Aristotle Infinite Regress & Medieval islamic cosmology

Metaphysics seminar final paper

“Had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolutions of the years, have created number, and have given us a conception of time, and the power of enquiring about the nature of the universe; and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will ever be given by the gods to mortal man.” 
- Plato 

Aristotle’s infinite regress argument 
Aristotle dismisses an infinite regress of causes as being impossible in some cases but quite possible in others. In the Metaphysics, he poses that the causes of being are not part of a limitless series of causes. There must be a first cause for all four types of causes, material, formal, efficient and final causes. If there is no first cause in a series, all the parts become medial or intermediary causes, and consequently, “there is no cause at all” (994a19). Although matter in its most irreducible form is taken to be eternal, capable of organizing itself into forms and perishing for an indefinite period, material causes can’t be traced back to a limitless genesis, flesh can only be divided until its reduced to its indivisible elements (). Formal causes similarly can’t regress to infinity. The essence is the primary defining attribute of a being’s substance (), the definitions of substances in turn can't be unlimited in nature and posit limitless causes for its effects. Knowledge comes from reaching indivisibles such as the essence (994b21). In turn, knowledge of such a series of formal causes becomes impossible with unlimited kinds of causes (994b28). We know a thing when we know its cause, if its causes were unlimited, we’d be unable to compile all its causes as part of the things account in a limited time. Movement also cant be limitlessly generated in a series, there has to be a prime mover, a first instance of motion (994a1-10). The final causes, the motivations for the sake of which beings move, can’t go on without a limit either, they must have a final member of the series (994a6-7). Without such a final member, and if the ends of our actions were unlimited, we’d evade the nature of the good (994b13). That toward which nature moves must also be immovable (1072b4). 

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If all kinds of causes must have a first member to their series, what remains in this universe of causality that Aristotle may deem appropriate to extend infinitely? Aristotle defines infinity as “that of which some part is always outside” (207a1). Alternatively, if something has no part outside itself, it’s “complete and whole” (207a8). Given that “nothing is complete unless it has an end” (207a13-15), a series that is complete must have an end. For Aristotle an actualized, demonstrable and sense-perceptible infinite body is impossible (205a8). What’s perceptible must have a spatial coordinate, signaling its existence somewhere in the physical universe. Since there can't be an infinite place, and if every body is in a place, there cannot be an infinite body (206a1). Alternatively a potential infinite may be possible (206a14). Aristotle provides three paradigm cases of possible infinities, time passing for eternity, human genealogy, and divisions of magnitudes (206a25-26). In the case of time and human genealogy, the series may extend forever even if its members die out given that their passing gave way to new life (206b1-2).

Let’s imagine a clock that duplicates itself for every second that elapses, such that every three seconds, three new clocks appear. If we observe the presence of clock number 88 and we know the cause of a new clock is the passage of one second, we know that there must have been a first cause in the series whose effects we observe in the 88th member of the series. If we are to trust the time on the face of the 88th clock we must inquire into whether the first clock was wound up to the correct time. If we don’t know the time on the first clock, this renders the time on the 88th unintelligible. Now the question remains of how this first clock was brought into existence. It must have been the effect of a prior clock’s falling second, but if there was no clock prior to the first, then no second could have elapsed and the first clock couldn’t have come into being. What created the first clock and its principle of duplicative change had to have initiated the series from outside the system, a Mover that isn’t a clock, otherwise, the series of clocks would regress to infinity. This paper will examine the cosmological and theological implications of Aristotle’s infinite regress argument by first inquiring into the nature of the first mover, whether both per se causal series and per accidens series must necessitate such a mover, and how this shapes Aristotlean and Neo-Platonist cosmological accounts of the universe’s eternality or generation in time. 

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The First Cause and Proof of the Truthful
What does this first cause necessarily look like? If it is allowed to be infinite and eternal, how can a finite and temporal world proceed from it? Is it God?

If the first cause in the series is necessarily separate from its effects, what can we know of this first cause of motion if it lies outside our system of causality? Aristotle demonstrates that an immovable moving substance must be eternal first and foremost. Aristotle’s model of the Universe is eternal and thus “eternal movement must be caused by something eternal” (1073a27). It must be an immovable mover, initiating motion without participating in the series of members moved that would otherwise regress to infinity. If something is moved, it is other than what it is in terms of primary spatial movement, even if not substantially other than what it is (1072b5-6). An immovable mover can't say to be other than what it is (1072b8). It can’t undergo spatial movement since it is the starting point of movement. In addition, it’s necessary that this mover differentiate between natural impulse and forced movement (107b32-34), and that it exists for the good(1072b12-14). A starting point of this kind is what nature and the heavens depend on, an immovable mover that is in a state of perpetual activity (1072b15). This mover must be separate from perceptible things, be indivisible and without parts, have neither an unlimited nor a finite magnitude. It must be active, having the capacity to bring about all the movement posterior to it (1073a2-12) for an eternal duration of time (1072b24-25). It must be singular, causing “the primary eternal and single movement” (1073a24). 

