5. God’s Knowledge of the Particulars. 61 Al-Ghazālī is very emphatic and uncompromising with regard to the all-circumscribing knowledge of God: “God knows the creeping of the black ant upon the rugged rock in a dark night, and He perceives the movement of the mote in the midst of the air.” 62 Ibn Sina also subscribes to the view that God knows everything: “Nothing, not even as much as a particle of dust in the heavens or on the earth, remains hidden from His knowledge.” 63 Yet, interestingly enough, al-Ghazālī does not hesitate to level a charge of infidelity against him on this score for, according to ibn Sina, though God knows all the particulars, He knows them only in a universal way. This means that God cannot have the perceptual knowledge of particular things but knows them by way of a universal knowledge. Ibn Sina realizes the difficulty of his position and so adds that the understanding of it needs great intellectual subtlety. The reasons that he advances to deny perceptual knowledge to God are fully recognized by al-Ghazālī.
Perceptual knowledge is characterized both temporally and spatially, whereas God is above both time and space and so it is not possible to ascribe perceptual knowledge to Him. A particular event occurs at a particular moment of time and suffers change with the passage of time. Change in the object of perception implies a change in the content of perception itself which obviously leads to change in the subject of perception, i.e., in the percipient himself. But change in God is unthinkable; therefore, perception of a particular event is not {608} possible for Him. Similarly, to distinguish between one particular object and another in space is possible only through the senses and implies a special relation of a sensible thing to the percipient as being near to or far from him or in a definite position, and this is impossible where God is concerned. Hence, it is not possible for God to have perceptual knowledge of the particulars. His knowledge can only be that which rises above the particular “nows” and the particular “heres,” that is to say, is of conceptual or universal nature.
Ibn Sina’s position as briefly outlined above seems to be very well grounded in sound reasoning and is quite understandable, yet, according to al-Ghazālī, it is so pernicious to religion that it altogether demolishes the entire edifice of religious Law (hence his charge of infidelity). The theory implies that God cannot know any new state that emerges in John-He cannot know that John has becomes an infidel or a true believer, for He can know only the unbelief or the belief of man in general in a universal manner and not in specific relation to individuals. Yes, God cannot know Muhammad’s proclaiming himself a prophet at the time when he did. And the same will be true of every other prophet, for God only knows that among men there are some who claim prophecy, and that such and such are their attributes; but He cannot know a particular prophet as an individual, for that is to be known only by the senses. There certainly is a point in what al-Ghazālī says here for it is really difficult to show any relation between the temporal and the timeless, yet the above criticism of his is a little wide of the mark for it is based on a misinterpretation of ibn Sina’s position. By the statement that God does not have perceptual knowledge of the particulars, ibn Sina does not mean to say that God does not have the knowledge of the particulars or that His knowledge is restricted only to that of the universals or general concepts. Ibn Sina insists that God does have knowledge of the particulars; only this knowledge comes to Him not through sensuous perception but through intellectual perception, not from moment to moment but eternally.
Ibn Sina starts with the Aristotelian conception that God has only self-knowledge but adds emphatically that His self-knowledge necessarily implies knowledge of all the existent things in the universe in so far as He is the principal or the ultimate source of them all. There is not a single existent particular which does not proceed from Him directly or indirectly and the existence of which does not become in some way necessary through Him. The coming into existence of particular events and objects is due to the action and interaction of the various causes but ultimately all these have to be traced back to the First Cause. God, the First Cause, has the full prescience of the working of the various causes which originate from Him, and knows the effects produced by them and the time involved in their occurrence and recurrence. Thus, God knows the particular events even when they occur to a single individual under specific conditions and at particular times in so far as they are fully explicable in terms of general laws and all-pervasive causal nexus. This may be illustrated with reference to an analogous human situation. An astronomer {609} who has full understanding of the general laws governing the movements of the heavenly bodies can, through his proper calculations, describe the various phenomena such as the particular eclipses and the conjunctions of the stars. The analogy, however, though helpful, cannot be stretched to an identity, for, strictly speaking, there is nothing in our experience to compare with divine knowledge.
