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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Al-ghazali’s Argument For the Eternity of the World and the Problem of Divine Immutability and Timelessness Tahafut al-Falasifa: Discussion One, Proofs 1 and 2a Al-Ghazali began his first discussion by noting that there are, historically, three philosophical views on the world’s past eternity.

The first and most widely held position was that of “upholding [the world’s] past eternity: that it has never ceased to exist with God, exalted be He, to be an effect of His, to exist along with Him, not be posterior to Him in time.”[^7] The second position, related to Plato, suggested that the world was “generated and originated in time.” The third position was agnostic in nature, and is found in the works of Galen; it holds that one can never know “whether the world is pre-eternal or temporally originated.”[^8] From these, al-Ghazali turned his polemic to the most widely held position, believing that this position was heretical and had led many Muslims away from their religion.[^9] Al-Ghazali accuses the philosophers of producing confusion by describing creation as Neoplatonic emanation, instead of a creation ex nihilo .

“The philosophers,” comments Watt, “had been adapting Neoplatonic cosmology to Qur’anic conceptions by equating emanation with creation.”[^10] Though the philosophers had many proofs for an eternal universe, al-Ghazali chose to focus on three of the most powerful, considering all others products of “feeble imagining.” Within this refutation of the arguments for the eternity of the world, can be discovered the kalam cosmological argument for the finite temporality of the world.[^11] The cosmological argument, according to Majid Fakhry, is considered the “classical argument for the existence of God in the West.”[^12] Though the cosmological argument was found in philosophers such as al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd,[^13] based on an infinite contingency, al-Ghazali argued that upholding the eternity of the universe makes the affirmation of a Creator pointless.[^14] This was based on a traditional rejection of the concept of efficient causality,[^15] seen clearly in Discussion Seventeen of the Tahafut , where al-Ghazali “repudiates the validity of the causal principle…on the ground that the alleged necessity of this principle is a mere illusion.”[^16] Efficient causality was, according to al-Ghazali, an unwarranted inference based only on an apparent observation of a correlation between temporal events.