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There’s a clear difficulty in describing a being of necessity that lies outside of the demonstrable universe. If this being is separate from its creation’s spatial and temporal domain, it can be difficult to claim with certainty what it ought to be, even if we can claim its necessity. Are the spatio-temporal and three dimensional tools we have to describe existence even adequate to inquire into this first cause? Avicenna takes this mover of necessity to be an ontological proof for the necessity of God. Avicenna takes this first cause to be an uncaused mover, otherwise, all series of causes would be made up of an infinitely regressing series of intermediary causes that are both caused and cause the next member of the series. Avicenna’s proof of the truthful uses the Aristotelian argument against the possibility of an infinite regress of causes to necessitate an efficient and agential cause of everything, unified in God. Avicenna distinguishes between the causality of a mover and a maker (Brown 511). While a maker is an efficient or agential cause, a mover is a cause to locomotion. Similarly, medieval theological figures such as Aquinas conclude that the necessity of a First Cause as an existent that depends only on itself implies the necessity of God (511). Conversely, Ghazali says if we admit the eternity of the world and allow for the concurrent infinite regress of causes, there would no longer be a point in necessitating a First Principle (Van Den Bergh 12). 

Aristotle poses a puzzle that is readdressed in Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers. Everything that’s active is capable of being active and not everything that's capable of being active is active. It seems that capacity for activity precedes activity (1071b23-26). Was there a gap between the first mover’s act of creation and its potential capacity to create? If so, Ghazali wonders whether this implies temporality in the Eternal First Principle. How can non-existence have the capacity to become existence unless its becoming is in time. The prime mover cannot become because that motion would subscribe it to time and participation in an infinite regress of causality. The prime mover must have the capacity to bring a being about without itself undergoing a change. Aristotle, and more pronouncedly Avicenna, differentiate between a thing x requiring an active cause to be moved, like wood, a material artifact that doesn’t move by itself, and a carpenter, an efficient cause of movement (1071b23-30). Motion doesn't necessarily follow from a mover because the mover may choose to withhold this capacity (1071b13) but an agent can will movement to begin. If creation was of necessity and the First Cause gave way to the temporal world involuntarily can we ascribe the Mover efficiency and will? There are different options for models of temporal creation coming from such an eternal principle. Aristotle posits in an obscure passage of  λ6 an act of creation that is prior to the mover’s capacity to create, with three agents in a constant cycle of changes in relation to one another,  (1072b10-15), a model reminiscent of Averroes proposition that a third seat for the Eternal agent must be lifted above what is within and without the Universe X (37). Creation could have also come from night or chaos, from all material things clumped together as the physicists posit, or from non-being (1072b20). Alternatively, Plato argued that the world was generated in time (Al-Farabi 153). Leucippus and Plato posited eternal activity and movement (1071b32-37). Aristotle points that this would conflate the activity of the first mover and of the moved, movement would be undifferentiated, with an unspecified direction or cause. For movement by nature is not the same as movement by force or by understanding. The particular movers that participate in the multiplicity of creation must have their movement differentiated in account from the first cause of their motion, the motion of an eternally active mover. 

For Aristotle, this dilemma is resolved by ascribing eternity of both The Prime Cause that doesn't come to be  (994b8-9) and that of the world created. The heavenly movers are taken to have eternal forms, with no beginning or corruption. The immovable substances are necessarily immovable and eternal, for if all substances “are capable of passing away, everything is capable of passing away” (1071b5). If the world and the heavenly bodies are eternal however, doesn’t this contradict Aristotle’s claim that an infinite regress of causes can’t exist? Not if Aristotleans distinguish between essentially ordered series of causes and accidentally ordered series, finite motion in space in an otherwise infinite duration of time. 

