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

which only some movements inhere, namely the eternal which is a body
like the heavenly bodies, and when this distinction, which the philosophers
require, is made, this objection becomes futile, for the discussion is only
concerned with the incorporeal eternal.
Having made this objection against the philosophers, he gives the
answer of the philosophers about this question, and the summary is that
they are only prevented from admitting temporal knowledge in the First,
because temporal knowledge must arise through itself or through another;
and in the former case there would proceed from the eternal a temporal
being, and according to the principles of the philosophers no temporal
being can proceed from the eternal. Then he argues against this assertion
that from the eternal no temporal being can proceed, by showing that they
assume that the sphere is eternal and that they assume that temporal
beings proceed from it.
But their justification of this is that the temporal cannot proceed from an
absolutely eternal being, but only from an eternal being which is eternal in
its substance, but temporal in its movements, namely the celestial body;
and therefore the celestial body is according to them like an intermediary
between the absolutely eternal and the absolutely temporal, for it is in one
way eternal, in another way temporal, and this intermediary is the celestial
circular movement according to the philosophers, and this movement is
according to them eternal in its species, temporal in its parts. And so far
as it is eternal, it proceeds from an eternal, and in so far as its parts are
temporal, there proceed from them infinite temporal beings. And the only
reason that prevented the philosophers from accepting an existence of
temporal beings in the First was that the First is incorporeal and temporal
beings only exist in body, for only in body, according to them, there is
receptivity, and that which is free from matter has no receptivity.
And Ghazali’s objection to the second part of the argument of the
philosophers, namely that the First Cause cannot be an effect, is that it is
possible that God’s knowledge should be like the knowledge of man, that
is that the things known should be the cause of His knowledge and their
occurrence the cause of the fact that He knows them, just as the objects
of sight are the cause of visual perception and the intelligible the cause of
intellectual apprehension; so that in this way God’s producing and creating
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