Who Really Lights the Fire: You, Nature, or God?
The World Rebuilt Every Second
Imagine you are in Baghdad in the year 850 CE. A theologian named al-Ashʿarī (874–936) argues that nothing in the universe has any power of its own. Not the fire that warms you, not the heart beating in your chest, not even your own hand. To understand why, you have to look at the world very closely.
These Islamic thinkers, known as the mutakallimūn, held that everything in creation is made of tiny atoms and their accidents—the properties those atoms have, like color, heat, or motion. They believed that God creates this world moment by moment. Imagine a film reel made of still frames. God creates you, your pale skin, and the room around you right now. If your skin stays pale in the next moment, that is because God actively recreates the accident of “paleness” in you. If you blush, God stops creating paleness and instead creates an accident of “redness.”
This is a radical version of occasionalism, the idea that God is the only true cause of every change. Al-Ashʿarī wanted to protect the doctrine of divine omnipotence. If God isn’t in total control of every single atom and accident at every single moment, then His power has a limit. To explain human actions without giving humans real power, al-Ashʿarī developed the idea of kasb (acquisition). God creates a temporary power inside you—say, the specific power to strike a cushion at a specific time. You “acquire” that action, but God creates the power and the result. Al-Ghazālī (1056–1111), a famous later thinker, explained this by saying a human power is related to its object in a “non-causal” way. You are attached to the action, but God is the engine making it happen.
The Justice Problem
But there is a massive problem with this picture. It threatens the idea of divine justice.
Suppose you intentionally shove a kid at school, and they fall and break their arm. According to the occasionalist view, God created the atoms of your anger, the motion of your arm, the contact, and the breaking of the bone. If God created that entire series of events, why should you be grounded? Why would a just God punish you for an action He performed Himself?
The Muʿtazilite school of theologians in the 8th century saw this as impossible. They argued that a perfectly just God must give human beings genuine power over their own actions. For them, the circle of agents includes both God and humanity. You really do cause your choice (ikhtiyār) and your bodily movement. Some accidents, like the broken arm, you produce by generation (tawallud)—you cause the shove, and even though God might bring the resulting accident into being, you are the source, so you are responsible.
The Muʿtazilite thinker ʿAbd al-Jabbār (935–1025) pushed this further. He asked: what happens before the action? You have motivations. But he argued that your motivation is never the full, sufficient cause that forces your action. An external force doesn’t just flow through you; you need to make a choice. A real agent must decide.
The Philosopher’s Middle Ground
While the theologians fought about justice versus omnipotence, a group of Islamic philosophers—the falāsifa—walked a third path. They followed the “First Teacher,” Aristotle, and his doctrine of the four causes. Chief among them was Ibn Sīnā (987–1037), known in the West as Avicenna.
Avicenna looked at a natural world full of real power. He defined the efficient cause as “that which bestows existence to another.” In his massive work The Book of Healing, he built a hierarchy of these causes. At the very top is God, the ultimate creative agent, who is absolutely immutable and causes the existence of a first intelligence. At the bottom is you and a campfire: small, temporary causes in the physical world. In between are celestial intelligences.
Crucially, Avicenna believed nature had rules. He used the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). The PSR says that if a possible thing exists, there must be a cause that specifies why it exists rather than not. Avicenna applied this to fire and cotton. Fire does have burning power. If you bring fire into contact with dry cotton and there is no obstacle—like a fire-resistant coating of talc—the fire necessitates the burning. Nature is a chain of necessity. Avicenna solved the problem of divine action by saying God acts necessarily too: because God is absolutely perfect and immutable, His knowledge and action don’t shift around like a human’s. The universe flows from God eternally, like light from the sun.
Al-Ghazālī’s Big Idea: There Is No “Fire Power”
Al-Ghazālī thought the philosophers had wandered off a cliff. In his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers, he launched his most famous attack: the argument against necessary connections.
You might think fire causes cotton to burn. But Al-Ghazālī says you only ever observe two things: contact with fire, and then the burning of the cotton. You never actually observe a secret force called “necessary connection.” We watch things happen side by side. Al-Ghazālī argues that God creates these sequences as a habit. It is entirely possible, he says, for the cotton to touch the fire and not burn. Why? Because fire is an inanimate object. It has no “action” of its own. The one who enacts the burning by creating blackness in the cotton is God.
Al-Ghazālī’s move was brilliant. It safeguarded miracles. If God simply makes it a habit for a staff to remain wood, it is easy for God to break the habit and make the staff a snake, or to keep a prophet safe inside a fiery furnace. Nothing in nature forces God’s hand. To show this in human action, he used a famous thought experiment. Imagine a starving man, a lover of dates, who must choose between two perfectly identical dates. The philosophers argued that without a small reason to prefer one (maybe it’s slightly bigger, or it’s on the left), he would be paralyzed. Al-Ghazālī insisted the will can simply pick, even when options are perfectly equal. The will creates a new chain of events for God to follow, without any external “push.”
The Fight That Never Ended
You might think this is a dusty argument from a world without science, but it is the exact same argument we have today.
Today, we have neuroscientists. Some look at brain scans and argue that your choices are just electrical signals in neurons—a perfect necessity, just like Avicenna’s fire burning cotton. If a brain is just atoms bouncing, do you really have free will? Like the Muʿtazilites, many people feel that if we don’t have a real choice, then justice—punishing criminals or praising heroes—makes no sense.
Al-Ghazālī’s skepticism about seeing causation is still alive too. We see a brain scan and we see a decision. But are we seeing the “cause” of the choice, or are we just watching two things happen side by side in time? The fight between the occasionalists, the Aristotelians, and the Muʿtazilites was not settled in the streets of Baghdad. It just moved into our laboratories. The next time you click a link or catch a ball, the 1,200-year-old question hangs in the air: did the atoms in your body force your hand to move, or did you move it?
Think about it
- If a supercomputer could predict your lunch choice next Tuesday with perfect accuracy, have you really chosen your food on Tuesday, or was it decided long ago?
- Al-Ghazālī says we see ice cream melt next to the sun, but we never see the sun “melting” the ice cream. What is one thing in your daily life that you believe causes another thing, even though you only see them happen in sequence?
- Imagine God recreates the universe every moment. The you from one hour ago is a copy, replaced by a new you now. What connects you to the person who was just eating a snack?
