The Servant Boy is a Horse in the Library

            On Thursday when Professor Black came in I called out to her, “To Tell the Truth!” She nodded and shared that she’d looked it up as well, assuring us that she only uses Wikipedia to research pop culture references. From behind me, Ryan wondered what “To Tell the Truth” was and so I explained to him that it was a game show. In each game, three contestants would all come in and claim to be the same person with the same experience and three panellists would interview them and finally guess which of them is telling the truth. Deborah Black commented, “They just don’t make game shows as well as they used to!” Ryan asked, “So you don’t like The Price is Right?” She said, “I hate to tell you, but The Price is Right has been around a long time as well.”

            She began the lecture.

            The problem Ghazali had with metaphysics was that the arguments don’t harmonize with religion. One can’t reject religious ideas outside of a religious context.

            Ghazali was idiosyncratic.

            Of math and logic: If someone shows themselves to be a great mathematician there is danger of accepting what they say about everything else. Or one might go the opposite way and reject everything someone says if they are wrong in one area.

            Of physics, Ghazali says there is nothing wrong with it. This is tricky. She once again brought up the game show and said, “Will the real Ghazali please stand up?” It’s hard to know where he stands. If accepting natural science means requiring natural causes, Ghazali is on thin ground.

            His diagnosis of the problem with philosophy does not match what philosophers do. Ghazali doesn’t say much about ethics. He thinks the Greeks were out to elaborate on the virtues of character. There’s a danger of throwing everything out from both philosophy and theology. He thought philosophers didn’t live up to their own standards and that direct knowledge was needed.

            That was the end of Professor Black’s lecture on Ghazali’s autobiography. She moved then to his book, “Incoherence of the Philosophers”. The first part refutes the idea that the world is eternal. The second part, the 17^th Discussion is his response to the attack on necessary connections. David Hume echoed Ghazali’s views on causality. Nicolas Malebranche actually cited Ghazali on this topic. They were both Occasionalists, insisting that creatures (angels) are not causes. Ghazali called into question the philosophers connecting of the world and the divine. God is the only true agent while the creature’s instruments are occasions. God builds atoms from moment to moment.

            Ghazali’s arguments are epistemological (relating to the nature of human knowledge). He says that if philosophers were honest they couldn’t make the kinds of claims they do about there being necessary connections in the physical world. One could become a skeptic then, but the other choice is that allowing for no underlying causal structure in the physical world it makes room for miracles such as bodily resurrection as reported in the Qu’ran.

            Cause leading to (with, concomitant, simultaneous) Effect. Avicenna thinks they are spontaneous. There is nothing to show necessitation as in try or through. The agent cause is distinct from the effect.

            This is not that cause and effect are discrete individual things.

            Ghazali drew from the looseness of Avicenna and concluded that sensation alone will not work. If there is a necessary connection it should be logical. It is possible to imagine that a cause occurs but the effect won’t follow as in eating without getting full or someone being decapitated and not dying like the headless horseman. Imagine the reversing of the laws of physics as in Roadrunner cartoons. If you can imagine this it is not impossible. God chooses to make everything work in its customary, regular way but can change its mind.

            If you take cotton, god is the agent of its whiteness and if you set it on fire god causes and is the agent of its burning and its blackness.

            Ghazali says we can accept legitimate descriptions off the order. How can you be certain that your servant boy has not turned into a horse in your library? This is a traditional Asharite answer. God created knowledge in our minds that things are regular but when it performs a miracle we can recognize that possibility. But god cannot cause 2 + 2 = 5.

            Ghazali’s second causal theory is what if we want to maintain necessity but still come up with an account to make miracles possible? What if god could just make the normal stuff happen faster? If you’ve heard of people being thrown into fire without being burned, god could have shielded them from the fire. As long as we preserve the natural order in explaining miracles we won’t get any argument from philosophers. Matter contains all possibilities and has potency within. Matter always does change into something else. So a rod is transformed into a snake. The things that a rod is made of will eventually break down and could eventually become the substances that a snake is made of. God could just fast-forward the process, so take that philosophers! You don’t have to buy it but you cannot be sure.

            Of the agency of entities that can make choices, philosophers have an impoverished conception of agency. Philosophers say the world is eternal and if god is the necessary existent then anything that issues from it if it creates the world is necessary. Ghazali says this must be overturned. He claims the philosophers model of the world is like that of the Asharites.

            If god creates the world how can the temporal proceed from it? Something eternal and unchanging creating the temporal is irrational. If you are eternal how do you arrive at a moment to create the world? You’re willing to be alone and then you suddenly start making stuff. Ghazali puts this in the mouths of the philosophers based on the decree of divorce. God could decree with an eternal decision. The temporal moment is built into the eternal will. If we understand the decree there are no pre-existent conditions. We are free agents.

            I passed Professor Black on the way out and said I’d see her Tuesday. She wished me a great weekend. She looks a lot older when she’s climbing the stairs than when she’s lecturing. She was really kind of struggling and pulling herself up by the handrail.

            The day before that I’d forgotten to mail my income report to Social Services, so after class I took College past Lansdowne to drop it off at the office. Then I took advantage of the rare occasion of being in that area and stopped at the big No Frills at Lansdowne and Dundas. They don’t always have better deals than Freshco but this time they did. They had red seedless grapes that were a lot fresher than Freshco and for the same price. I got some Thompson cinnamon bread, some Rubschlager bread, some old cheddar and a box of roasted red pepper crackers. They had large bottles of Listerine on sale and I got some Arm and Hammer toothpaste.

            I don’t know what it is with that location. Perhaps it’s because they’re at the top of a hill looking south and west, but that parking lot always seems to have a spectacular cloud display to greet me when I leave with my groceries.