first, by affirming the existence of those accidents that are attributes in general; or, alternatively, by affirming only some of them—such as the akwan (the transient states of motion, rest, conjunction, and separation); second, by demonstrating that these akwan are originated, through refuting the idea that they merely emerge after having been latent or that they can migrate from one locus to another; third, by proving that a body can never be devoid of accidents—either of every class of accident, on the ground that a thing capable of receiving a quality can never be empty of that quality or its opposite, or at the very least of the akwan; and fourth, by establishing the impossibility of a sequence of events having no first beginning. This fourth point rests on two premises:

1. A body is never without the accidents that are attributes.
2. Whatever is inseparable from attributes that are accidents must itself be originated, for such accidents are nothing but originated. Sometimes they state this only with respect to certain attributes that are accidents, such as the akwan, and then argue further: whatever is never devoid of any class of temporal events is itself temporal, because an infinite regress of events is impossible.

It is known by necessity that Muhammad—peace and blessings be upon him—did not summon people to acknowledge the Creator and the prophethood of His messengers by means of this line of reasoning. Indeed, the leading dialecticians, such as al-Ashʿari and others, have admitted that it is not the method of the messengers, their followers, the early generations of the ummah, or its great imams; they have even declared that it is forbidden in their view.

The exacting scholars go further, holding that the method is unsound and that, once its premises are properly analyzed and qualified, they cannot establish the conclusion in any absolute manner. Hence, anyone who builds the foundations of his religion upon it is forced into one of two situations: either he discovers its weakness and sets it alongside the proofs offered by those who argue for the world’s eternity, so that the evidences appear to cancel one another out; or he finds himself sometimes favoring this side and at other times that side—precisely the state in which many of those groups now stand.