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

say that the age of the world is a definite quantity and cannot be longer or
shorter than it is, in conformity with the philosophical doctrine about the
size of the world. Therefore these arguments are not stringent, and the
safest way for him who accepts the temporal creation of the world is to
regard time as of a definite extension and not to admit a possibility which
precedes the possible; and to regard also the spatial extension of the
world as finite. Only, spatial extension forms a simultaneous whole; not so
time.
Ghazali expounds a certain kind of argument attributed to the
philosophers on this subject against the theologians when they denied that
the impossibility of delay in the Creator’s act after His existence is known
by primitive intuition:
How will you defend yourselves, theologians, against the
philosophers, when they drop this argument, based on the
necessity of thought, and prove the eternity of the world in
this way, saying that times are equivalent so far as the
possibility that the Divine Will should attach itself to them is
concerned, for what differentiates a given time from an
earlier or a later time? And it is not absurd to believe that the
earlier or the later might be chosen when on the contrary you
theologians say about white, black, movement, and rest that
the white is realized through the eternal Will although its
substrate accepts equally black and white. Why, then, does
the eternal Will attach itself to the white rather than to the
black, and what differentiates one of the two possibles from
the other for connexion with the eternal Will? But we
philosophers know by the necessity of thought that one thing
does not distinguish itself from a similar except by a
differentiating principle, for if not, it would be possible that
the world should come into existence, having the possibility
both of existing and of not existing, and that the side of
existence, although it has the same possibility as the side of
non-existence, should be differentiated without a
differentiating principle. If you answer that the Will of God is
the differentiating principle, then one has to inquire what
differentiates the Will, i.e. the reason why it has been
53