[512] Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī said: The first issue concerning the natural sciences is the judgment of the philosophers that the connection that is observed to exist between causes and effects is a necessary relation, and that there is no capability or possibility of bringing the cause into existence without the effect, nor the effect without the cause.

The first issue must be disputed, since denying it is the basis of affirming miracles that interrupt the habitual [course of events], such as converting a stick into a serpent, reviving the dead, and cleaving the moon. Those who regard the habitual course [of events] as being necessitated consider all these things to be impossible. They attach a figurative interpretation to the Qur'ānic passages concerning the revival of the dead. They say that God intends in these passages to refer to eliminating the death that is ignorance by means of the life that is knowledge. They have interpreted the conversion of the stick into the deceiving [serpent] in terms of Moses' refutation of the doubts of the unbelievers by means of the clear divine argument. As for the cleavage of the moon, they have often denied its occurrence, claiming that it has not been recurrently corroborated by a sound tradition.

The philosophers have only affirmed the existence of miracles that interrupt the habitual [course of events] in the following three cases.