Causation: does fire burn cotton necessarily, or is the connection God's custom?

Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

What is observed is that the two occur together. Concomitance is not necessity, the philosophers have not demonstrated the connection they assert, and the habitual course of things is God's custom rather than a law that binds him.123

Sources

  1. We only deny their confining themselves to it and their denying the possibility of the changing of the staff into a serpent, the revivification of the dead, and other [miracles of the kind]. For this reason it becomes necessary to plunge into this question to affirm miracles and [to achieve] something else—namely, to support what all Muslims agree on, to the effect that God has power over all things.
    The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 360–362
  2. We only oppose them in these sciences with respect to four question: (19) The first is their judgment that this connection between causes and effects that one observes in existence ry ithin {that of] possibility to bring about the cause without the effect or the effect without the cause." connection of nec concomitance, so that it is within neither [the realm of] power nor (20) The second is their statement that…
    The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 355–356
  3. Both [explanations], according to us, are possible, as we have mentioned in the first question in the natural sciences when discussing [God's] making [all events] run according to a habitual course.
    The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 473–474

Where the argument is made

  • Tahāfut al-Falāsifa, Discussion 17 (Marmura's translation, Brigham Young, 2nd edition)
  • al-Iqtiṣād fī'l-Iʿtiqād on divine power and habit

How the argument was received

The most philosophically durable argument in the corpus and the one whose implications are still disputed.