The Problem of a Created World

This paper will present and respond to al-Ghazālī’s argument that God eternally willed the world to be created at a specific moment in time; I will refer to this throughout the paper as “the eternal will hypothesis.” Because Ghazālī’s proof and my own responses to his arguments depend heavily on an understanding of God as eternal, I begin the paper by stipulating that God is axiomatically taken to be infinite in nature. In §1, I present Ghazālī’s argument on behalf of philosophers who argue that the world exists eternally, which, in brief, proposes that a created world is impossible because in all instances it involves a change in God that violates His nature as an eternal being. In §2 I explicate Ghazālī’s eternal will hypothesis, which responds to §1 by asserting that God’s eternally willing a specific moment to be the time of creation does not require any change in God, and thereby serves as a viable explanation for a created world. In §3, I set the stage for two objections to Ghazālī’s eternal will hypothesis by demonstrating how his example of two dates separates coincidental predisposition toward an entity from willful selection of an entity. From this understanding, I object in §4 that willfully choosing a moment of creation, as in the date example, necessarily requires that God pre-exist His will of this moment, and thereby contradicts both Ghazālī’s eternal will hypothesis and the nature of God as eternal. Lastly, in §5, I argue that although foregoing commitment to God’s willful choosing of the moment of creation avoids the violation of eternity that occurs in §4, committing Him to a nature as eternally willing the moment of creation relegates God to the coincidental type of selection mentioned in §3 and in so doing undermines the Ghazālīan conception of will established in §3.