nor, indeed, by most philosophers. In fact, many philosophers dispute his denial that temporally occurring events and attributes subsist in the essence of the Necessary Existent. They maintain that attributes and acts of will subsist in it, and that its being necessary in itself is not incompatible with this, just as, in the view of all of them, its being eternal is not incompatible with it.

But since Ibn Sīnā and his followers shared the Jahmiyya’s denial of attributes and their eternalist predecessors’ belief in the eternity of the world, they adopted a method of establishing the Lord of the worlds different from that of his Peripatetic predecessors, such as Aristotle and his followers. These philosophers established the First Cause by arguing from the voluntary motion of the celestial sphere, and that it has a mover which moves it as a beloved moves a lover. This mover moves the sphere for the purpose of resembling the First Cause. Ibn Sīnā therefore abandoned that method in favour of this one, which he derived from the method of the theologians who argue from what is temporally originated to its originator, although he himself does not affirm the temporal origination of the world.

He thus made his method an inference from the contingent to the Necessary. Seeing that those theologians divided existence into the eternal and the temporally originated, he instead divided it into the necessary and the contingent, and established the Necessary Existent by this method. This, however, rests on the premise that what is eternal is contingent and has a quiddity capable of either existence or nonexistence.

On this point, the majority of rational thinkers—philosophers, theologians, and others—disagreed with him. Indeed, he himself contradicted his own position on this matter, agreeing with his predecessors and all rational thinkers.