Essentially Ordered Series vs Accidentally Ordered Series
St.thomas differentiates between essential causal series and accidental causal series. Essential causal series can’t regress to infinity per se because there can't be “an infinite number of causes that are per se required for a certain effect” (46). In Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles, an infinite regress of essentially ordered series is ruled impossible because if the first mover in a series is removed or ceases to move, in that no cause is the first anymore, “no other mover will move [another] or be [itself] moved]”(Brown 513). The First mover causes all other motion in a series. If all members of a series were movers and things moved, not only would there be no mover, but we’d be stuck with an infinite chain of effects with no first instance of motion to cause them. A starting principle and immovable mover is a necessity for essentially ordered series, otherwise there can’t be any motion if no motion was instigated by a first acting principle. These types of series can’t proceed to infinity for Aquinas because its causes are simultaneous in time with one another, meaning that “the effect would have to depend on an infinite number of actions simultaneously existing” (519). Aristotle comments on the simultaneity of causal series of motion whereby “the motion and the movent and the motion of the movent must proceed simultaneously” (242a23-26). Essentially ordered series are simultaneous rather than experiencing a delay between cause and effect. In this respect, the string of causes are pressed up against one another, whereby the first, intermediate and final cause, are all parts of the same act, the same simultaneous flash of activity, When I pass my hand through water, the water moves simultaneously with the cause of motion, my hand. A series of accidental causes on the other hand is necessarily in time, and can regress to eternity. On these grounds Aristotle claims both a Prime cause of motion and the eternity of the world (250b11,256a4). 

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Accidentally ordered series that are in time can regress till infinity. St.Thomas offers the example that it is accidental to man “as generator to be generated by another man, for he generates as a man and not as the son of another man”. Although not evidently necessary, its “not impossible for a man to be generated by a man to infinity” (512). Duns Scotus clarifies that essentially ordered causes in a series each depend on their preceding member in the series “precisely in its act of causation” (513). For accidentally ordered series on the other hand, the second member exists by virtue of the first cause, but not dependent on the first “in exercising his own causality”. A son can continue his lineage whether his father is dead or alive, or even if they were opposed to the act of procreation. Contrastingly, in a stack of dominos, the intermediary domino pushes the next precisely because the first domino set off the chain of motion that the intermediary domino fall. For Scotus what characterizes essentially ordered series is that intermediate causes in a series “is causally dependent upon its predecessor for its own causal efficacy regarding its successor” (516). Whereas accidentally ordered series, each member of the series draws its causal efficacy from itself rather than the prior member of the series, even if the existence of the intermediary is dependent on the prior cause. The first member of the series informs us of the trajectory of the causal chain, its a cause for all intermediaries and is invaluable in our understanding of the chain and its trajectory. In an accidentally ordered series the functions of each member of the series differs from the last whereas in essential series the function of the first is instrumental in understanding the function of the intermediary and the final causes (517). 

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The distinction between the necessity of a first cause of essentially ordered series of motion, from accidental series that are in time and eternal, is crucial. Although some critics like Van den Bergh in his introduction of his translation of Avveroes’ Incoherence of the Incoherence, and Ghazali critique that this distinction does little to dispel the contradiction given that these accidental series are often attributed to the same medium that observes finite motion. Van Den Bergh proposes that Aristotle “holds at the same time that time and movement are infinite and that every causal series must be finite” (11). Averroes contends with this contradiction by arguing that infinite per accidens series would have to draw their eternity from the Eternal Principle given that they are nevertheless in time. Its fruitful to note here that the Eternal principle would experience eternity differently as temporal beings participating in it. Plato differentiates between two senses of infinities. An aggregated infinite body and a infinite trajectory in eternal time (206b22-33). While motion might be finite and temporal, its extension into eternity prior to the Universe’s creation, allows for series of accidental causes to be eternally moving in time. It follows that our experience of time for an indefinite duration differs drastically from the expression of an Eternity that necessarily abolishes time as the condition for its immobility. Ghazali is unmoved in that Aristotle’s contradiction posits eternal movements of heavenly movers, without a beginning or end, and yet denies the possibility of an infinite regress of causes. This is especially pronounced since Ghazali argues per se and accidental series are coextensive and share a finite and temporal medium of expression. If the heavenly bodies move for an eternal time then why are the movements of the heavenly bodies exempt from the impossibility of an infinite regress of motion?  

