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

For the unphilosophical, however, they are binding, since the sanctity of
the State depends on them.
When we have read the long discussions between the philosophers and
theologians we may come to the conclusion that it is sometimes more the
formula than the essence of things which divides them. Both philosophers
and theologians Arm that God creates or has created the world. For the
philosophers, since the world is eternal, this creation is eternal. Is there,
however, any sense in calling created what has been eternally? For the
theologians God is the creator of everything including time, but does not
the term ‘creation’ assume already the concept of time? Both the
philosophers and theologians apply to God the theory that His will and
knowledge differ from human will and knowledge in that they are creative
principles and essentially beyond understanding; both admit that the
Divine cannot be measured by the standards of man. But this, in fact,
implies an avowal of our complete ignorance in face of the Mystery of
God. Still, for both parties God is the supreme Artifex who in His wisdom
has chosen the best of all possible worlds; for although the philosophers
affirm also that God acts only by natural necessity, their system, like that
of their predecessors, the Platonists, Peripatetics, and Stoics, is
essentially teleological. As to the problem of possibility, both parties
commit the same inconsistencies and hold sometimes that the world
could, sometimes that it could not, have been different from what it is.
Finally, both parties believe in God’s ultimate Unity.
And if one studies the other works of Ghazali the resemblance between
him and the philosophers becomes still greater. For instance, he too
believes in the spirituality of the soul, notwithstanding the arguments he
gives against it in this book; he too sometimes regards religious concepts
as the symbols of a higher philosophical or mystical truth, although he
admits here only a literal interpretation. He too sometimes teaches the
fundamental theory of the philosophers which he tries to refute so
insistently in our book, the theory that from the one supreme Agent as the
ultimate source through intermediaries all things derive; and he himself
expresses this idea (in his Alchemy of Happiness and slightly differently in
his Vivification of Theology) by the charming simile of an ant which seeing
black tracings on a sheet of paper thinks that their cause is the pen, while
it is the hand that moves the pen by the power of the will which derives
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