 When al-Ghazâlî writes that the connection between a cause and its effect is not necessary he attacks Avicenna’s necessitarian ontology not his secondary causality. The dispute between al-Ghazâlî and Avicenna is not about causality as such, rather about the necessary nature of God’s creation. Kukkonen (2000) and Dutton (2001) have shown that the two start with quite different assumptions about necessity. Avicenna’s view of the modalities follows the statistical model of Aristotle and connects the possibility of a thing to its temporal actuality (Bäck 1992). A temporally unqualified sentence like, “Fire causes cotton to combust,” contains implicitly or explicitly a reference to the time of utterance as part of its meaning. If this sentence is true whenever uttered, it is necessarily true. If its truth-value can change in the course of time, it is possible. If such a sentence is false whenever uttered, it is impossible (Hintikka 1973, 63–72, 84–6, 103–5, 149–53). In Aristotelian modal theories, modal terms were taken to refer to the one and only historical world of ours. For Avicenna, fire necessarily causes cotton to combust because the sentence “Fire causes cotton to combust,” was, is, and will always be true.