Eternal World or Generation in Time 
Van Den Bergh poses a valuable and clarifying question, “can there be a causal relation between an eternally unchangeable God and an eternally revolving and changing world?” (12). Creation extends a causal chain between an immaterial, motionless and eternal body, and a material creation that is in time. Where is the causal link between an immaterial body that necessarily abolishes time and cannot undergo a change, otherwise admitting susceptibility to time, and a material body in time? If God’s eternity was causal, and undifferentiated might I add, to the eternal movements of the heavens, this would for Ghazali lead to an infinite regress of causes. For Aristotle, the world is both eternal temporarily and spatially finite. He envisions a finite universe that has existed from eternity and will exist for an infinite duration. Other philosophers like Anaxagoras or Empedocles held different beliefs, that the early universe was composed of primitive matter, or that this universe was born out of the destruction of another, and another before it. Aristotle believes in the finitude of causes and the impossibility of beginningless series of essential causes. All movement needed a first mover, some acting and immovable mover to start the series. A contradiction forms, that we’ll try to reconcile, that of an eternal world, if its eternity extends into the past or to the future as well, will observe an infinite regress of causes and according to Van den Bergh an infinite series of movers (11) and of fathers and sons. In Averroes’ Incoherence of the Incoherence, he engages in dialogue with Ghazali as to whether this applies to both essential and accidentally ordered series. If the universe in-itself regresses temporally to eternity we’ll never reach a first mover which is widely incompatible with Aristotle’s acknowledgment of the impossibility of an infinite regress of causes and the necessity of a prime mover. Aristotle “holds at the same time that time and [by extension] movement are infinite and that every causal series must be finite” (11). An infinite progress of movement is admitted in his account of the heavenly bodies, but it seems as though an infinite regress of motion would nevertheless find its halt and beginning in the mover that cannot be moved. 

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In Ghazali‘s first discussion, Ghazali inquires that if the world was created, some determinant must have launched its existence, what moved this determinant? If another determinant was the catalyst for the primary instigator of creation, this series of determining principles will go on ad infinitum. Unless we accept an Eternal Principle that can spark new determinations into existence. This, however, suggests a change in God from having the capacity to create the universe but not acting on it, to the actuality of its creation. A change suggests a passage of time in God, a delay between creation potentially and it's being brought into actuality. This delay contradicts the notion of an eternal God that stands outside of time. A fragment of Aristotle’s De Philosophia in Cicero’s Academics argues against the possibility of a generated world given that there couldn't have been a new development in the mind of an all-knowing and unchanging God (12). The complication for Aristotle is that he requires for every actuality a potentiality that is brought into existence, these two steps suggest a change in the will of God (13). Contrastingly, Ghazali and the Megarians can bypass the necessity of two steps in creation given that they deny potentiality and the superposed state of being and nonbeing. For them things either are or are not,  God creates and destroys as he wishes, and causal sequence of motion of the same object are undifferentiated in their position in space relative to the first moving principle. Objects occupy different spaces at different times, and matter is neither eternal nor holds potential forms “of everything that can or will happen” that Aristoteleans hold for matter being potentially, both water and wine, until the form structures the matter in actuality (19). Averroes proceeds with an Aristotelean claim that what has no beginning has no end, and since the eternal preceded creation and has no beginning, there must be no end to time either. In response to Ghazali, Averroes “denies that an infinite time involves an infinite causal series and the negation of a first cause” (15). God is the essential cause of the accidental and temporal sequence of Universe X. Aristotelean theory confirms that in temporal creation its unfolding is by succession, “a simultaneous infinite whole is denied Aristotle” (16). On that basis, Aristoteleans argue that while space is limited and motion requires a first cause, accidental series that are set in time may exist for limitless time given that at the edge of this universe’s temporality, time extends indefinitely through the Eternal Principle. 