Our knowledge is liable to error and is fragmentary, whereas God’s knowledge is infallible and all-embracing, so much so that the whole universe is known to Him in one single congruous manifestation which is not affected by time. God is immediately aware of the entire sweep of history regarded as an ordered string of specific events in an eternal now. Further, God not only knows but is also the very ground of the objects that He knows. The universe proceeds from the essence of God verily because of His knowledge of the universe: the ideal representation of the universal system is the very cause of its emanation. Had God not known the universe with all its concrete particularities, the universe would never have come into being. This indeed is a very original and quite ingenious theory with regard to God’s knowledge of the particulars. Yet it is undoubtedly of highly speculative nature and so al-Ghazālī is all out to bring quite an arsenal of criticism against it with a dialectical analyticity and rigour not incomparable to those of the logical positivists of our own day. He is not at all prepared to accept any of the assumptions of the philosophers until and unless they should either be atatable in the form of analytical propositions or be verifiable through some kind of intuitive experience.
The attribution of knowledge to God as it is, but particularly that of “the other,” cannot go without jeopardizing to some extent at least His absolute unity and simplicity which otherwise are so much emphasized, rather over-emphasized by the philosophers. Above all, the theory, like any of its kind, fails to relate in any satisfactory manner the eternality of God’s knowledge with the tranaciency of human experience, which relation indeed is the very crux of religious experience. And so far as it suffers from the presuppositions of the intellectualistic-deterministic world-view of the philosophers, al-Ghazālī simply has no patience with it. For one, it suggests a block universe such as makes little allowance if any at all even for the exercise of God’s will. These are just a few general remarks to indicate the mode and the various lines of al-Ghazali’s arguments against the philosophers; they may now be substantiated and amplified by listing some of the actual points of his criticism.
The statement that God’s self-knowledge necessarily implies the knowledge of all the existent particulars in the universe cannot be logically validated, nor can it be verified on the basis of any analogous human experience. God’s self-knowledge and His knowledge of others do not have the relation of logical entailment, for it is possible to imagine the existence of the one without imagining the existence of the other at the same time. Looking to our own experience it would be wrong to claim that man’s knowledge of what is other than himself is identical with his self-knowledge and with his essence.
It may be said that God does not know other things in the first intention {610} (al-wajh al-awwal) but that He knows His essence as the principle of the universe and from this His knowledge of the universe follows in the second intention (al-wayh al-thani), i. e., by way of a logical inference. Now, the statement of the philosophers that God knows Himself directly only as the principle of the universe, according to al-Ghazali, is as much an arbitrary assumption as the earlier statement and is exposed to exactly the same kind of criticism. According to the philosophers’ own admission, it would suffice that God should know only His essence; the knowledge of His being the principle of the universe is additional to it and is not logically implicated in it. Just as it is possible for a man to know himself without knowing that he is “an effect of God” (for his being an effect is a relation to this cause), even so it is possible for God to know Himself without knowing that He is the principle or cause.
The principle or cause is merely the relation that He bears to His effect, the universe. His knowledge of His relation to the universe is not by any means entailed by His knowledge of His own essence. Do not the philosophers themselves in their doctrine with regard to the attributes of God affirm the possibility only of negative or relational statements about God on the plea that negations or relations add nothing to His essence?64 The knowledge of the relation, therefore, cannot be identical with the knowledge of the essence. Hence the philosophers’ assumption that God knows His essence and thereby also knows Himself as the principle of the universe, remains unproved logically and unverified experientially. Al-Ghazālī raises many more points of criticism of a similar nature which fully bring out the “positivistic” and “analytic” thrusts in his thought. This type of criticism should have been sufficient with al-Ghazālī, for it served his purpose of refuting the philosophers quite effectively, but his religious calling and persuasion impell him to launch many more attacks on the philosophers. They do not aim so much at the complete smashing of the philosophers’ arguments as to bring out either inconsistencies in their various positions or more so the difficulties of a religious nature in accepting them.
