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Fire and cotton in the Seventeenth Discussion, read beside Hume’s Enquiry

Abdulrahman Al-Bassam Fellow
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CausationIslamicModern EuropeanAsh'arismEmpiricismAl-GhazaliDavid HumeIbn Rushd#constant-conjunction#miracles#necessary-connection#occasionalism
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Causation is a practical problem for me most mornings. I've been reading the seventeenth discussion of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers (in Michael Marmura's translation) next to Section VII of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and I want to set out what I see.

Al-Ghazālī. The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is believed to be its effect is not necessary. When fire touches cotton, observation shows only that the burning happens with the contact, not through it. God creates the burning, and could create the contact without it. That is how the miracles of the prophets are possible, such as Abraham in the fire.

Hume. We never observe a power or necessary connection, only one event regularly followed by another. Our idea of necessity comes from the mind's expectation, formed by custom, when it has seen the conjunction many times.

The overlap in the first step is real. The purposes are almost opposite. Al-Ghazālī clears away the philosophers' necessity to make room for God as the direct agent of every event. Hume clears it away to show that our confidence in causation has no rational foundation.

Two complications I'd like help with. First, al-Ghazālī offers two positions in that discussion, and the second seems to allow fire a nature that burns, with God able to intervene. So was he really an occasionalist? Second, what does all this mean for those of us who rely on causal models every day?

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5 replies

  1. Layla Sfeir

    Fellow

    You've spotted the right difficulty. Al-Ghazālī presents two accounts. On the first, God creates every event directly, and what we call causes are only occasions. On the second, things do have natures that act, but God can alter conditions, as by changing the fire or protecting the body, so that miracles remain possible without violating anything necessary. His aim in the Incoherence is to show that the philosophers cannot prove necessary causation, not necessarily to commit himself to one positive theory.

    How much he was an occasionalist is genuinely disputed. Frank Griffel's Al-Ghazālī's Philosophical Theology (2009) argues that he deliberately left the question open. Others read him as a fairly straightforward Ash'arite occasionalist. I wouldn't settle it.

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  2. Alistair Gow

    Fellow

    On Hume, it helps to remember that he never doubted that we should rely on causes. Earlier in the Enquiry he says that custom is the great guide of human life. His scepticism is about the foundation, not the practice. He thinks nature has made us expect the future to resemble the past, and that no argument could make us stop, or needs to. A reservoir engineer is a perfect Humean: he trusts the model, and he knows it rests on the past.

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  3. Arvind Poojary

    Fellow

    In physics, the debate is still alive. Modern Humeans, David Lewis most famously, think laws of nature are just the best summary of regularities in the world, with no necessity behind them. Their opponents think laws govern events, with some kind of necessity. Al-Ghazālī's position, in a strange way, agrees with the Humeans that nothing in the things themselves necessitates anything, and with their opponents that something does govern events. He just thinks that something is God.

  4. Bilal Rashid

    Fellow

    The theological purpose shapes the practical attitude, which is your second question. Al-Ghazālī never told anyone to ignore causes. In the Iḥyā', his treatment of trust in God insists that trust does not mean giving up means. The hadith about tying your camel and then trusting God makes the same point. The believer uses causes as the ordinary way God acts, while refusing to treat them as independent powers. So, in practice, you and a Humean would run your models the same way. You'd differ about what you were thanking afterwards.

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  5. Abdulrahman Al-Bassam

    Fellow

    This is very helpful. I'll keep both of al-Ghazālī's positions open, as Layla suggests. Ibn Rushd's reply, which I've started, pulls the other way: he argues that denying real causes undermines knowledge itself, since to know a thing is to know its causes. So the three of them make a triangle: al-Ghazālī says the necessity isn't demonstrable, Ibn Rushd says without it there is no science, and Hume says science goes on fine without it, by habit. I'm not sure which corner I stand in, but I see the triangle now.

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