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

field has never been, the up-torn trees are not rooted again. ‘Thou’ll come
no more, Never, never, never, never, never!’ Besides, Averroës, holding
as he does that the world is eternally produced out of nothing, is
inconsistent in regarding with Aristotle production and destruction as
correlatives.
In the third chapter Ghazali maintains that the terms acting and agent
are falsely applied to God by the philosophers. Acting, according to him,
can be said only of a person having will and choice. When you say that
fire burns, there is here a causal relation, if you like, but this implies
nothing but a sequence in time, just as Hume will affirm later. So when the
philosophers say that God’s acting is like the fire’s burning or the sun’s
heating, since God acts by natural necessity, they deny, according to
Ghazali, His action altogether. Real causation can only be affirmed of a
willing conscious being. The interesting point in this discussion is that,
according to the Ash‘arites and Ghazali, there is no causation in this world
at all, there is only one extra-mundane cause which is God. Even our acts
which depend on our will and choice are not, according to the Ash‘arites,
truly performed by ourselves. We are only the instruments, and the real
agent is God. But if this is true, how can we say that action and causation
depend on will and choice? How can we come to the idea of any causal
action in God depending on His Will if we deny generally that there is a
causal relation between will and action? The same contradiction is found
in modern philosophy in Mach. Mach holds that to speak of causation or
action in material things-so to say that fire burns-is a kind of fetishism or
animism, i.e. that we project our will and our actions into physical lifeless
things. However, at the same time he, as a follower of Hume, says that
causation, even in acts caused by will, is nothing but a temporal sequence
of events. He denies causation even in voluntary actions. Therefore it
would follow that the relation of willing and acting is not different from the
relation of fire and burning and that there cannot be any question of
fetishism or animism. According to such a theory there is no action at all in
the universe but only a sequence of events.
Then, after a second argument by which Ghazali sets out to show that
an eternal production and creation are contradictions in terms, since
production and creation imply the generation of something after its nonexistence,
he directs a third argument against the Neoplatonic theory, held
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