Divine Intervention and the Broader Anti-Empirical Current — Epoche C2
The claim, and the dispute it actually enters Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) held that there is a mode of knowing above discursive reason, that its objects cannot be reached by sense or by inference, and that its warrant is a light God casts into the heart — and the question this essay asks is what that claim looks like when it is read as an epistemological thesis rather than as a piece of piety. Three terms need fixing before the reading can begin. Ashʿarite kalām is the dominant school of Sunnī rational theology from the tenth century onward, of which al-Ghazālī was the most celebrated exponent of his generation. Its cosmology is occasionalist: bodies are composed of indivisible atoms bearing accidents that do not endure through two successive moments, so that the world's persistence is a continuous divine re-creation, and what we call causation is the regular concomitance of events that God customarily creates together. Reliabilism, the modern term applied to this material, is the thesis that a belief is justified in virtue of having been produced by a process that reliably yields truths, whether or not the believer can cite that fact — an externalist thesis, since the ground of the justification need not be available to the person justified. Put those together and something structural follows immediately, before any text is consulted. Under occasionalism, no created thing produces anything, so the reliable 'process' in which justification consists cannot be a property of the cognitive faculty. It can only be a property of God's customary practice. Reliability is therefore not merely contingent in the modest sense that a faculty might have been built differently; it is contingent at every instant, sustained by a will that is under no created necessity and that suspends the custom in the case of miracle. This is reliabilism with the reliability relocated outside the world. The earlier and shorter version of this essay opened by opposing a 'prevailing scholarly consensus' that Islamic epistemological reliabilism developed in isolation from other traditions. No such consensus exists, and the essay is stronger for saying so plainly rather than fighting a target that has to be invented. Nor could the earlier version's supporting authority for that claim be verified as a publication, and it has been dropped. The dispute in the field is a different one, and it is sharper. Richard Frank argued, in a pair of studies of 1992 and 1994, that al-Ghazālī was not in substance an Ashʿarite at all: that he had absorbed an Avicennan cosmology of real secondary causes acting by their natures within a system flowing necessarily from the divine essence, and retained Ashʿarite language for public consumption. Michael Marmura, who translated the Tahāfut al-Falāsifa , replied that nothing in the texts commits al-Ghazālī to genuine efficient causes in creatures and that the occasionalist reading stands. Frank Griffel's study of 2009 argues that al-Ghazālī deliberately left the question open, since two different analyses of the causal connection both satisfy his one non-negotiable requirement — that God be able to bring about the events the prophetic reports describe — and that he never chose between them because he did not need to. That is the live question, and it bears directly on the present argument: the claim, made without qualification in the earlier version, that occasionalism supplies 'the theological scaffolding' for al-Ghazālī's epistemology assumes the answer to a question the specialists have not settled. It should be advanced as a reading, and its dependence flagged. The regress that makes the claim necessary Al-Ghazālī's argument for a stage above reason is not an assertion of privilege. It is a regress argument, and it can be set out in three steps, all of them from al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl , the retrospective account he wrote near the end of his life. The steps deserve to be given in order, because the shorter version of this essay reported the conclusion and omitted the reasoning that produces it. He begins by fixing the standard. Certain knowledge is knowledge in which the object is disclosed so completely that no doubt attends it and no possibility of error can be entertained — and he supplies a test with teeth: if a challenger were to turn a stone into gold and a stick into a serpent in order to shake the belief, would it be shaken? A conviction that would survive that is certain; one that would not is opinion wearing certainty's clothes. Sense fails the test at once, and the counter-examples are the ordinary ones: the shadow that appears to be at rest and is found by comparison to have moved continuously; the star that appears the size of a coin and is demonstrated by astronomical argument to exceed the earth. In each case it is reason that convicts sense. The important feature of these examples is one the essay's earlier version could not exploit because it had cast al-Ghazālī as an opponent of empirical knowledge: he accepts the astronomical demonstration. Elsewhere in the same work he warns explicitly that a defender of religion who attacks the philosophers on arithmetic or on the calculation of eclipses inflicts a grave injury on religion, since the demonstrations are sound and their public refutation discredits whoever attempts it. Whatever 'anti-empirical' can mean here, it cannot mean hostility to observation or to mathematical science within their domain. The second step is the one that generates the regress. If sense is judged by reason, what judges reason? Al-Ghazālī's move is a symmetry argument, and it is the philosophically interesting part of the text. The authority reason exercises over sense is exercised from outside sense: the senses cannot detect their own error, and the correction arrives from a faculty whose deliverances they cannot represent. Nothing then rules out a further faculty standing to reason as reason stands to sense. He makes the possibility vivid with dream