The Proof of God’s Existence and al-Ghazālī’s Tahāfut al-falāsifa
One of al-Ghazālī’s earliest works, which he wrote when he was still teaching Ashʿarī kalām at the Niẓāmiyya college in Baghdad before his first crisis in 488/1095, is the Tahāfut al-falāsifa. Al-Ghazālī intended this work—as its title indicates and as he states in its introduction—as a refutation of Aristotle’s philosophy as presented in the works and commentaries of al-Fārābī (d. 339/950) and Ibn Sīnā (d. 427/1037) (Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Tahāfut al-falāsifa, ed. Maurice Bouyges, 6–9). The Tahāfut displays clear signs that allow associating it with the kalām tradition—not of a particular school though, as al-Ghazālī himself stresses (Al-Ghazālī, Tahāfut al-falāsifa, 13–14)—, which is apparent not only in the views and positions defended in it, but also in the terms and concepts employed, as shall be seen. In his article “Ghazālī’s Argument from Creation,” Lenn E. Goodman writes: [t]he brunt of Ghazālī’s effort in The Incoherence of the Philosophers and roughly half the bulk of the work are given over to working out the consequences of his belief that acceptance of the eternity of the world is inconsistent with belief in the existence of God, compatible only with atheism. […] If eternalism is tantamount to atheism, it is the argument from creation alone which can prove that God exists (Lenn E. Goodman, “Al-Ghazālī’s Argument from Creation. (I),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 2/1 (1971): 67–85).
William Lane Craig, in his monograph The Cosmological Argument From Plato to Leibniz, agrees with Goodman’s analysis for he too presents al-Ghazālī’s criticism of the philosophers not only as relating to the question of the provability of God’s existence, but also as constituting an implicit charge of atheism: “to his mind the thesis of an eternal universe was quite simply equivalent to atheism” (William Lane Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz, 99). Al-Ghazālī does not maintain, in my view, against the philosophers that God’s existence can only be proven if the createdness of the world is asserted; rather, in maintaining that “he who does not assume the originatedness of the bodies has no ground at all for his assumption of the creator” al-Ghazālī sums up his position which entails the following points: first, the philosophers are unable to trace the world back to God and to ascribe it to Him as His product, even though they maintain to believe that the world is an eternal emanation from God. Secondly, even though they hold that God is to be regarded as the “creator” (ṣāniʿ) of the world, they have no grounds for their claim, and only the mutakallimūn, like al-Ghazālī himself, who uphold the world’s originatedness in time are justified in describing God with this attribute. For al-Ghazālī, the issue at stake is, thus, not whether the philosophers’ doctrine of an eternal world is reconcilable with the proof of God’s existence. God’s very existence is out of question, and al-Ghazālī continuously presents the philosophers as upholding that God exists and is part of reality.
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