al‑Ghazali: Incoherence and Occasionalism

You light a match, hold it to cotton, and it burns.
To most people, that’s “cause and effect”; to Abū Hāmid al‑Ghazali, it is a mistake to say the fire caused the burning in any necessary sense.

In The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al‑Falāsifa), al‑Ghazali launches a famous attack on Avicennian falsafa. One of his most discussed points is about causality. Philosophers, he says, treat natural causes as if their connection to effects were necessary: given fire and cotton in contact under normal conditions, burning must occur. Al‑Ghazali denies this. For him, only God is a true cause in that strong sense. What we observe—fire followed by burning—is just a habit God has established. This view is often called occasionalism. The idea is that created things do not have independent causal power; God creates both the “cause” and the “effect” events in sequence. Fire has no built‑in necessity to produce burning; God simply chooses, most of the time, to create burning when fire touches cotton. This preserves, in his view, divine omnipotence and room for miracles. If natural causes were necessary, God could not interrupt them without contradiction. By denying necessity in created causation, al‑Ghazali keeps God free. He also worries that the philosophers’ metaphysics leads to heretical positions: that the world is eternal, that God knows only universals, and that there is no bodily resurrection. For him, their reliance on Aristotelian necessity undercuts key Islamic doctrines. The attack on natural causation is therefore both epistemological (we never see necessity, only conjunction) and theological (we must attribute real power only to God). Later Western readers often compare him to Hume, but al‑Ghazali’s target is different: his main concern is to block a worldview where God becomes a distant first cause rather than an active, willing agent in every event.

“In our view, the connection between what are believed to be the cause and the effect is not necessary. Take any two things. The philosophers deny this possibility; indeed, they assert its impossibility. Since the inquiry concerning these things (which are innumerable) may go to an indefinite length, let us consider only one example—viz., the burning of a piece of cotton at the time of its contact with fire. We admit the possibility of a contact between the two which will not result in burning, as also we admit the possibility of the transformation of cotton into ashes without coming into contact with fire. And they reject this possibility.

We say that it is God who—through the intermediacy of angels, or directly—is the agent of the creation of blackness in cotton, of the disintegration of its parts, and of their transformation into a smouldering heap or ashes. Fire, which is an inanimate thing, has no action. How can one prove that it is an agent?”

— al‑Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Discussion 17 (on causality), trans. Sabih Ahmad Kamali

Al‑Ghazali starts with a conceptual point: from the idea of cotton and fire alone, you cannot deduce burning as a logical necessity. It is at least thinkable that cotton touches fire and does not burn, or burns without fire. Philosophers say this is impossible; he says it is possible. That is enough, for him, to break the claim of necessary connection. Then he brings in theology: once you give up necessity, you can say it is God who creates both the “contact” and the “burning” events according to His will. The second paragraph is blunt: fire is “an inanimate thing” with “no action.” All the features we associate with burning—the blackness, the disintegration into ash—are direct products of divine agency. The point is not to deny regularity; al‑Ghazali agrees that God usually keeps the pattern stable, which is why science and everyday life remain possible. But in principle, God can suspend or alter it at any moment, and that matters for miracles and for seeing the world as dependent at every instant on divine willing. Philosophers like Averroes will push back, arguing that this makes the world unintelligible; al‑Ghazali thinks it preserves true monotheism.

Consider modern medical expectations. When you take an antibiotic, you expect the infection to clear because the drug “causes” bacterial death. An al‑Ghazali‑style occasionalist could say: you are observing a stable habit of God—most of the time, when antibiotic molecules and bacteria meet under certain conditions, God creates a sequence of events we describe as bacterial death. Miracles, on this view, are cases where God simply declines to create the usual effect (e.g., someone recovers without medicine, or survives a normally fatal injury). A contemporary believer who thanks God rather than the medicine is, in a way, echoing this occasionalist intuition.

If you deny that creatures have genuine causal powers, do you undermine the very basis of science, which relies on stable causes? Or can you keep robust empirical inquiry while still saying, with al‑Ghazali, that only God truly “does” anything?