Through the voice of the falāsifah, Ghazali has accused himself of implying that ‘God’s will has no specific designated course, but can vary and change in kind.’ However we must remember that for Ghazālī, God’s will is eternal and therefore does not change. The question whether it has a ‘designated course’ is ambiguous. If it means that something else designates the course of Divine will, such as the essential nature of things, Ghazālī must deny it. If it means that natural events take a course designated by Divine will, then he cannot deny this. It may be clarifying at this point to consider an issue that Yaqub (2017) brings. In the process of affirming Ghazālī’s commitment to occasionalism, he distinguishes that from predetermination: whereas the latter holds that God has determined all events beforehand, the former holds that God wills them at the time of their occurrence.
It should be clear why Ghazālī would not hold either of these doctrines, at least as opposed to the other. The only difference between them is the temporal relation they suppose between God’s determination and the event itself. Occasionalism, as Yaqub conceives it here, imagines God’s will as simultaneous with His act, while predetermination imagines it preceding His act. Neither of these relations apply to God’s timeless eternity. Strictly speaking, they are both false. Taken as metaphor they are both simply attempts to imagine the unimaginable. Just as we can use ‘before’ (as Ibn Sīnā and Ghazālī both hold) in a non-temporal sense to express the priority of the Eternal, so we can also use, ‘on every occasion’ to express the eternity of the First. Understood as distinct doctrines, as Yaqub defines them, Ghazālī holds neither.
With this in mind, there are two models of the miracle to consider. On one model, we may describe the occurrence of the miracle by saying that, while in the past God has willed that flesh burn on contact with fire, He now wills (in a particular case) that it not do so. This description represents God’s will as changing. For it represents the content of the will in each case as a universal generalization, related to a position on the A-series of time. In the past, fire burned flesh, but here and now, it does not. Since God’s will, according to Ghazālī is timelessly eternal and thus unchanging, this cannot be the model he has in mind.
Instead, we must describe the miracle by saying that God wills (timelessly, not from the temporal ‘beginning’) that, for all specific times and places, when and where fire contacts flesh, the flesh burns, with the exception of times t and places p, where it does not. Here, we express the content of the will by a proposition ranging over specific instances, each occurring at fixed positions on B-series time. The miracle does not then constitute any change in God’s will. Rather God’s unchanging will designates the course of the whole from eternity.
The temporal observer may experience a change in the course of events, in relation to a generalization she has made over prior particular events, experienced relatively as past. Thus, while no change is possible in what God timelessly wills, difference is always possible between that and any generalization (e.g. ‘cotton burns on contact with fire’) we have made based on prior experience. These two models thus correspond to two distinct frames of reference: one of human experience and the other of a conceptualization of the cosmos as a whole.
We may consider the event of the miracle from within either frame, but to draw conclusions about the constancy of God’s will from the reference frame of human experience is of course mistaken. Nevertheless, from the human frame of reference, we can describe the miracle as a change in the course of events, since here that is nothing other than the historical pattern of our experience in A-series time. From the cosmic frame of reference, on the other hand, we conceive the course of events as laid out in B-series time, as known and willed by God from eternity. In this case, the miracle is not a change in the course of events, but simply a part of the cosmic event.