The Habit of Fire

Al-Ghazali was a scholar in eleventh-century Baghdad who wrote a book against the philosophers of his day, called The Incoherence of the Philosophers. One of his arguments concerned cause and effect.

He pointed out that when cotton touches fire and burns, all we observe is the burning following the touch. We do not observe a necessary tie between them. In his view the tie is how God ordinarily acts, and God could act otherwise, so the usual pattern is a habit and not a law of logic.

You need not share his religious conclusion to learn from the argument. It shows how easily we move from a regular pattern to a claim of necessity. It also shows why a good thinker asks what exactly has been seen.

The cotton and the flame

A cook always lights the stove before the soup boils, and a young helper concludes that the match itself makes the soup hot. The cook laughs, but then asks the helper what exactly she has seen.

The helper says she saw the match, then the flame, then the bubbles. The cook agrees that the order is clear, and adds that the link from flame to heat is something we understand by more than looking.

Try this today Pick a cause-and-effect pair you take for granted and write what you have actually observed of it.