The limits of philosophical demonstration › What the critique leaves us to decide

The strongest question for al-Ghazali is whether his alternatives are genuinely coherent. A critic cannot defeat a demonstration merely by saying that something else might happen. The alternative must survive scrutiny. Does an eternal will specifying a temporal beginning explain enough? Does divine production of knowledge preserve warranted confidence? These are questions raised by the arguments we have examined.

A second question concerns the movement from philosophical criticism to religious acceptance. Suppose an argument against bodily resurrection fails. That failure does not make every religious account of resurrection true. Further commitments concerning revelation and its interpretation are needed. The Incoherence cannot be read as though the collapse of one proof automatically establishes an entire theology.

The book nevertheless teaches a demanding way to read an argument. Identify the exact conclusion. Separate it from the confidence with which it is asserted. Ask which premise excludes the proposed alternative, and whether that premise has been defended. Then ask what follows if the argument fails. Sometimes the proper result is a narrower conclusion rather than a reversal.

The cotton in contact with the flame now presents several questions at once. What happened? What produced it? Under which conditions would it recur? Could it have been otherwise? Al-Ghazali insists that an answer to the first question cannot simply be promoted into a final answer to all the others. Whether his own alternatives succeed remains part of the philosophical work the reader must do.