Al-Ghazālī fully appreciates the motive of the philosophers in elaborating their theory with regard to the nature of God’s knowledge of the particulars, which is no other than that of safeguarding the immutability and the unity of God. Eliminating the factor of time or change altogether in God’s knowledge, however, has difficulties of its own which will be noted presently, but there is another aspect of the philosophers’ treatment of the problem of God’s knowledge which lands them into a morass of contradictions and annuls the very purpose for which it is belaboured, i. e., that of establishing the unity of God. Granted that God’s knowledge remains unaffected by change, for it rises above the distinction of “is,” “was” and “will,” yet how can God’s knowledge remain unaffected by the multiplicity and diversity of the objects that He knows? How can it be claimed that knowledge remains unitary even {611} when the things known are unlimited in number and are different, for knowledge has to conform to the nature of the things known? If the change in the objects of cognition necessarily presupposes change in the subject, multiplicity and difference in the former presuppose the same in the latter.
“Would that I could understand,” says al-Ghazālī, “how an intelligent person can allow himself to disbelieve the oneness of the knowledge of a thing whose states are divisible into the Past, the Present, and the Future; while he would not disbelieve the oneness of knowledge which relates to all the different Genera and Species. Verily the difference and the disparity among the diverse Genera and Species is more marked than the difference which may actually be found to exist among the states of a thing divisible in accordance with the division of time. If that difference does not necessitate multiplicity and difference, how can this do so either?”65
Though the philosophers ascribe omniscience and fore-knowledge to God, they make His knowledge a sort of mirror which passively reflects in an eternal now the details of an already finished sequence of events just as we in a particular present moment have the memory of a fixed and inalterable sequence of past events. Thus, God’s knowledge of time is restricted only to the relational aspect of time, i. e., that of the sequence of before and after or of earlier and later. There is, however, another aspect of time which typically characterizes the human experience and forms its very essence, namely, that of the ever-fleeting, ever-changing now. This is the time which is born afresh at every moment, the time in which the future is perpetually flowing through the present into the past. Now, according to the philosophers’ thesis of God’s knowledge as explained above, in God’s eternal being there can be no counterpart of the experience of this living time in which we humans move and act. God may know, for example, that my acts of religious devotion are subsequent to my religious conversion, but He cannot know now that I am acting or have acted in such and such a way.
So God in His supra-temporal transcendence would remain impervious to my religious solicitations, for I am eternally doomed to the tyranny of this ever-fleeting, ever-trembling now. 66 Should this be true and should I come to realize it, I may cry in despair: “Of what use is God to me!” Such is the catastrophe to which the philosophers’ over-emphasis upon the eternality and changelessness of God’s knowledge leads through its very incumbent logic. The problem of the relation of the eternality of God to {612} the temporality of human experience is almost an impossible problem and the philosophers of all times have stumbled over it. It may be suggested, however, that God is transcendental to both time and change and yet in some mysterious way immanent in it. Viewed superficially, this seems to be an apparent logical contradiction, but, adds al-Ghazālī, the philosophers dare not point this out for they themselves have affirmed with regard to their doctrine of the eternity of the world that the world is eternal and yet at the same time subject to change.
The statement that God not only knows the universe but, further, that this knowledge is the very ground and the cause of the universe, though very significant in itself, is made by the philosophers essentially within the framework of their deterministic-emanationistic world-view and as such, according to al-Ghazālī, involves them into an embarrassing predicament.
