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

have come into being, in so far as it was a natural existent, from principles
appropriate to natural things, rather than from principles appropriate to
artificial things, i. e. the will. Since, however, it is established that the world
exists through a First Agent which preferred its existence to its
nonexistence, it is necessary that this agent should be a willer, and if this
First Agent does not cease to prefer the world’s existence to its
nonexistence, and the willer-as Ghazali says-must have knowledge, the
philosophers are in complete agreement with the theologians about this
fundamental point. The whole theological argument, however, which he
gives has only persuasive power, because it compares natural things to
artificial.
As to what he says of the philosophers, that they believe that what
proceeds from the Creator proceeds in a natural way, this is a wrong
imputation. What they really believe is that existents proceed from Him in
a way superior to nature and to the human will, for both these ways are
subject to an imperfection, but they are not the only possible ways, since it
has been proved that the act of God can proceed from Him neither in a
natural way nor in a voluntary, in the sense in which this is understood in
the sublunary world. For will in an animal is the principle of movement,
and if the Creator is devoid of movement, He is devoid of the principle of
movement in the way a voluntary agent in the empirical world moves. ‘
What proceeds from God proceeds in a nobler way than the voluntary, a
way which nobody can understand but God Himself. And the proof that He
wills is that He knows the opposites, and if He were an agent in absolutely
the same way as He is a knower, He would carry out the two contrary acts
together, and this is impossible; and therefore it is necessary that He
should perform one of the two contraries through choice.
The error of the theologians with regard to this question is that they say
that every act is either natural or voluntary, but do not understand the
meaning of either of these words. For nature, according to the
philosophers, has different meanings, the primary being the ascending of
fire and the descending of earth, ‘ and an existent only has this movement
when something has prevented it from being in its natural place, and there
was therefore something that constrained it; but the Creator is too high for
this kind of nature. The philosophers also apply the term ‘nature’ to every
potency from which an intellectual act proceeds, in the same way as the
356