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

for both agents, i.e. so far as the need for a new determinant is
concerned. Further, is this division into two agents complete, or does
demonstration lead to an agent which resembles neither the natural agent
nor the voluntary agent of human experience?
All these are multifarious and difficult questions which need, each of
them, a special examination, both in themselves and in regard to the
opinions the ancients held about them. To treat what is in reality a plurality
of questions as one problem is one of the well known seven sophisms,
and a mistake in one of these principles becomes a great error by the end
of the examination of reality.
Ghazali says:
I say:
There are two objections to this. The first objection is to
say: why do you deny the theory of those who say that the
world has been created by an eternal will which has decreed
its existence in the time in which it exists; that its nonexistence
lasts until the moment it ceases and that its
existence begins from the moment it begins; that its
existence was not willed before and therefore did not
happen, and that at the exact moment it began it was willed
by an eternal will and therefore began? What is the objection
to this theory and what is absurd in it?
This argument is sophistical: although it is not allowable for him to admit
the possibility of the actual effect being delayed after the actual cause,
and in a voluntary agent, after the decision to act, he regards it as possible
that the effect should be delayed after the will of the agent. It is possible
that the effect should be delayed after the will of the agent, but its being
delayed after the actual cause is impossible, and equally impossible is its
being delayed after a voluntary agent’s decision to act. The difficulty is
thus unchanged, for he must of necessity draw one of these two
conclusions: either that the act of the agent does not imply in him a
change which itself would need an external principle of change, or that
there are changes which arise by themselves, without the necessity of an
agent in whom they occur and who causes them, and that therefore there
are changes possible in the Eternal without an agent who causes them.
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