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argument for the necessity of a God. That their monads came so and not otherwise must
have a cause; without it there could be no harmony or connection between them. And this
cause must be one with no cause behind it; otherwise we would have the endless chain. This
cause, then, they found in the absolutely free will of God, working without any matter
beside it and unaffected by any laws or necessities. It creates and annihilates the atoms
and their qualities and, by that means, brings to pass all the motion and change of the
world. These, in our sense, do not exist. When a thing seems to us to be moved, that
really means that God has annihilatedor permitted to drop out of existence, by not
continuing to uphold, as another view heldthe atoms making up that thing in its
original position, and has created them again and again along the line over which it
moves. Similarly of what we regard as cause and effect. A man writes with a pen and a
piece of paper. God creates in his mind the will to write; at the same moment he gives him
the power to write and brings about the apparent motion of the hand, of the pen and the
appearance on the paper. No one of these is the cause of the other. God has brought about
by creation and annihilation of atoms the requisite combination to produce these
appearances. Thus we see that free-will for the Muslim scholastics is simply the presence,
in the mind of the man, of this choice created there by God. This may not seem to us to be
very real, but it has, certainly, as much reality as anything else in their world.
Further, it will be observed how completely this annihilates the machinery
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of the universe. There is no such thing as law and the world is sustained by a
constant, ever-repeated miracle. Miracles and what we regard as the ordinary operations of
nature are on the same level. The world and the things in it could have been quite
different. The only limitation upon God is that He cannot produce a contradiction. A thing
cannot be and not be at the same time. There is no such thing as a secondary cause; when
there is the appearance of such, it is only illusional. God is producing it as well as the
ultimate appearance of effect. There is no nature belonging to things. Fire does not burn
and a knife does not cut. God creates in a substance a being burned when the fire touches
it and a being cut when the knife approaches it.
In this scheme there are certainly grave difficulties, philosophical and ethical. It
establishes a relationship between God and the atoms; but we have already seen that
relationships are subjective illusions. That, however, was in the case of the things of
the world, perceived by the sensescontingent being, as they would put it. It does not
hold of necessary being. God possesses a quality called Difference from originated things
(al-mukhalafa lil-hawadith). He is not a natural cause, but a free cause; and the
existence of a free cause they were compelled by their principles to admit. The ethical
difficulty is perhaps greater. If there is no order of nature and no certainty, or nexus,
as to causes and effects; if there is no regular development in the life, mental, moral,
and physical of a manonly a series of isolated moments; how can there be any
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