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Reading group: al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd on whether the world had a beginning

Abdulrahman Al-Bassam Fellow
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God & the argumentsIslamicJewishAsh'arismFalsafaKalamAl-GhazaliIbn RushdIbn Sina#creation#eternity-of-the-world#reading-group#tahafut
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The longest chapter of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers is the first, on the philosophers' doctrine that the world is eternal. Nearly a century later Ibn Rushd answered it, line by line, in The Incoherence of the Incoherence. I have read summaries of both for years. I would like to read the actual exchange with others, slowly.

Translations: Michael Marmura's English with the Arabic on facing pages (Brigham Young University Press) for al-Ghazālī; Simon Van den Bergh's translation (1954) for Ibn Rushd, which includes al-Ghazālī's text inside Ibn Rushd's replies. Both are available second-hand.

Week 1. Al-Ghazālī's statement of the philosophers' main proof (a temporal effect cannot proceed from an eternal cause without something new happening in the cause) and his reply about an eternal will that decrees creation at a particular time.
Week 2. His arguments from the impossibility of an infinite past, including the celestial revolutions, and the claim that time itself was created with the world.
Week 3. Ibn Rushd's replies to the same passages.
Week 4. Where the dispute leaves us: what was at stake religiously, and whether either side won.

I model oil reservoirs for a living, so I think in boundary conditions. I am curious whether "before the world" is a boundary condition or a confusion.

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6 replies

  1. Layla Sfeir

    Fellow

    Week 1. What I always point out in my reading group is that al-Ghazālī does not claim to prove that the world began. His aim in this book is narrower: to show that the philosophers have not demonstrated that it is eternal. The reply about will is clever: why should an eternal will not decree that the world begin at one moment rather than another, when the moments are all alike? The philosophers say a will needs a reason to prefer one moment. Al-Ghazālī says that is exactly what a will is: the power to specify one of two alike things.

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  2. Omar Ragab

    Fellow

    Week 2. The argument from the heavenly spheres is my favourite. Saturn completes a revolution in about thirty years, the sun in one year. If the past were infinite, both would have completed infinitely many revolutions, even though one has made far more than the other. Worse, is the number of revolutions so far odd or even? It must be one or the other, yet adding one would change it, which seems impossible for an infinite number. Cantor would reply centuries later, but the puzzle is still a good one to pose to students.

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  3. Rafael Lucena Prieto

    Fellow

    Week 3. Reading Ibn Rushd in Córdoba, a short walk from where he was born, I notice how often he concedes a point and then changes the frame. In his Decisive Treatise he even says the dispute between the theologians and the ancient philosophers about the world's eternity comes close to being a disagreement about names: everyone agrees the world is caused, and the question is only whether its past has a limit. In the Tahāfut al-tahāfut he says the world is perpetually being brought into existence, which he thinks is a better meaning of "created" than a first moment.

  4. Youssef Berrada

    Fellow

    Week 4, from a historian. At the end of the Incoherence, al-Ghazālī says that on three points the philosophers' views amount to unbelief: the eternity of the world, God's knowing particulars only in a universal way, and the denial of bodily resurrection. The other seventeen points he calls innovation at worst. That tells us how high he thought the stakes were on this chapter. It is not just physics. It is whether God is an agent who chooses.

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  5. Miriam Adler

    Fellow

    A Jewish epilogue. Maimonides, who knew this debate well, concluded in the Guide that neither eternity nor creation in time had been demonstrated. He chose creation, partly because Aristotle's eternity would make the world necessary and leave no room for will or miracle, and so would undermine the Law. He also says that if eternity had been demonstrated he could have read Genesis figuratively, as he did the verses about God's body. That is a very honest position.

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  6. Abdulrahman Al-Bassam

    Fellow

    My answer to my own question: for al-Ghazālī "before the world" is a confusion, since time begins with the world, but the world's having a boundary at all is not. For Ibn Rushd the boundary is the confusion. In reservoir terms, they disagree about whether the model has an edge, and both agree it needs a source.

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