Tahafut_al-Tahafut-transl-Engl-van-den-Bergh

so only through the corruption and disintegration of its parts, and those
parts which disconnect themselves from the decaying mass must
necessarily remain in the world in their totality or change into other parts,
and in either case an appreciable change must occur in the world, either in
the number or in the character of its parts. And if the size of the bodies
could change, their actions and affections would change too, and if their
actions and affections, and especially those of the heavenly bodies, could
change, changes would arise in the sublunary world. To imagine,
therefore, a dissipation of the heavenly bodies is to admit a
disarrangement in the divine order which, according to the philosopher,
prevails in this world. This proof is not absolutely strict.
Ghazali says:
The philosophers have a second proof of the impossibility
of the annihilation of the world. They say: The substance of
the world could not be annihilated, because no cause could
be imagined for this and the passage from existence to nonexistence
cannot take place without a cause. This cause
must be either the Will of the Eternal, and this is impossible,
for if He willed the annihilation of the world after not having
willed it, He would have changed; or it must be assumed that
God and His Will are in all conditions absolutely the same,
although the object of His Will changes from non-existence
to existence and then again from existence to non-existence.
And the impossibility of which we have spoken in the matter
of a temporal existence through an eternal will, holds also for
the problem of annihilation. But we shall add here a still
greater difficulty, namely, that the object willed is without
doubt an act of the wiper, for the act of him who acts after
not having acted-even if he does not alter in his own naturemust
necessarily exist after having not existed: if he
remained absolutely in the state he was in before, his act
would not be there. But when the world is annihilated, there
is no object for God’s act, and if He does not perform
anything (for annihilation is nothing), how could there be an
action? Suppose the annihilation of the world needed a new
act in God which did not exist before, what could such an act
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