In the first proof for the generation of the world in time, Ghazali articulates the philosopher's views that it is impossible for the temporal and corruptible to “proceed from the absolutely eternal”. There’s difficulty in drawing out a causal relation between the two insoluble mediums. A difficulty tended to by Ghazali’s argument that when Universe is X is created, and time begins ticking, there must be some determining principle that brings existence into actuality from non-existence. Something had to have happened! Ghazali questions firstly if such a change from the state of privation implies a change in the will of God. Secondly, he asks why this determinant was sparked when it did, why not 100 years earlier or later? Either creation was made eternal by an eternal creator, which implies an infinite regress of causes, or we arrive at a principle determining eternally (34). In response, Avveroes contends that this argument is dialectic and doesn’t reach the standard of demonstrable proof (34). Avveroes stands by the first mover’s agency as God, and claims the principle of determination to begin creation at the time God chose lies with his will, rather than being dependent on the conditions set out by the universe X and its temporal nature (34). When we presume natural things to house their own principle of change, this doesn't imply that their essential activities such as motion is initiated by themselves, rather Avveroes argues every movent derives its motion from the first Mover (35). For an agent’s whose function it is to create, just as a geometer geometrizes, the transition from not creating to creating doesn't require an external determining principle. The change between non-existence and existence is still there tho, if we assume the divine to occupy the entirety of the non-spatiotemporal grounds prior to Universe X’s creation, we end up assuming that no changes occur. An agent acting from a will or by the necessity of nature will differ in the temporality of their act. While saying it was the creator’s nature to will existence into being would suffice to discharge Ghazali’s argument, Avveroes is committed to an Eternal Will that differs from human will. In fact Avveroes charges Ghazali with misguidedly equivocating eternal will and temporal will, when in fact they are contrary, though possibly having a middle term unifying their apparent contradictions (37). Averroes proceeds to inquire whether demonstration would show God’s agential will to be neither like the natural or voluntary will. Temporal will is guided by desire while God has none. Assuming such a temporally linear will creates a contradiction in the nature of the divine as atemporal. While an “eternal will does not cease through the presence of the object willed”, there isn't a specific moment in time, as we know it, that we can ascribe this continuation of eternal will from an atemporal to a temporal medium and since the eternal has no beginning, creation extends into eternity. Given the eternal will is demonstrated as being other than a voluntary or natural will which are problematic ascriptions to the divine on their own, a will that can remain eternal because it is “neither inside nor outside the world” (37) can reconcile the incompatibilities of traditional forms of will and an Eternal will. 

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Averroes argues for the eternity of the world. He poses that God can’t have priority to time, because a time prior to the beginning of temporal creation implies an existence in time of a mover that stands outside yet prior in chronological relation to time. Eternity thus becomes the quality that extends from the First Mover to its creation. Similarly in space, if we move to the edge of space and point outwards we would presume it paradoxical that the first cause would be in a space contiguous to creation. In contrast, Ghazali argues that temporal relations are relative to movement and temporal beings, they orient us in relation to time, they don’t imply the presence of temporality in a principle known to be eternal. For Ghazali, the First Mover and the Eternal one views space and time as undifferentiated, vastly different from our experience of space-time as participants in it. Ghazali equivocates the two directions that orient us relative to the sublunar world and the rest of the heavenly bodies, up, which lighter elements like fire and air have a tendency towards, and down, which earth and water gravitate to. Averroes contends that the way we describe space and time aren’t wholly relative, and that nature, and the heavenly movers must have their own relations to space, different descriptions to orient them relative to their movement. Just as we wouldn’t ascribe the same directions of movement to a crab that moves in two dimensions, left and right, to a human that moves in three dimensions, it wouldn’t seem right to ascribe these same relations to the heavenly movers (67). Ghazali however, stands firm in arguing that “spaces, positions, situations and directions are equivalent so far as concerns their receiving movement” (69). Relative to the First Mover, space is uniform and undifferentiated in its motion since all motion within universe X is traced back to the same First mover. In turn, Ghazali posits that time is similarly undifferentiated between past and future by the philosophers by virtue of sharing the same possibility for the realization of time and the same direction for its final realization, time shares the same past and the same future, time relative to an Eternal principle is undifferentiated in its directions. The example used to conceptualize this equivocating of future and past for an eternal principle holds a bizarre presumption on the circularity of time as opposed to our linear experience of it. Ghazali’s analogy is that if the heavenly body moves in a continuous circular path, whether it moves east or west, it follows the same circular trajectory, despite being opposite directions. Similarly, Ghazali says if the philosophers can equivocate past and future, as modes of orientation in time, Ghazali can do the same with space (69) “as far as concerns their receiving the movement and any purpose that might be connected with it” (70). This analogy holds if an agent observing temporal creation from an a-temporal position would observe time as being circular, that future and past share the same temporal axiom of circulation. As linear temporal beings we may be stuck moving from past to future through the present, but to an a-temporal being observing time from a non-participatory position in its currents, future, and past would be undifferentiated. This only works if by analogy time were circular, and the atemporal being had a view of time as having completed its course, a birds eye view of its axis, either viewing time that is yet to unfold as having already unfolded, or as being equivalent to time that has unfolded. If potential and actual time were one and the same time, and the atemporal being took the particular view of the present, rather than stepping outside of a completed circuit of time, then we would have to allow for the possibility that the infinite hodological possibilities of the unfolding of time are not only equally possible, but simultaneously existing. This runs the trouble of trying to make God a human with divine properties, or a human a God with human properties. They're wildily different tho! This also poses an interesting question for the relevant approach to metaphysics, do we attempt to understand the first and divine principles, the building blocks of reality and the subject matter of metaphysics, from the perspective of a human or from the imagined perspective of a Divine Artisan that formulated them. ّWhich perspective is the relevant or even demonstrable approach to metaphysics? Averroes takes the prior stance and argues that opposite directions can’t be equivalent though it may be said that “the substratum for both is indifferent”. Averroes stands by the Aristotelean necessity of investigating universals by first assuming our particular frame of reference. Similarly Before and after are similarly not equivalent, they refer to different directions of time, but rather their possibility of existence as directions of the same time may be indifferent towards them (70). Consequently, whether we can refer to the moment prior to creation as temporal or not, in “neither case could a definite time be fixed to which the divine could attach itself” (71). 

