The Providential Intervention of God

In particular, a twelfth-century bookman of Muslim Spain, Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd-- cognize to the West under the oft more federation name of Averroes--played a major image in the contagion of Greek philosophy to the medieval West. He came, indeed, to be kn bear as the "Great Commentator" on Aristotle (Kogan, 1985, p. 2). Averroes' role in the history of philosophy, however, goes far beyond that of a simple transmission-belt by which Aristotle found his way to the universities of medieval Europe. He made his own major contribution to the fundamental philosophical questions of causation, the personality of nature, and the role of divine intervention in the world. He did so in defense of a congeal which was gradually losing ground in the Muslim world in his time, and which in modern propagation has been wholly rejected by Muslims. Averroes' position remained very much alive in the West, however. Indeed, the philosophy of Averroes can be seen as being, in important ways, a precurser to the set of ideas rough the world that became predominant in the West during the Enlightenment, and which on the full have remained predominant--in general Western attitudes, if not necessarily in formal Western philosophy--up through the present day.

To understand Averroes' deed and its relationship to Enlightenment thought, we must first inquire into the nature of the debate in which he participated,

There was no place in this conception of Averroes, however, for miracles, at least not in the sense of super infixed interventions in the world. The world itself was a miracle, the product of God's creative will, and every natural chain of action was an expression of His purpose. But for God to put in in the world in a supernatural sort would be to make an arbitrary disruption of His own creation. If it would be a very poor watchmaker who had continually gorge on the hands in order for his watch to have time, then it fell below the greatness and power of the absolute, divine, watchmaker to have to periodically come back to adjust his form.

The likeness of the watch has been deliberately chosen in this discussion, though it is anachronistic with respect to Averroes, who lived before the mechanical clock, powered by weights or spring, and governed by an escapement, was invented. But the clock, or its small form the watch, was known to Western thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was for them a ready symbolisation and example of the working of the Newtonian universe.

These doubts led eventually to the opening of occasionalism (Fakhry, 1958, p. 9), and thus to the doctrine of continuous creation (Fakhry, 1958, pp. 26ff). Occasionalism is a position which has also appeared recurrently in Western philosophy, notably in the medieval work of William of Ockham (from whom the term "Occam's Razor" derives), and in the work of the seventeenth-century French philosopher Malebranche. Occasionalism holds, in essense, that causality is an arbitrary construction located upon events; these events can in fact only legitimately be understood as "occasions" of an underlying divine (rather than material) continuity.

Thus, the assure of writers like John Toland, who wrote a tract called Christianity not surreptitious in 1696, might be summarized as "what was mysterious and superhuman about Christianity must be discarded" (Gay, 1966, p. 327). There
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