Ghazali gives an example of how we mistakenly appropriate causality to incidents where the only factor that can be deduced logically is a mere simultaneity:
Suppose that a man blind from birth, whose eyes are veiled by a membrane and who has never heard people talk of the difference between night and day, has the membrane removed from his eyes by day and sees visible things, he will surely think then that the actual perception in his eyes of the forms of visible things is caused by the opening of his eyelids, and that as long as his sight is sound and in function, the hindrance removed and the object in front of him visible, he will, without doubt, be able to see, and he will never think that he will not see, till, at the moment when the sun sets and the air darkens, he will understand that it was the light of the sun which impressed the visible forms on his sight. (Averroes 5)
In this example, Al-Ghazali demonstrates that the blind man, whom has never seen anything in his life, appropriates a causality between “the actual perception in his eyes” and “the opening of his eyelids.” There is no necessary causation between the cause and the effect because, as Al-Ghazali says, “each of two things has its own individuality and is not the other, and neither the affirmation nor the negation, neither the existence nor the non-existence of the one is implied in the affirmation, negation, existence, and non-existence of the other” (4). This is much like the way that the philosophers prescribed the idea of causality to such things merely by observation, and why “the satisfaction of thirst does not imply drinking, nor satiety eating, nor burning contact with fire, nor light sunrise, nor decapitation death” (4).
Averroes, who was born after Al-Ghazali had already died, came from the philosophical, and not theological, approach to the question of necessary causality and natural necessity. Averroes was the chief philosopher of his time reviving the Aristotelian principles that had been prominent in past philosophers such as Avicenna and Al-Farabi, the two that Al-Ghazali had written against in The Incoherence Of The Philosophers. In response the The Incoherence..., Averroes wrote his Incoherence Of The Incoherence, an expansive criticism of Al-Ghazali’s work. One of the most well known discussions in The Incoherence Of The Incoherence is the Seventeenth Discussion, in which Averroes addresses the denial of a logical necessity between cause and effect. This is where he responds to Al-Ghazali’s claim that only God is the necessitating cause and that there is no natural necessity because it can all be traced back to the First, or Essential Cause, that being God. While Averroes’ work would continue to shape the advancement of Western thought, Al-Ghazali effectively marginalized “reflection on metaphysical matters in the Islamic world to the activities of an elite,” namely the philosophers, “whose adherence to Quranic faith would often be suspect” (Burrell 2). This last sentiment is important because one of the goals of Al-Ghazali’s work was to hinder the process of philosophical thought that impedes upon theological principle, and he had successfully done so by causing the philosophers to be questioned in their faith and thus having their ideas discounted as heretical.
The main objective that Averroes seems to want to make clear is that, granted that Al-Ghazali’s argument is true, what follows is the absence of human free will, in addition to an impossibility of true knowing, because to deny cause implies a denial of knowledge, and accordingly implies that nothing can be known, but is merely opinion or a probability. The stronger claim from this sentiment is that Al-Ghazali’s argument, granted its truth, defeats itself in that “his proposition would have no sense” due to his inability to have any knowledge of God, so he would not know that God is the necessary cause of all things. Averroes’ position maintains that “the connection between a concept of a thing and its causal properties is not just accidental, but it is rather a question of meaning. A concept of a thing has as part of its meaning various causal properties, and denying the necessary nature of this relation is to reject the meaning of the term itself” (Leaman 97). Thus, in Al-Ghazali’s example, decapitation would be the necessary cause of the death of the person decapitated because part of the concept of decapitation entails the death of the victim. In other words, decapitation would not be decapitation if the victim did not die, because a necessitating factor in classifying decapitation as such entails that the victim die. Leaman conveys the same idea with a different example: “a pencil with which it is impossible to write because it has no lead might well be denied the name ‘pencil’ given its lack of the causal power generally associated with pencils” (97). In this example, the essential quality of being able to write is tantamount to the object in question being identified with the concept of ‘pencil.’
Possibly Al-Ghazali’s most well known assertion in all of his writings is his suggestion that “there is not logical flaw in one’s reasoning were one to deny that [a piece of cotton subject to fire] must catch fire” (96). He says that:
We regard it as possible that the contact might occur without the burning taking place, and also that the cotton might be changed into ashes without any contact with fire, although the philosophers deny this possibility. The discussion of this matter has three points.
