THE TENTH DISCUSSION
To prove their incapacity to demonstrate that the world has a creator and a cause, and that in fact they are forced to admit atheism
Ghazali says:
Their statement that body needs a creator and a cause can be understood from the theory of those’ who argue that all bodies are temporal, because they cannot exist without what is temporal. But what keeps you philosophers from the doctrine of the materialists, namely that the world is eternal in the condition in which it actually is, and that it has no cause and no creator, that there is only a cause for temporal events and that no body comes into existence and no body is annihilated, and that only forms and accidents come into existence, for the bodies are the heavens (which are eternal) and the four elements, which are the stuff of the sublunary world, and their bodies and matters are eternal too, and there is only a change of forms in them through mixtures and alterations ;and that the souls of men and animals and plants come into existence, that all the causes of these temporal events terminate in the circular movement, and that the circular movement is eternal and its source the eternal soul of the sphere. Therefore there is no cause for the world and no creator for its bodies, but since the world, as it is, is eternal, there is no cause for it, i. e. no cause for its bodies. For indeed, what sense is there in the doctrine of the philosophers that these bodies exist through a cause, although they are eternal?
I say:
The philosophers assert that the man who says that all bodies have been produced (and by ‘produced’ must be understood creation ex nihilo) gives a meaning to the term ‘produced’ which is never found in the empirical world, and his statement surely stands in need of a proof. As to his attacks on the philosophers in this passage, so that he even forces on them the implication of atheism, we have already answered them previously and there is no sense in repeating ourselves, but, in short, the philosophers hold that body, be it temporal or eternal, cannot be independent in existence through itself; and this principle is, according to the philosophers, binding for the eternal body in the same way as for the temporal, although imagination does not help to explain how this is the case with the eternal body in the way it is with the temporal body. Aristotle therefore, in the second book of De caelo et mundo, when he wanted to explain the fact that the earth was circular by nature, first assumed it to have come into being in time so that the intellect might imagine its cause, and then transferred its existence to eternity.
Having forced on the philosophers these reprehensible deductions, Ghazali now gives an answer in defence of them and objects then to their answer.
Ghazali says:
And if the philosophers say: ‘Everything that has no cause is of a necessary existence, and we philosophers have already mentioned the qualities of the necessary existent through which it is proved that body cannot be the necessary existent, ‘ we answer: We have shown the mistake in your claim about the attributes of the necessary existent, and that your proof does not demonstrate anything but the termination of a causal series, and this termination also exists for the materialists at the beginning of things, , for they say that there is no cause for the bodies, and the forms and accidents are causes for each other and terminate in the circular movement part of which is the cause of another part in the same way as it takes place according to the doctrine of the philosophers, and this causal series’ ends in this circular movement.
And the man who observes what we have related will understand the inability of those who believe in the eternity of bodies to claim at the same time that they have a cause, and the consequence of their theory is atheism and apostasy, which one party has clearly admitted, those namely who rely solely on the determinations of the intellect.
I say:
All this has been already answered, and its degree of truth has been stated, and there is no reason to repeat ourselves. And as to the materialists, they rely only on the senses, and when according to them the movements had terminated in the heavenly body and through this the causal series was ended, they thought that where sensation had come to a limit, the intellect also had come to a limit; but this is not true. But the philosophers considered the causes till they ended in the heavenly body, then they considered the intelligible causes and arrived at an existent which cannot be perceived and which is the principle of perceptible being, and this is the meaning of the words: ‘Thus did we show Abraham the Kingdom of Heaven and of the earth . . ‘The Ash’arites, however, rejected sensible causes; that is, they denied that certain sensible things are the causes of other sensible things, and they made the cause of sensible being a nonsensible being by a way of becoming which is neither experienced nor perceived, and they denied causes and effects; and this is a kind of view which is inconsistent with the nature of man in so far as he is man.
Ghazali says, objecting to the argument of the philosophers:
If it is said that the proof that body is not a necessary existent is that, if it were a necessary existent, it would have neither an external nor an internal cause, but if it has a cause for its being composed, it will be possible in respect of its essence, and every possible needs a necessary existent, we answer: The terms ‘necessary existent’ and ‘possible existent’ are devoid of sense, and your whole confusion lies in these terms; but let us revert to their plain sense, which is the denial and the affirmation of a cause, for then your words amount to nothing else but saying that bodies either have a cause or not, and the materialists affirm the latter, ‘ and why should you deny it? And when this is understood by ‘possibility’ and ‘necessity’, we say body is necessary and not possible, and your statement that body cannot be necessary is pure presumption without any foundation.
I say:
We have already said that if by ‘necessary existent’ is understood the causeless and by ‘possible existent’ is understood that which has a cause, the division of being into these two sections is not acknowledged, and opponents might say that this division is not true, but that, indeed, all existents are causeless. But when by ‘necessary existent’ is understood absolute necessary being and by ‘possible’ the genuinely possible, then we must arrive at a being which has no cause, for we can say that every being is either possible or necessary; if possible, it has a cause, and if this cause is of the nature of the possible, we have a series which ends in a necessary cause. Then, concerning this necessary cause it may be asked again whether some necessary beings might have a cause and other necessary beings none, and if a cause is ascribed to the nature of the necessary being which can have a cause, there will follow a series which ends in a necessary being which has no cause. Avicenna wanted by this division only to conform to the opinion of the philosophers concerning existents, for all philosophers agree that the body of the heavens is necessary through something else; whether, however, this thing necessary through another is possible by itself is a problem which has to be studied.And this argument is therefore faulty when this method is followed, and this method is of necessity faulty, because being is not primarily divided into the genuinely possible and the necessary, for this is a division which is only known through the nature of existing things.