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Both Ghazali and Avveroes agree that God’s existence can’t imply their temporality, it must exist in a timeless eternity (16). Both struggle, however, with drawing a causal relation between two widely different components of creation, the immaterial and a-temporal creator and the material temporal creation. What is the mechanism of this coming to be? (17) For Aristotle, the world couldn’t have come to be, because there can’t be a becoming in the eternal in-itself.  Ghazali responds to this point that if the world were two units bigger than what it was, the ‘space’ outside the universe would be 2 units smaller. If we afford empty space a measure, which is problematic on the ground of quantifying nothingness by the negative space that Universe X occupies. However, the existence of a Universe X that is actual implies its existence somewhere, whether thats no-where in no-thing, or in an enlarged scale of a much grander universe housing our own universe and many more like it. It would be similarly problematic to assume the duration of the universe to be prolonged or diminished, and having an observable temporal effect on a world outside of ours that we take to be timeless. The previous argument rests on an illusion of the imagination according to Ghazali. Averroes says this is a real consequence for theories that view the universe as infinitely expanding in space. A finite universe would be moved by a God with “infinite quantitative possibilities”. The parallel possibility in time would see a temporal universe that has a beginning and end, but is bounded by infinite temporal possibilities (95).  Averroes credits to the one “ who believes in the temporal creation of the world and affirms that all body is in space” must admit that prior to the world there existed space occupied either by the matter of this universe or empty so that the universe could be created there (96). Whether or not this is compatible with his Aristotelean commitment to finite space is a pertinent question. Averroes confirms that space is only finite because of the heavens spherical shape since the sphere is essentially and naturally finite (65). If it wasn’t spherical the universe could end in another body, which would regress space infinitely to its contiguous bodies outside the universe, or there would be empty space which is also impossible for Averroes. In effect, the finiteness of the universe is a conditions of material reality and the properties of its constitutive elements, not only for this world but for “every possible world imaginable can only consist of these bodies” (65). Similarly, Ghazali argues that the shape of the heavens is necesarily a globular shape of the heavens because its nature is “simple, homogenous and without differentiation” (62). Different shapes such as a triangle or a hexagon require differentiation of angles. Ghazali stands by the necessity of the natural order of the universe on the basis of Divine and perfect volition.

