the impossibility of a beginningless succession of temporally originated events; the difficulties with this have already been noted. This approach additionally requires demonstrating that a body cannot be devoid of temporally originated attributes other than motion and rest, which most rational thinkers dispute. It rests on several premises: that a body must have a size, or involve combination or separation; that this is possible only through a particularizer; and that everything requiring a particularizer is originated in time.

As for the first premise, most rational thinkers concede that a body must have a size. The claim that it must involve combination and separation, however, rests on the question of the indivisible atom.

Most rational thinkers among Muslim groups and others deny the indivisible atom—even major schools of speculative theology, such as the Najjāriyyah, Dirāriyyah, Hishāmiyyah, and Kullābiyyah, and many of the Karrāmiyyah, together with most philosophers. Nevertheless, the claim that a body is composed of matter and form, as some adherents of philosophy also maintain, is more untenable than the claim that it is composed of indivisible atoms. Both views are weak.

Our purpose here is to draw attention to the general outlines of these approaches and their aims. As for the claim that whatever has a size requires a particularizer, this is a matter of well-known dispute. Size is one attribute of the thing possessing it, like its colors, its spatial states, and all the other attributes a body may possess, such as life, knowledge, power, speech, hearing, and sight