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

will is completely undetermined. His will does not depend on distinctions in
outside things, but He creates the distinctions Himself. The idea of God’s
creative will is of Stoic origin. According to the Neoplatonic conception
God’s knowledge is creative. We know because things are; things are
because God knows them. This idea of the creative knowledge of God has
a very great diffusion in philosophy (just as our bodies live by the eternal
spark of life transmitted to us by our ancestors, so we rekindle in our
minds the thoughts of those who are no more); it is found, for instance, in
St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, and Kant-who calls it
intellektuelle Anschauung, intellectual intuition, and it is also used by the
Muslim philosophers when it suits them. Against Ghazali’s conception,
however, Averroës has the following argument: If God creates the world
arbitrarily, if His Will establishes the distinctions without being determined
by any reason, neither wisdom nor goodness can be attributed to Him. We
have here a difficulty the Greeks had seen already. Either God is beyond
the laws of thought and of morals and then He is neither good nor wise, or
He Himself stands under their dominion and then He is not omnipotent.
Another argument for the eternity of the world is based on the eternity of
time: God cannot have a priority to time, as the theologians affirm,
because priority implies time and time implies movement. For the
philosophers God’s priority to the world consists solely in His being its
simultaneous cause. Both parties, however, seem to hold that God’s
existence does not imply time, since He exists in timeless eternity. But in
this case, what neither of the parties has seen, no causal relation between
God and the world can exist at all, since all causation implies a
simultaneous time.
We come now to the most important argument which shows the basic
difference between the philosophical and theological systems. For
Aristotle the world cannot have come to be because there is no absolute
becoming. Everything that becomes comes from something. And, as a
matter of fact, we all believe this. We all believe more or less
unconsciously (we are not fully aware of our basic principles: a basement
is always obscure) in the dictum rien ne se crée, rien ne se perd. We
believe that everything that comes to be is but a development, an
evolution, without being too clear about the meaning of these words
(evolution means literally ‘unrolling’, and Cicero says that the procession
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