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In turn, Ghazali argues against the Eternal creation, given that a potential infinity of time implies an infinite progress of motion as well as the coinciding of infinities of different magnitudes. For Ghazali its impossible to describe the heavenly movers as eternal because this would actualize some paradoxes of infinity and also create an infinite regress of motion that is inextricably bound to a beginingless temporal existence of the heavenly movers. Firstly, infinity challenges the way we conceive of mathematical possibilities, in that if you divide infinity by two, the result two sets of equally infinite quantities. Ghazali considers that the sun completes its revolution in one year, while Saturn in 30 years, then asks whether the number of revolutions they each complete are to be considered odd or event, both or neither? Averroes dismisses it as sophistry but there is value and nuance to Ghazali’s argument, especially given that each body will be approaching infinity at a different rates. Ghazali’s objection is that firstly if we assume the heavenly bodies to be completing an infinite number of revolutions for eternity, each body will be approaching infinity at different rates. Let’s arbitrarily assign each revolution for the Sun an odd number and for every successive revolution an even number. Now let’s pair up every odd-numbered revolution with the even-numbered revolution, forming 2 columns of paired up numbered revolutions. Since these revolutions are eternal, each column will extend to infinity, despite having divided the initially infinite domain of the number of Solar revolutions in two, each column produces its own infinity. Aristotle recognizes this challenge to actual infinities in the Physics when he recognizes that an infinite body will be made up of infinite parts, nevertheless the heavenly bodies are expected to revolve for an actually infinite duration. Averroes responds that theres no proportion between the two bodies because their movers are eternal, but the parts of these movers have proportion because they are actual (44). In addition Averroes denies that the odd or even numbers exists actually in things that have no beginning or end, except if its expressed in the soul (48). The soul can’t have a representation of infinite, since it itself is conscious through a finitely extending body. Aggregates of the number of revolutions of the sun up until present moment that exist potentially outside the soul, are said to have no beginning, and cant be denoted as odd or even, “unless they are looked upon as actual, i.e. as having beginning and end”. Motion and time can only form a totality, with a respective beginning and end in the soul. The soul and human perception assigns numerical value, and finality to space and time, whereby it is only right to do so for space (48). We dont need to contend with the different sized infinities because its only a problem with actual infinities, while things that are “potentially infinite, there exists no proportion at all” (45). For Averroes and Aristotle an accidental series of fathers producing children for example, can only be infinite in accidens, since the fathers are corrupted this avoids the impossibility of an infinite aggregate of humans at any one time, across time however, in an eternal world, and given no extraneous circumstances like an asteroid, global warming or humans destroying one another, the series would extend to infinity. Similarly, if the motion of the heavenly movers were eternal, this would only pose an impossibility of actuality if every revolution occupied a different region of space, thus revolving eternally in a new location every revolution in a finite space. In turn, accidentally ordered “infinite series is the necessary consequence of an eternal agent” (73). Alternatively if the heavenly movers were not eternal, eternal generation of father and sons would not be possible, and if the Eternal Principle didnt precede creation, such an continuous series of accidental causes would be limited in its capacity to reproduce infinitely by a finite amount of time. If the eternal mover was finitely temporal, accidental series as temporal would have no claim to eternity to generate eternally. It’s necessary that accidentally ordered series such as father and sons should proceed from “an eternal mover and an eternal moved body”, the First Cause and the movers of the heavens (73). The problem that Ghazali and myself have with this argument is that the potential eternity of these movements implies an actuality, namely the indefinite revolution of heavenly bodies for infinite time in finite space. This necessarily implied an ever-receding actuality of infinite revolutions that is paradoxical. That infinite motion is implied by the accidental infinite of eternal heavenly movers. Philosophers don’t allow for an infinite regress of motion, but they do for accidental sequences (72). This would imply motion without a first mover of the heavens if they were eternal. This first principle must have been simultaneous with his act otherwise He wouldn’t be the first. The act must have been necessary rather than merely possible, and his acts are accidental in relation to the first essential cause, creation of universe X was an accidental series, dependent on the essential first mover, accidental infinities are permitted. This eternity of X is “a necessary consequence of the existence of an eternal first principle” (46).

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Ghazali credits another proof to philosophers such as Avicenna that use this argument to show the eternity of time or an infinite duration of time. If there was a time in which God was existent but hadn't created the universe, it's imaginable that this time extends ad infinitum. While we can't ascribe temporality to the eternal being we can get around this impossible condition for a change from an eternal state of non-existence to a state of existence. Suppose God created three universes X,Y,Z, at different instances relative to one another, universes whose heavenly movers share identical distances and speeds for the revolutions of the heavenly bodies. Up to the present moment, each universe completed a different number of revolutions. Universe X experienced 1000 revolutions, Y experienced 1100 revolutions, and Z 1200. These differences reflect the gap in time that the Creator took to create them sequentially. If the Creator can't experience time, and created these universes simultaneously from its perspective as an atemporal being, a temporal being can nevertheless identify the temporal difference and beginning of its time relative to the other universe’s revolutions. A temporal being can nevertheless inquire into its temporality in contrast with an atemporal and Eternal mover (92). This would prove satisfactory to the theologians that necessitate the existence of time before the world (93). Averroes develops the argument in saying that if there is “an infinite regress of this possibility of anterior worlds, there is an extension which precedes all these worlds “ (93). The middle ground, or world between worlds, cannot be simply an absence of existence since we can't measure time in non-existence. Yet even if it were non-existent we’d be measuring time across non-existence, by cross-referencing the universal clocks, so to speak, of each pocket of existence. We’d nevertheless need some determining principle for their existence, which we assume to be one and the same for each one given our theological and metaphysical commitments towards a unified First Cause of motion. If this extension of time coexisted with the first movement of Universe X, initiated by a first mover, “it would have to be preceded by an extension which could measure it”, a temporal extension to the expanded arena of possible movement (93). The extension of the world prior to the series of Universes N would have no beginning, for if it had a beginning it would to have a temporal extension that could measure it.

