These matters we have discussed here are of general benefit and are needed both here and elsewhere, because of the maladies in people’s hearts. We digressed into them, however, while discussing the approaches Abū 'Abd Allāh al-Rāzī adopted to establish that the world and bodies have a beginning n. We also cited al-Āmidī’s discussion of those approaches. Thus, this discussion arose in connection with the first approach.

[Section: Al-Āmidī’s Formulation of the Second Approach]

The second approach argues that particularization requires a particularizer. Al-Āmidī set it out in two ways.

The First Formulation

One is the argument al-Rāzī presented and then rejected.

Al-Āmidī said: “The second approach is that the components of the world require something to particularize them with the attributes they possess from among those possible for them. Everything of this kind has a beginning; therefore, the world has a beginning.

As for the first premise, our fellow scholars have pursued two ways of establishing it. The first is that they said: Every body in the world is finite, and everything finite has a specific shape, a specific size, and a specific spatial location.

The first premise rests on what has already been established. As for the second premise, it is because every