What is fire cotton?

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

Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī answers

The question you are putting is not about fire cotton as some technical subject of its own — you are asking, I take it, about the example I use in Discussion 17 of the Tahāfut al-Falāsifa to press the point about causation. Cotton placed in contact with fire burns. That is what is observed. What the philosophers assert is something further: that the fire is the agent of the burning by its very nature, acting necessarily, incapable of restraint.¹

I deny this. What observation delivers is that burning occurs at the time of contact — not that it occurs by the fire, and not that there is no other cause.² The one who enacts the burning, creating blackness in the cotton, separating its parts, reducing it to cinder or ash, is God — either through the mediation of His angels or without mediation.³

The fire, being inanimate, has no action of its own. The example is chosen because it seems so obvious. Everyone watches cotton burn and thinks the fire did it. That appearance of necessity is precisely what I am pressing against. Concomitance is not causation, and the philosophers have produced no demonstration that it is — only the observation itself, which proves nothing beyond the co-occurrence.⁴

It is therefore within divine power to create the contact without the burning, or to create the transformation of the cotton into ash without any contact with fire at all.⁵ The story of Abraham in the fire is the case that sharpens it: if the connection were necessary in itself, no interpretation of that event would remain open.⁶ The argument is not scepticism for its own sake.

It is a defence of the intelligibility of prophecy and miracle against a necessity the philosophers claimed to have demonstrated and had not.

Sources

1. The first position is for the opponent to claim that the agent of the burning is the fire alone, it being an agent by nature [and] not by choice—hence, incapable of refraining from [acting according to] what is in its nature after contacting a substratum receptive of it.

   The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 363–364

2. Observation, however, [only] shows the occurrence [of burning] at [the time of the contact with the fire] but does not show the occurrence [of burning] by [the fire] and [the fact] that there is no other cause for it.

   The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 363–364

3. The one who enacts the burning by creating blackness in the cotton, [causing] separation in its parts, and making it cinder or ashes is God, either through the mediation of His angels or without mediation.

   The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 363–364

4. It has thus become clear that [something's] existence with a thing does not prove that it exists by [that thing].

   The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 363–364

5. it is within [divine] power to create satiety without eating, to create death without decapitation, to continue life after decapitation, and so on to all connected things.

   The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 361–363

6. they denied the falling of Abraham in the fire without the burning taking place, the fire remaining fire, and claimed that this is only possible by taking the heat out of the fire—which makes it no longer fire—or by changing the essence and body of Abraham into a stone.

   The Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 366–367