and refuting infinite regress: “There remains another issue to address: refuting circular causation, whereby this has its existence favoured over nonexistence by that, and that by this.”

He said: “Know that circular causation is invalid. The principal argument for refuting it is that a cause precedes its effect. If each were the cause of the other, each would precede the other. Each would therefore precede what precedes itself, entailing that each precedes itself—which is impossible.”

He raised an objection to this, whose substance is that if precedence means something other than one being the cause of the other, we do not concede the first premise. If it means precisely that one is the cause of the other, then the consequent is identical to the antecedent. The argument would thus mean: “If one were the cause of the other, it would be the other’s cause.”

He then said: “In fairness, the invalidity of circular causation is self-evident. Perhaps the Shaykh omitted it for this reason.”

I say:

This is correct, for the invalidity of circular causation is self-evident. For this reason, it does not even occur to most rational people, such that they would need to dismiss it from their minds. Likewise, it does not occur to them that the agent responsible for existing things could be nonexistent, or that something could come into being or exist neither through itself nor through anything else. Indeed, it does not even occur to them that there could be a succession of things brought about with no agent to bring them about. This is an infinite regress of causes: an effect produced by another effect that is itself produced, with that latter effect in turn being the effect of another produced thing, and so on without end. Thus, most sound minds do not even conceive of this as possible