There is no sense in talking about the knowledge of an agent when his action is a “natural action” in the sense that it follows from him necessarily and is not the result of his volition. We do not say that knowledge of light possessed by the sun is the requisite condition for the emanation of light from the sun, and this in fact is the analogy which the philosophers have employed to explain the procession of the world from the being of God. Further, according to them, the universe has not been produced by God all at once but has proceeded from Him through “the intermediaries and the other consequences and the consequences of those consequences all indirectly connected with these intermediaries.” 67 Even if it should be granted that the necessary procession of something from an agent requires the knowledge by him of that which proceeds, God’s knowledge at best would be only that of the first intelligence and of nothing besides. That which proceeds from something which proceeds from God may not be necessarily known to Him. Knowledge is not necessary in the case of the indirect consequences of volitional actions; how can it be so in the case of the indirect consequences of necessary actions? Thus, the assertion of the philosophers that God’s knowledge is the very ground and cause of that which He knows loses its entire significance because of its moorings in the Plotinian scheme of emanationism.
Through a strange irony of logic the emanationistic argument of the philosophers, instead of building a staircase between God and the world, creates almost an unbridgeable gulf between the two. It certainly leads to the conclusion that God is directly related only to the first intelligence, i.e., the first item of the series of emanations between God and the world; on the other hand, the world is directly related only to the lowest end of that series. Further, the argument makes the world an independent and autonomous system, which can be understood by itself because of its insistence on an inexorable causal necessity such as pervades the entire scheme of things.
This conception of a through and through causally determined universe rooted in the {613} intellectual-emanationistic metaphysics of the philosophers was so radically different from his own dynamic-occasionalistic world-view grounded in the theistic-voluntaristic metaphysics of the Ash’arite tradition that al-Ghazālī declared a complete parting of the way with them. Their world-view, al-Ghazālī made it clear, militates particularly against the fundamental Islamic doctrine of God’s providence and omnipotence, and leaves no possibility for the happening of miracles such as turning of a rod into a serpent, denaturing fire of its capacity to burn, revivification of the dead, splitting of the moon (all so clearly referred to in the Qur’an). 68 There certainly is no scope for the exercise of God’s freewill in a universe in which there is no real becoming and in which the future is already given in the present as its necessary effect. Nor, in view of the reign of the inexorable law of causal necessity in such a universe, is there any possibility for the miracles, except those which can be “naturalized” through scientific explanation.
6. Causality.-Al-Ghazālī’s desire to vindicate the truth of the religious position mentioned above led him to make a highly critical and acute analysis of the philosophers’ concept of causality. This analysis, which bears a strikingly close similarity to that of Hume’s, brings 69 out clearly the most remarkable originality and acumen of al-Ghazālī’s thought. The problem that engaged him at the outset of his inquiry with regard to the seventeenth disputation in the Tahāfut is the problem of the alleged necessity of the causal connection as maintained and insisted on by the philosophers. He challenges the validity of this necessity right as he opens the discussion. 70 “In our view,” he asserts, “the connection between what are believed to be cause and effect is not necessary.” The reason that he offers for the justification of his position is that the relation between cause and effect is not that of logical entailment. The affirmation of the one does not imply the affirmation of the other, nor does the denial of the one imply the denial of the other. Neither the existence nor the non-existence of the one is necessarily presupposed by the existence or the non-existence of the other. The relation between quenching of thirst and drinking, satiety and eating, burning and fire, or light and sunrise, etc., is not a necessary relation, for in no case does the one term logically imply the other. There is nothing logically contradictory in assuming that fire may not burn, and drinking may not quench thirst, and so on.
