On Sunday morning, starting my yoga was like putting a crinkly sculpture moulded out of tinfoil through all of the poses.
I spent a lot of the day going through
Ghazali’s “Incoherence of the Philosophers”. I had a hell of a time trying to
figure out how to answer the question for Tuesday’s tutorial, but here’s what I
came up with:
Al-Ghazali considers
a man who needs to choose between two equally tasty dates. How does he use this
example to refute the philosophers' argument that the world must be
eternal?
Ghazali
uses the analogy of the identical dates to show that just as the hungry person
will know which date to take without subjectively responding to imagined
differences or proximity the will of “god” does not need to choose between
temporal moments to bring the world into existence. The one that it chooses
will be the right one and the moments will have no bearing on the decision. It
is interesting that he equates “god’s” will or the motivation behind it with
hunger in this analogy. It would imply that creating the world was the result
of a need on “god’s” part.
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