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

“that the world is an act” than that it is an effect having an
everlasting relation to God. Speak of this as an “act” or not
just as you please, for do not let us quibble about words
when their sense has once been established.’
Ghazali says:
I say:
Our answer is that our aim in this question is to show that
you philosophers use those venerable names without
justification, and that God according to you is not a true
agent, nor the world truly His act, and that you apply this
word metaphorically-not in its real sense. This has now been
shown.
In this argument he supposes that the philosophers concede to him that
they only mean by God’s agency that He is the cause of the world, and
nothing else, and that cause and effect are simultaneous. But this would
mean that the philosophers had abandoned their original statement, for
the effect follows only from its cause, in so far as it is a formal or final
cause, but does not necessarily follow from its efficient cause, for the
efficient cause frequently exists without the effect’s existing. Ghazali acts
here like a guardian who tries to extract from his ward the confession of
having done things he did not allow him to do. The philosophers’ theory,
indeed, is that the world has an agent acting from eternity and everlasting,
i.e. converting the world eternally from non-being into being. This question
was formerly a point of discussion between Aristotelians and Platonists.
Since Plato believed in a beginning of the world, there could not in his
system be any hesitation in assuming a creative agent for the world. But
since Aristotle supposed the world to be eternal, the Platonists raised
difficulties against him, like the one which occupies us here, and they said
that Aristotle did not seem to admit a creator of the world. If was therefore
necessary for the Aristotelians to defend him with arguments which
establish that Aristotle did indeed believe that the world has a creator and
an agent. This will be fully explained in its proper place.
The principal idea is that according to the Aristotelians the celestial
bodies subsist through their movement, and that He who bestows this
movement is in reality the agent of this movement and, since the
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