The problem was...

The problem was, however, that when the time came for creation, a “renewed intentional upsurge” would have had to occur within God to have a cause for creation - which would entail divine change once again.[^65] Though, according to Fakhry, al-Ghazali’s assertion that the creation of the universe as an act of divine will is sufficient and bypasses “the objection of the Neoplatonists that creation in time would entail necessarily a change in the divine.”[^66] Al-Ghazali’s only explicit response to the accusation of divine change was to say that the philosophers held the same problem in their doctrine of divine knowledge.[^67] Nevertheless, the problem of divine immutability remains for al-Ghazali.

William Hasker comments that In the philosophical lineage stretching from Parmenides to Plato to Plotinus, there is a strong metaphysical and valuational preference for permanence over change. True Being, in this tradition, must of necessity be changeless; whatever change, on the other hand, enjoys a substandard sort of being if any at all.[^68] Al-Ghazali had agreed with the philosophers on this doctrine of immutability when such an agreement was unnecessary.

Hasker argues that Plato’s argument was faulty, setting up a false dichotomy, in that Plato falsely assumed that change was either change for the better or worse. Change, however, is not always for the better or worse. A clock, for example, registers a particular time (say 3:30 PM) at one particular point of the day, and at another point it registers another time (say 4:00 PM).

There has been change within the clock, but such change was not better or worse, it was simply a change.[^69] Affirming the possibility of divine mutability, then, requires one to re-define what is meant by divine perfection.

Al-Ghazali, despite upholding divine immutability and having shown from natural science and philosophy that the universe was temporally finite, did not answer the charge of the philosophers.[^70] If the universe is finite, and there was a time when God existed but the universe did not exist, then God must be mutable.

The philosophers, in al-Ghazali’s words, commented that before the existence of the universe, …infinite time would have existed, and this is contradictory; for the reason of the affirmation of the finitude of time is impossible.