Then Ghazali answers the philosophers’ statement that body cannot be a necessary existent by itself, because it has parts which are its cause.
If it is said: ‘It cannot be denied that body has parts, and that the whole is only constituted through the parts, and that the parts in a thing are prior to the whole, ‘ we answer: ‘Let it be so; certainly, the whole is constituted by the parts and their aggregation, but there is no cause for the parts nor for their aggregation, which on the contrary are eternally in the condition in which they are without an efficient cause. ‘ And the philosophers cannot refute this, except by the argument of theirs which we have mentioned, which is based on the denial of plurality in the First; we have shown its futility, and apart from it there is no other method. It is therefore clear that for the man who does not believe in the temporal creation of bodies there is no foundation for believing in a creator at all.
I say:
This argument is, without doubt, binding for the man who follows the method of a necessary existent to prove the existence of an incorporeal being, but this is not the method followed by the ancient philosophers, and the first, so far as we know, who used it was Avicenna. He said that it was superior to the proof of the ancients, because the ancients arrived only at an immaterial being, the principle of the universe, through derivative things, namely motion and time; whereas this proof, according to Avicenna, arrives at the assertion of such a principle as the ancients established, through the investigation of the nature of the existent in so far as it is an existent. If indeed it did arrive at such an affirmation, what Avicenna says would be true; however, it does not. ‘ For the most that could be affirmed of the existent necessarily existing by itself would be that it is not composed of matter and form, and generally speaking that it has no definition. But if it is supposed to exist as composed of eternal parts which are continuous by nature, as is the case with the world and its parts, it may indeed be said of the world with its parts that it is a necessary existent, z it being of course understood that there is a necessary existent. And we have already said that the method Avicenna followed to establish an existent of this description is not demonstrative and does not by nature lead to it, except in the way we have stated. The utmost consequence of this argument-and this constitutes its weakness-is the theory of those, namely the Peripatetics, who assume that there exists a simple body not composed of matter and form. For the man who assumes an eternal compound of actual parts must necessarily acknowledge that it is essentially one, and every oneness in a compound is one through an essential unity, namely a simple, and through this unity the world becomes one, and therefore Alexander of Aphrodisias says that there must exist a spiritual force which is diffused in all the parts of the universe in the same way as there is a force in all the parts of a single animal which binds them together, and the difference between the two forces is that the binding force in the world is eternal, because the conjoining principle is eternal, whereas the conjunction between the parts of the sublunary animal is individually transitory-although, through the eternal conjunction, not specifically transitory-since it cannot be individually imperishable like the world z And through this theory the Creator will be deprived of that very kind of perfection which nothing else can equal, as Aristotle says in his book De animalibus. And we see nowadays that many of Avicenna’s followers because of this aporia ascribe this opinion to him, and they say that he does not believe that there exists a separate existence, and they assert that this can be seen from what he says about the necessary existent in many passages, and that this is the view which he has laid down in his Oriental Philosophy, and they say that he only called this book Oriental Philosophy’ because it is the doctrine of the Orientals; for they believed that according to the Orientals divinity is located in the heavenly bodies, as Avicenna himself had come to believe. However, notwithstanding this they accept Aristotle’s argument to prove the First Principle through movement.
And as for ourselves, we have discussed this argument at other times and have shown in what sense it can be regarded as evident, and we have solved all the doubts concerning it; we have also discussed Alexander’s argument on this question, namely the one he uses in his book called On the printiples. s For Alexander imagined that he was turning from Aristotle’s argument to another; his argument, however, is taken from the principles which Aristotle proved, and both arguments are sound, though the more usual is Aristotle’s.
And when the argument for a necessary existent is verified, it is true according to me in the way I shall describe it, although it is used too generally and its different senses must be distinguished. It must, namely, be preceded by knowledge of the different kinds of possible existents in substance and the different kinds of necessary existents in substance. And then this argument takes this form: The possible existent in bodily substance must be preceded by the necessary existent in bodily substance, and the necessary existent in bodily substance must be preceded by the absolute necessary existent which does not possess any potency whatsoever, either in its substance or in any other of the different kinds of movements, and such an entity is not a body. For instance, it appears from the nature of the body of the heavens that it is a necessary existent in its bodily substance, ‘ for otherwise there would have to be a body prior to it, and it appears also from its nature that it is a possible existent in its local movement; it is therefore necessary that its mover should be a necessary existent in its substance, and that there should be in it no potency whatsoever, either as regards movement or in any other respect, and that neither movement nor rest could be ascribed to it nor any other kind of change, and such an entity is absolutely without body and without any potency in a body. But the eternal parts of the world are only necessary existents in their substance, either universally like the four elements, or individually like the heavenly bodies. ,
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Author: Ibn Rushd (Averroës)
