If they say, “No change has occurred,” they deny the obvious.

If they say, “A change has occurred,” they are asked:

“Is the occurrence of this change known to the Eternal One or not?” The earlier difficulty then follows.

In short, it is difficult to conceive that knowledge of a thing before it exists and knowledge of it after it has come into existence are one and the same.

This, then, is the formulation of the difficulty.

He said:

Imam Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī attempted to resolve this difficulty in his book entitled The Incoherence of the Philosophers, but offered nothing useful.

The substance of his argument was this: he claimed that knowledge and the thing known are correlatives. Just as one of two correlatives may change while the other remains unchanged in itself, something similar, he suggested, may happen to things in relation to Allah’s knowledge, glorified and exalted is He: the things themselves may change without His knowledge of them changing.