Ghazali by Ormsby Eric;

Author:Ormsby, Eric; [Ormsby, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1792111
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Causality vs “Habit”

The seventeenth chapter of the Tahafut deals with causality and miracles. The philosophers affirm that:

. . . the connection between causes and effects that one observes in existence is a connection of necessary concomitance, so that it is within neither the realm of power nor within that of possibility to bring about the cause without the effect or the effect without the cause.

Tahafut/Marmura, 166

But this, Ghazali argues, renders miracles impossible and so is not only wrong but heretical. He is thinking specifically about miracles such as the biblical transformation of the staff into a serpent, and those attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, such as his splitting the moon; but the doctrine of the resurrection is also at stake. Whoever asserts a necessary connection between cause and effect in the realm of nature, as the philosophers do, makes such miracles impossible; they must be either interpreted metaphorically or denied outright.

Divine causality, which both theologians and philosophers accept, albeit in widely divergent ways, is not at issue, but what is usually termed “secondary causality” (that is, those sequences of effects which seem to ripple from one cause to the next: when I move my hand, the ring on my finger moves too, and so on). For the philosophers, a cosmos not bound together by interlocking chains of secondary causality represented an absurdity; nature as well as reason were at stake. (Ibn Rushd – and later, Maimonides, following in his footsteps – argued that if you remove causality from the scheme of things, you also remove rationality, for the very processes of the mind depend upon cause and effect, as in argument itself.) But for the theologians, especially those of the Ash‘arite persuasion, such a cosmos suggested a dangerous autonomy; a world in which necessity inheres in the nature of things infringes divine agency and compromises omnipotence.

For Ash‘arites, God is the sole agent whose will determines and effects every action. What we think of as causality is nothing but “God’s habit” (or “custom”). The world functions as it does, with apparent cause and effect, only because it is God’s habit for it to do so. Miracles are nothing more than “breaches of habit.” There are neither “laws of nature” nor natures intrinsic to things. God can alter His custom whenever He will; no reality exists in things themselves, despite appearances. All ultimately are fictive; subject to alteration or annihilation from moment to moment, and in the twinkling of an eye. Things as they are exist as they do only because God creates them, atom by atom, instant by instant, in continual pulsations of His will. If He were to decide that the rain should fall upward, it would instantly do so; this would represent a “breach of God’s habit,” a miracle, not a reversal of “nature.” What we call nature is itself nothing more than God’s habit.

This is the famous “occasionalism” of doctrinaire Ash‘arism at its most blatant. (This is the doctrine lampooned by Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed,

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