something else is caused by it; rather, both may be effects of another cause, even if one is a condition for the other.

Discussion of this then leads to the distinction between a cause, a constituent part of it, and a condition. This is not the place to examine that distinction exhaustively, since the point is established without doing so. The point here is simply that the precedence of an efficient cause over its produced effect is rationally intelligible to the vast majority of rational people, both earlier and later. Only a small group, such as Ibn Sīnā, al-Rāzī, and others like them, allow that a produced effect can exist simultaneously with its agent.

Al-Rāzī claimed in his al-Muhassal and elsewhere that theologians and philosophers allow a beginningless contingent being to exist as the effect of a cause that necessitates its effect by its very essence—namely, the beginningless cause. However, the theologians say that He acts by choice, and therefore deny that any contingent being can be beginningless, whereas the philosophers say that He does not act by choice, and therefore hold that His effect is beginningless. This claim of his misrepresents both groups, as we have explained at length elsewhere.

The theologians who maintain that a beginningless produced effect is impossible hold that it is impossible however its agent is conceived. They also say that it is impossible for the Lord to act without choice. The impossibility of either is not conditional upon knowing the other to be impossible.

The philosophers who hold that the celestial spheres are beginningless have two views concerning the First Cause: does it act by choice, or does it necessitate its effect without choice?