Past Qs

• How did Ghazali refute the Philosophers’ argument about Eternity of the Universe? (20 marks)
(2017)
• Short note: Al-Ghazali. (10 marks) (2018)
• Short note: Ghazali’s criticism of the Philosophers. (10 marks) (2019)
• How did Ghazali refute the Philosophers’ argument about Eternity of the Universe?

Notes

I. Introduction
a. Al-Ghazali was one of the most prominent and influential Muslim philosophers,
theologians, jurists, and mystics of Sunni Islam.
b. He was of Persian origin.
c. Prior to the coming of Ghazali, there was a huge shift in the history of philosophy in the
Islamic world.
d. Because in the wake of the translation movement, the first generations of philosophers
working in Arabic were mostly busying themselves with responding to Aristotle who had
just become massively available in Arabic translation.
e. Then Avicenna came along, with his new powerful philosophical synthesis, we see a
change in the way philosophy is done in Arabic.
f. Avicenna takes up all the topics that are covered in Aristotle’s philosophy and rethinks
them with his own distinctive methods: epistemological methods, new logical
discoveries, and new breakthroughs in metaphysics.
II. incoherence of the philosophers
a. This book is his fierce attack on the philosophical tradition and the way in which he felt
it had infected Islam.
b. His primary target is Avicenna.
c. He is not necessarily naming individual philosophers, he is talking about the general
views of the camp of philosophers, the intellectual trend of the philosophers.
d. In the incoherence, he outlines a number of things about which they are plain
doctrinally wrong about.
i. Most of them are intellectual errors and he lists 20 of them.
ii. Then he picks on 3 that are so significant that they condemn the philosophers’
heretics.
iii. He argues that philosophical trend should not have a place in the intellectual
sciences of Islam.
iv. The 3 doctrines he considers as entirely contriving the orthodoxy of Islam are as
follows.
1. The notion that the world is eternal.
a. The philosophical view that matter cannot be destroyed and
therefore the world must have existed eternally.
b. Ghazali said this directly contradicts the Islamic doctrine of the
creation of the world from nothing which we find in the Quran
 but is also is general developed in the Islamic theology that God
created the world from nothing.
2. The notion that God does not know the particulars.
a. The philosophers have this notion of God as knowing the
generalities of things but not the particulars.
b. This is contradictory to the doctrine of Islam in Quran which
states that God knows everything about everything.
3. The notion of the bodily resurrection.
a. The philosophers had questioned it as a physical possibility.
b. This is a fundamental element of Muslim belief that there would
be a bodily resurrection at some future time to be decided by
God.
v. So, these three doctrines were viewed by Ghazali as demonstrating that the
philosophers were outside the fold of Islam.
III. Refutation of the Philosophers’ argument about Eternity of the Universe.
a. Ghazali noted that majority of the philosophers – ancient as well as modern – agree
upon the eternity of the universe, holding that it always coexisted with God as His effect
which was concurrent with Him in time – concurrent as an effect is with the cause e.g.,
light with the Sun.
b. Also, Avicenna’s philosophical theology commits to the notion that God’s relation to
the world is necessary.
c. That is the main reason why the Universe would wind up being eternal because if he
creates the Universe necessarily then whenever you got God, you got the world so the
world is eternal.
d. Refutation of 1st notion
i. In the end of incoherence, Ghazali addresses this when he takes up the concept
of miracles.
1. This is probably the most famous part of incoherence because it
reminds people of David Hume and like Hume, Ghazali gives examples
of standard cases of causation.
2. His case is cotton touching fire and then burning and he asks the
question that whether the cotton necessarily must burn.
3. In other words, is there a causal connection between fire touching
cotton and cotton burning.
4. Is it a necessary relation or could it happen that the fire fails to burn
the cotton?
5. Ghazali wants to say that it could fail to burn the cotton because that
leaves room for miracles to occur and he accuses the philosophers of
saying that the relationship is necessary.
6. The reason why it reminds people of David Hume is that he then says
we expect the fire to burn the cotton and we have this very strong
information that it must burn the cotton but that is just because we
have a habit.
 7. Every time we have seen fire touch cotton or something similar, we
have seen it burn the cotton or burn it to ash but that is just an
expectation that has been created by our experience.
8. It does not necessarily mean that the cotton will burn.
9. Therefore, Ghazali leaves the room for miracles and refutes the
argument for the eternity of the Universe.
ii. Secondly, Ghazali refuted this argument by saying that when fire and cotton are
placed in contact, the cotton is burned directly by God rather than by the fire,
a claim which he defended using logic in Islamic philosophy.
1. He explained that because God is usually seen as rational, rather than
arbitrary, his behavior in normally causing events in the same sequence
(i.e., what appears to us to be efficient causation) can be understood as
a natural outworking of that principle of reason, which we then describe
as the laws of nature.
2. Properly speaking, however, these are not laws of nature but laws by
which God chooses to govern his own behavior (his autonomy, in the
strict sense) – in other words, his rational will.
3. Therefore, Ghazali refuted the philosophers’ argument and asserted
that God created the world in time and just like everything in this world
time will cease to exist as well, but God will continue on existing.
IV. Conclusion: