Al-Ghazali's Argument Against Aristotelian Argument

In the 11th century, a prominent Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali published ‘The Incoherence of philosophers’ to argue against Avicenna, an early Islamic philosopher. He organized his arguments by giving them each their own chapter, twenty in total. His purpose was to point out the several contradictions that Aristotelian philosophers have made, especially about God and the universe. He also accused these philosophers of going against their own religion by criticizing and discrediting the word of God and the Quran itself in his last three points. Surprisingly, he didn’t find natural science to be problematic, except for metaphysics because the thinking process behind it lacked the same kind of logic found in natural sciences. He describes natural science as perceptions/observations of God’s will, not the direct cause of any effect.

Ghazali believes that God chose to create this world as the best alternative, among several different alternatives, which is conceivable to him. This way he defends the Asharite doctrine of there being a temporally finite universe but still refuting the Aristotelian notion of an eternal universe.

In his seventeenth chapter, Al-Ghazali offers more than one explanation concerning the concept of causality, that is, how and why things happen. Ghazali argued that everything happens as a result of god’s will, whether it be the primary or secondary cause, in other words, it is the ultimate cause. This is a philosophical theory known as occasionalism.

Al-Ghazali believed that everything is a cause of God’s will rather than by man’s actions. He used the example of burning cotton for his argument, stating that the fire isn’t what causes the cotton to burn, but rather it’s the physical manifestation of how God chooses to govern his own behavior. Since the fire itself is inanimate, it is unable to act upon