The first is that our opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the fire exclusively; this is a natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain from what is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive substratum. This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God, through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnexion of its parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation. For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? (Averroes 4)
In this excerpt from his work, Al-Ghazali here denies that a piece of cotton will inevitably burn when exposed to flame, given that the essences of each are as universally understood and not altered. This assertion is made from the idea that fire itself, as a “dead body,” is incapable of being an agent of causality, and therefore the creator of that body, God, must be the necessary cause of the fire having the ability to burn. This is in direct contrast to the views held by the philosophers of his time who held the Aristotelian account that “if there is material [cotton] which is capable of burning (its receptive substratum being disposed to burn) and a flame with the purpose and formal essence of bringing about burning, then we are dealing with entirely natural phenomena which must lead us to the conclusion that the cotton will, indeed must, burn” (Leaman 96). This position holds a natural necessity in the fire as a causal agent, an idea that Al-Ghazali denies. He suggests that this Aristotelian position breaks down of its own accord because, according to Aristotle himself, “matter is of itself incapable of movement [and] is passive until energized [. . .], so that the claim that physical objects have essences [that] make necessary certain processes in nature seems to be inconsistent with the philosophical view of the nature of matter” (96). This implies that God, being the “prime mover” that energizes the matter and the fire being the matter in question that is incapable of movement, must move the fire. Because the fire requires movement from an external source, namely God, then it is illogical to believe that the fire must burn cotton because God can choose to energize the fire, and thus burn the cotton, and equally not choose to energize the fire, accordingly not burning the cotton. It is important to note that Al-Ghazali does not challenge the idea that some events in the world bring about others, but merely that these relationships are necessary. He says that “causal relations are only as they are because of God’s organization of events in the world” (96). Thus, while fire may be an intermediary cause of burning a piece of cotton, it is ultimately God that is the cause of the cotton being burned.
Al-Ghazali explains the appearance and impressions of a uniformity in nature by saying that it is simply a tradition arbitrarily maintained by the divine will. Combinations of atoms and accidents give the impression of uniformity inherent in the actual nature of things themselves, though Al-Ghazali makes clear to point out that exceptions and such things as the possibility of miracles are easily conceivable in this scheme. Interestingly, in response to an Avicennan principle, he says that “a benevolent God has no desire to deceive us and so has organized nature in such a way that when he brings about [necessary] conditions [of causal power], but without causal properties in natural things, he creates simultaneously in us indubitable knowledge of the subject” (98). What Al-Ghazali is saying in this statement is that, while we do not have a natural connection between potentials and particulars, there is a supernatural connection through God. His ambition in this subject, however, seems to lie in his desire to account for miracles, as described in the Quran. He says that “there is no denying [the existence of miracles], except through a lack of understanding and unfamiliarity with higher things and oblivion of the secrets of God in the created world and in nature” (100). Despite Al-Ghazali’s persistence in the suggestion of miracles and his vehement attack on his opponents, Averroes appeared hesitant to discuss the issue. He said that “ancient philosophers deliberately omitted to mention miracles, not because they failed to acknowledge their reality but because they recognized that belief in miracles is one of the fundamental principles establishing religious laws” (101). Accordingly, miracles are events of a divine or supernatural nature, and therefore it is not logical to discuss miracles in human thought as if it was of a natural quality. Miracles, just as specifics about God, cannot be known by human comprehension. Though Al-Ghazali stresses that he believes that God cannot do what is not possible, he includes miracles in the range of possibilities, and Averroes, while a bit ambiguous, appears to favor the Aristotelian argument that qualitative change due to miracles may be logically impossible (102).
The history of Islamic thought has been hampered by one debate in particular, namely, the issues pertaining to causality, the major players being Al-Ghazali and Averroes. This debate has at its root a conflict of belief and in interest. Al-Ghazali believes that God is the only necessary cause of all things and that any change is due to his re-creating of the atoms. He also strongly favors the idea of God’s ability to perform miracles in the natural world. Averroes, contrary to Al-Ghazali, supports the idea of natural causality and suggests that if Al-Ghazali’s argument were true, there would be no definitive knowledge of anything. Al-Ghazali does not seem to imply otherwise, as human free will is not a major problem for him. The most obvious example of this clash between two schools of thought is Al-Ghazali’s example of fire’s potentiality to either burn or not burn cotton, contingent on God’s deliberation and not the fire itself because it is a “dead body.”
Works Cited
Adamson, Peter. “Al-Ghazali, Causality, and Knowledge.” University of Notre Dame. 20 Nov. 2002. < http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/gck.htm>.
Averroes. Tahafut Al-Tahafut: E-text Edition. Trans. Simon Van Der Bergh. Ed. Muhammed Hozien. 20 Nov. 2002. < http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ir/tt/default.htm>.
Burrell, David. “Causality and Necessity in Islamic Thought.” Routledge. 21 May 2003. <http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/H005.htm>.
Hasker, William. “Occasionalism.” Routledge. 21 May 2003. <http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/K057.htm>.
Leaman, Oliver. An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
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