I think Tzortzis's insistence that Ghazali came up with the Kalam 'argument' is another case of plagiarising mistakes from William Lane Craig.
Indeed this is true.
Ghazali did believe that Allah is the 'first cause', but he meant this in a completely different sense to that which is being ascribed to him. He believed that Allah is the direct first cause, of every event.
Using Ghazali's undertanding of first cause, 'first cause' becomes meaningless, because there are no second causes. There is no long chain of cause and effect beginning with Allah. There is only Allah. There is only 'the cause'.
It is not Allah > A > B > C > D
It is Allah > A; Allah > B; Allah > C; Allah > D
Not quite. Allah can cause A to lead to B but that is because he wants A to lead to B. There is nothing inherent within the body of A (as it exists in a temporal state) to lead to the body of B (existing in another temporal state). He basically presaged Hume's idea of temporal priority being an attribute of psychological causality.
He basically denies cause and effect in the very sense that we understand it today. The very sense in which William Lane Tzortzis fans require it to be used.
Right, but WLT fans probably don't understand wavefunction collapse, do they?
He denied the very fundamentals of nature, dissolving any possibility to learn about it, and this is why he can also be charged with contributing to the decline of science in the Islamic world.
At the time, yes. But his view is more compatible with QM than you may like to think. In fact it is the (scientific) mu'tazilite doctrne that has utterly been discredited today.
Neither did he see an inherent problem with infinite regress.
Well, it is possible that time had no beginning because the first half-open interval of the big bang keeps getting smaller and smaller, if this is what you're referring to. I'll concede this is a minority position championed by the likes of Quentin Smith etc...
But if you're referring to causality, surely this is a tautology?
Topic: Al Ghazali and Kalam