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The proposition of multiple worlds in part reconciles alot of the inconsistencies between Averroes and Ghazali’s account, and in another way displaces the problem of an Eternal Principle generating a temporal creation to a place outside our universe. Aristotle argues that an infinite body must employ infinite parts as well. In this spirit Averroes stands by the philosophers in the impossiblity for the temporal and corruptible to “proceed from the absolutely eternal” if we are to consider temporal creation part of the Eternal(34). Now as Philoponus argues, a capacity to generate infinite motion for an infinite duration of time, doesn’t necessarily entail the actual eternity of the object of His will (13). Alternatively, the temporal may proceed directly from a temporal principle which would require a middle term between the Eternal creator and temporal creation. Ghazali and the Ash’arites wonder whether they can reconcile the impossibility of a causal series extending across two vastly insoluble medium, between the eternal will and temporal creation “with or without a middle term” (40) an instrument of creation, a cause outside and temporally prior to our Universe X and that is posterior to the Eternal will. In volume 4 of the Matalib al-’Aliya, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi a medieval physicist attempts to investigate the possibility of a multiversal cosmology in a manner consistent with Avicenna’s proof for the eternity of the world (29). If Averroes is correct in proposing that the Lord of All Worlds is eternal because he is “neither inside nor outside the world” (37), we could reconcile the inconsistencies of an Eternal mover and generated world in time. By assuming a middle term between the Eternal Principle and temporal creation, we could propose that the universe came out of a natural and spatio-temporal, although potentially non three-dimensional, process. Time could have proceeded from a temporal process in the unseen world prior to the demonstrable world we participate in. Nevertheless we can maintain the necessity of an Eternal, self-suffient and unified First mover that initiated not only our universe, but all other universes from a place outside or in between the internal world and what lies beyond its borders.  

Concluding Notes 
At first glance the beginnings of the universe in time or eternity seems like a question to be saved and answered by future generations of physicists with the tools to demonstrate its answer with certainty. At second glance this remains true, however there is a unique depth to the spiritual implications of such a question that only philosophers and theologeans are equipped to recognize. Centuries after this discussion between Ghazali and Averroes, a theologean named Friedrich Jacobi clashes with Spinoza about where God figures in existence and how we can know such divine and first principles. While the human intellect and understanding can grant a mechanical and cartesian account of the Divine’s nature, no account of its properties is sufficient without feeling, intuiting and believing in the spirit in and out of the machine. Similarly, in the struggle between philosophy and theology at the heart of the muslim world in the 11th century, Ghazali sought to critique the grounds of philosophy in its intellectualization of undemonstrable concepts such as how this universe relates to the First and Eternal Creator of the universe. Ghazali stands by the limitations of finding proofs for the foundations of knowledge, instead of the mechanistic intellectualization of the knowable universe that he believes philosophers of the time champion, he argues for seeking these answers to the first and divine principles “through mystical illumination and the mystical way of life” (7).  Nevertheless Ghazali is closer to the philosophers than Jacobi was in that he nevertheless valued reason in approaching these questions, just not as the sole instrument for knowing God. Rather, he aimed to defend belief in the divine after the line of reason has been exhausted and synthesized, and the sciences have studied nature as it is (8). In our search for God, Jacobi and Ghazali propose that lived experience is an expression of this living force, and that we don’t need to preserve the Eternity of the Divine within the grasp of experience of the heavenly bodies that move this transient bubble of universal existence. There are different forms of divinity that can be unified in essence but hold different properties depending on the medium they are expressed in. A divinity that unifies this Universe as sharing the same flow of relatively dialting time in a contained and contiguous space; and a divinity that lies outside this bubble, a wondrous mystery who’s truth is more bizarre than any fiction we could conjure. Aristotle held that all things that begin must end, and that if this universe necessarily began in creation, then its end is also impossibly ensured. However, as with the cathartic release of facing one’s own mortality, there is a heart splitting relief in accepting the mortality of this Universe whose fabric we are so intimately entwined with.  

Citations 
Al-Farabi, Abu Nasr, and Fauzi M Najjar. The Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages: Plato the Divine and Aristotle.
Aristotele, and John Lloyd Ackrill. A New Aristotle Reader. Clarendon Press, 1987.
Aristotle, and Reeve C D C. Metaphysics. Hackett Publishing Company, 2016.
Averroës , and Simon Van Den Bergh . Averroes' Tahafut Al-Tahafut: (the Incoherence of the Incoherence). Gibb Memorial Trust, 2016.
Brown, Patterson. “Infinite Causal Regression.” The Philosophical Review, vol. 75, no. 4, 1966, pp. 510–525., https://doi.org/10.2307/2183226.
فخر الدين الرازي . المطالب العالية. ليار الكتب العربية, ١٩٨٧