Al-Ghazali and Hume make the same argument about fire. Why do they end up so far apart?

Question

I teach history in Fes, and my students love the story that al-Ghazali "anticipated Hume" by six centuries. I tell it too. But the more I read, the less I think "anticipated" is the right word, and I would like help explaining why.
The resemblance is clear. In the Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali says that when fire touches cotton, we observe burning occurring together with the contact, but we never observe that the fire necessitates the burning. In the Enquiry, Hume says that we see one event follow another, but never perceive a necessary connection; our idea of necessity comes from habit.
Yet one was defending the possibility of miracles and the other was attacking belief in them. One was a theologian, the other a sceptic. How can the same argument lead to such different places? And is it even the same argument? I have read that whether al-Ghazali was really an occasionalist is itself debated.
I would be grateful for an explanation I can take into a classroom of seventeen-year-olds.

Layla Haddad · Accepted Answer

Youssef, here is how I'd put it for seventeen-year-olds: a shared first step and two different conclusions, because each man brings different luggage.
The shared step. Observation shows succession, not necessity. Neither says fire and burning are unrelated, only that watching them can't show the link is necessary.
Al-Ghazali's luggage. He already believes God is the only true agent, or at least that God can do anything not logically contradictory. So when observation fails to show natural necessity, he concludes that the regularity is God's habitual ordering. Since nature compels nothing, a miracle, such as Abraham unburnt in the fire, is no violation of necessity.
Hume's luggage. He believes our ideas must come from impressions. When observation fails to show necessity, he concludes that the idea comes from custom in us. Then he turns the same caution against miracles: testimony to them is always weaker than the uniform experience against them.
The debate about al-Ghazali. In the same discussion of the Incoherence, he also offers a second account, on which things do have natures that God created and can suspend. So whether he was strictly an occasionalist is contested.
And give Ibn Rushd the last word: if fire does not burn by its nature, nothing has a nature, and then nothing can be known.

Alistair Gow · Answer

A Hume footnote: he's often read as saying there's no causation, only conjunction. In fact he gives two definitions of cause in the Enquiry, one in terms of constant conjunction and one in terms of the mind's transition from one idea to the other. Whether he was a sceptic about causal power or only about our knowledge of it is still argued over. That's another reason the "same argument" story is too neat.

Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani · Answer

As someone who started reading the Ash'ari atomists for faith and stayed for the argument: the luggage Layla mentions is heavy. Classical kalām held that the world consists of atoms and accidents that God recreates at every instant. In that world there is nothing for necessity to be in. Al-Ghazali didn't need to invent occasionalism to make his point; he inherited a whole physics that made it natural.

Youssef Benali · Answer

Thank you all. I'll draw it on the board as one road splitting at a fork, with "God's custom" on one sign and "our custom" on the other. The students will like that the same word, custom, sits on both signs.

Al-Ghazali and Hume make the same argument about fire. Why do they end up so far apart?

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