to say that, just as the essence of the Necessary Existent is eternal and has no agent producing it, so too its attributes are eternal and have no agent producing them?”

Ibn Rushd said: “All of this is a challenge to those who deny the attributes by following Ibn Sīnā’s method of establishing the Necessary Existent in itself. They understand contingent existence as genuine contingency and hold that everything other than the First Principle has this character. Their Ashʿarī opponents concede this and hold that every contingent being has an agent, and that the regress ends upon reaching something that is not contingent in itself.

“If these premises are conceded to them, they suppose that it follows that the First, at which contingency ends, is not contingent and must therefore be simple, not composite. But the Ashʿarīs may say: ‘That which is free of genuine contingency need not be simple; it need only be eternal, without an efficient cause.’ Thus, these thinkers have no demonstration, through the argument from necessary existence, that the First is simple.”