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

God possesses self-consciousness). Ghazali does not admit this
disjunction and, besides, argues with Plotinus that self-consciousness
implies a subject and an object, and therefore would impede the
philosophers’ thesis of God’s absolute unity.
The Muslim philosophers, following Aristotle’s Neoplatonic
commentators, affirm that God’s self-knowledge implies His knowledge of
all universals (a line of thought followed, for instance, by Thomas Aquinas
and some moderns like Brentano). In man this knowledge forms a
plurality, in God it is unified. Avicenna subscribes to the Qur’anic words
that no particle in Heaven or Earth escapes God’s knowledge, but he
holds, as Porphyry had done before, that God can know the particular
things only in a universal way, whatever this means. Ghazali takes it to
mean that God, according to Avicenna, must be ignorant of individuals, a
most heretical theory. For Averroës God’s knowledge is neither universal
nor particular, but transcending both, in a way unintelligible to the human
mind.
One thing, however, God cannot know according to Avicenna (and he
agrees here with Plato’s Parmenides) and that is the passing of time, for in
the Eternal no relation is possible to the fleeting ‘now’. There are two
aspects of time: the sequence of anteriority and posteriority which remains
fixed for ever, and the eternal flow of the future through the present into
the past. It will be eternally true that I was healthy before I sickened and
God can know its eternal truth. But in God’s timeless eternity there can be
no ‘now’ simultaneous with the trembling present in which we humans live
and change and die, there is no ‘now’ in God’s eternity in which He can
know that I am sickening now. In God’s eternal stillness the fleeting facts
and truths of human experience can find no rest. Ghazali objects,
erroneously, I think, that a change in the object of thought need not imply
a change in the subject of consciousness.
In another chapter Ghazali refutes the philosophers’ proof that Heaven is
animated. He does not deny its possibility, but declares that the
arguments given are insufficient. He discusses also the view that the
heavens move out of love for God and out of desire to assimilate
themselves to Him, and he asks the pertinent question-already posed by
Theophrastus in his Metaphysics, but which scandalizes Averroës by its
prosaicness-why it is meritorious for them to circle round eternally and
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