Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The question is not whether God can reassemble what He has scattered. It is whether the philosophers have demonstrated that He cannot. They offer three alternatives for how a soul might return to a body, and then argue that all three are impossible.1 The first: that soul and body are both annihilated at death, and resurrection means God creates them again.
They object that a newly created replica is not the same individual as what perished.2 The second: that the soul survives and the original body, with all its very parts, is reconstituted. The third: that the soul is returned to a body, whether composed of the original matter or of other matter, the identity of the person residing in the soul rather than the matter.3
My answer to the objection about identity is this: the philosophers have not demonstrated that reconstitution of annihilated things produces only a replica rather than the original. They have asserted it. Asserting is not demonstrating, and I demand the proof. More fundamentally, the one who denies resurrection has not considered how he knows that the causes of existence are confined to what he has observed.4
There may be, in the treasury of divine power, causes unknown to him that produce the resurrection of bodies and render them disposed to receive the returning souls — just as a man who had never seen a magnet would deny that iron could be drawn without a string, because he has observed only one pattern of attraction.5 His denial rests on nothing more than thinking the unfamiliar unlikely.
The philosophers press further: the divine act follows one fixed course that does not change, and God Himself has said there is no change in His way.6 But this argument turns on a confusion between the regularity of God's custom and its necessity. I have argued, in the discussion of natural science, that the connection between causes and effects in existence is one of concomitance, not necessity — it is within God's power to bring about the effect without its habitual cause, or the cause without its usual effect.7
The habitual course is not a constraint upon the one who established it. Miracles — the staff becoming a serpent, the dead restored to life, the moon split — are precisely the disruption of what the philosophers have mistaken for a necessary constant.8 Resurrection, then, is not a violation of a law. It is an instance of the same divine power that runs the habitual order, acting outside the pattern it has established but is not bound by.
Whether the resurrection of bodies proceeds through direct divine power without mediation, or through causes unknown to us, both are possible.9 The wonders of creation are already before us: the single drop of sperm divides in the womb into seven layers of the eye, into teeth that are hard and tongue that is soft, into nerves and bones and cartilage — all from one undifferentiated origin.10
A person who has seen this and still finds the resurrection of scattered bones improbable has not thought carefully about what he has already conceded.
The first alternative is to say that the human consists of body and life... The second alternative is to say that the soul exists and survives death but that the first body is changed back into existence with all its very parts. The third alternative is to say that the soul would be returned to a body, regardless of whether the body is reconstituted from those original bodily parts or formed from other parts.The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 459–460
once life and the body become annihilated, then the commencing of their creation would consist of bringing into existence a replica of what had been, not what is identical with what had been.The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 459–460
The resurrected would be that identical human inasmuch as the soul would be that same soul. As regards matter, no attention should be given it, since the human is not a human because of it, but by virtue of the soul.The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 459–460
The one who denies the resurrection does not give thought to the question of how he would know the confining of the causes of existence to what he has observed.The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 475–476
if a human had never seen a magnet and its attraction of iron and this fact is related to him, he would deny it, saying, 'No attraction of iron is conceivable except through a string attached to it and then pulled, for this is what is observed in things being pulled.'The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 473–474
The divine act has one fixed course that does not change... 'You will not find any change in God's way' [Qur'ān 48:23].The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 475–476
their judgment that this connection between causes and effects that one observes in existence is a connection of necessity, so that it is within neither the realm of power nor possibility to bring about the cause without the effect or the effect without the cause.The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 355–356
The contention over the first theory is necessary, inasmuch as on its refutation rests the affirmation of miracles that disrupt the habitual course of nature, such as the changing of the staff into a serpent, revival of the dead, and the splitting of the moon.The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 355–356
the connection of connected things in existence is not by necessity, but that habitual patterns can be disrupted, whereby these matters would come about through God's power without the existence of their causes... in the treasury of things enactable by divine power there are unknown wondrous and strange things.The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 473–474
his denial will be even stronger than the denial of the atheists who said: 'When we were moldy bones'... will have its similar parts divide in the womb of a woman to form different organs, by way of flesh, nerves, bones, veins, cartilages, and fat, from which there comes to be the eye with seven layers differing in constitution, the tongue, the teeth.The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 475–476