The alleged necessity of the causal connection is not logically warranted because through no amount of logical reasoning can we deduce the effect from {614} the cause. At best it is based on observation or experience. We observe that objects succeed one another or that similar objects are constantly conjoined. Now, this proves succession, not causation, or conjunction, not connection, The fire which is an inanimate object has no power to produce the effect of burning; “observation shows only that one is with the other and not that it is by it,” i. e., the effect happens with the cause and not through it (`indahu la bihi). 71
The notion of necessity is valid only in the case of logical relations such as identity, implication, disjunction, etc. In the sphere of mere natural relations necessity has no scope. In the order of nature, unlike the order of thought, we deal merely with the contingent and alogical entities which remain unrelated to each other except in the minds of the perceiver. Objects as such are not connected with one another; only the ideas of them get connected in our mind by association. The relation between fire and burning is not a necessary relation, for it does not belong to the realm of necessity but to that of possibility such as may happen or may not happen depending on the will of God. “It is only,” al-Ghazālī enunciates clearly, “when something possible is repeated over and over again (so as to form the Norm), that its pursuance of a uniform course in accordance with the Norm in the past is indelibly impressed upon our minds.” 72 Thus, if there is any semblance of necessity in the order of natural relations such as that of cause and effect, it is merely because the two terms which in nature remain extrinsic to each other, through constant repetition become conjoined in our consciousness. Causal necessity is just the habit of our mind: it is merely a psychological necessity and not a logical necessity. The psychological necessity differs from logical necessity in this that its denial like the latter does not involve us in a logical impossibility. Hence the miracles, such as the fire not burning the body of Abraham when he was thrown into it, are not impossible to think.
Al-Ghazālī insists that the denial of miracles can be justified only when it should be proved that they are logically impossible and where such proof is not forthcoming their denial is sheer ignorance and obduracy.
It is interesting to note further that al-Ghazālī, in the course of his discussion of the principle of causality and the possibility of miracles, comes close to propounding the notion of the composite nature of a cause and also that of plurality of causes. Cause he understands to be the sum total of many contributory factors, some of which are positive while others negative, and all of which have to be considered in conjunction. Take the case of a man seeing a coloured object: he should possess sound vision, he should open his eyes, there should be no obstruction between the eyes and the object of vision, the object should be a coloured one, the atmosphere should be not dark but have sufficient light, etc. Any one condition by itself cannot be taken to be a cause and a single negative condition such as the blindness of the {615} person or the darkness of atmosphere may make the cause non-operative though logically not impossible. The relation of cause and effect is based on observation and observation as such does not rule out the possibility that the same effect might follow some cause other than the apparent one. Even where we recognize that there are many causes for the same effect, we cannot limit the number of causes just to those which we ourselves have observed. So there are many causes for the same effect 73 and a cause is a sum total of many conditions. In view of this it is not possible to negate an effect on the negation of one particular cause but on the negation of all the various causes. This latter possibility, however, is emphatically discounted by al-Ghazālī so far as we are concerned, for it presupposes a complete and exhaustive knowledge of all the causes and their conditions, which knowledge we humans can never come to possess.
Moreover, causes by themselves are inert entities; will and action cannot be attributed to them. They act only through the power and agency of God. 74 The only will is the absolutely free-will of God which works unconstrained by any extraneous law or incumbency except the self-imposed law of contradiction. Thus, the things to which God’s power extends include mysterious and wonderful facts such as “elude the discernment of human sensibility.” Indeed, God’s power extends to all kinds of logical possibilities such as turning of a rod into a serpent, or the revivification of the dead. For the same reason it is not impossible for Him to bring about the resurrection of bodies in the life hereafter and all other things with regard to paradise and hell which have been mentioned in the Qur’an. 75 To deny them is both illogical and irreligious. One may add that, according to al-Ghazālī, not only all miracles are natural but also all nature is miraculous. 76 Nature, however, seems to be pervaded by a causal nexus only because as a rule God does not choose to interrupt the continuity of events by a miracle; it is possible, however, that Ile might intervene at any moment that He deems fit. Such a standpoint may make one sceptical of the phenomena of nature, but it may equally lead one to an acute mystical sense of the presence of God to all things. Scepticism of this kind and mysticism need not always be antithetical-the former may as well lead to the latter. This indeed is said to have had happened in the case of al-Ghazālī. {616}
M. Saeed Sheikh, M. A.
Professor of Philosophy, Government College, Lahor (Pakistan)
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