Ibn Rushd (Averroes) · Philosophy
Averroes’s book-length reply to al-Ghazali - a defence of natural causation against the claim that God, not fire, does the burning. Fire burns cotton by its own nature, Averroes insists, and to deny that causes really act is to destroy knowledge, science, and the very idea of a wise Maker.
A century before Averroes, the theologian al-Ghazali had written The Incoherence of the Philosophers, a devastating critique that accused the great Muslim Aristotelians - above all Avicenna - of contradiction and impiety, and branded three of their doctrines outright unbelief. It was so effective that it is often blamed for cooling the philosophical fire in the Islamic east. Averroes, from the far west of the Muslim world, rose to answer it with a work whose title is a deliberate echo and taunt: The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahafut al-Tahafut). Its method is remarkable - Averroes quotes al-Ghazali’s arguments in sequence and replies to each in turn, so the book is a recorded debate across a hundred years. Nowhere is the combat fiercer than over a single humble example: a piece of cotton touched by a flame.
Averroes answers that al-Ghazali has denied the obvious and paid a ruinous price for it. Things in the world have natures - stable, defining characters that make them the kinds of things they are and give them their proper powers. Fire is not an inert lump on which God happens to hang the property of heat; being hot and burning is what fire is. To strip fire of its causal power is to strip it of its nature, and then the word ‘fire’ names nothing in particular. For Averroes, following Aristotle, to understand any object is to grasp what it does and can do; a thing’s activity flows from its essence. Deny that fire burns of its own nature and you have not defended God’s power so much as dissolved the identity of every object in the world into a nameless flux on which God alone acts.
This is Averroes’s master argument, and he wields it like a blade: knowledge is of causes, so to abolish causes is to abolish knowledge. The point is not merely that science is convenient and occasionalism inconvenient. It is that the very meaning of understanding is bound to causation. When we say we understand an eclipse, a disease, a proof, we mean we have grasped why it must be so, from what it follows. Cut the necessary tie between a thing and its effects and you have not just made prediction harder; you have emptied the words ‘because’ and ‘therefore’ of content. Averroes also thinks occasionalism insults God: a Maker whose world runs on arbitrary custom rather than intelligible order is not the wise Artisan the Qur’an praises but a capricious will. Real causes, far from crowding God out, are the very wisdom of His design made legible to the mind.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that al-Ghazali argued there is no necessary connection between cause and effect (God alone burns the cotton), and that Averroes replied that things act by their natures, that knowledge just is knowledge of causes, and that denying causation makes both science and a wise God unintelligible. Explain the cla…
Leads to Al Ghazali.
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