theologians, whose speculative theology was originally derived from the Jahmiyyah and the Qadariyyah.”

He is then told: “Your position entails something even more untenable: events arising without an agent—the very position you described as manifestly untenable. For if you say that the events we observe have no agent, you are committed to this position. If you say that they have an agent, you are asked: Did it produce them after they had not existed, without anything newly arising within itself, or did it refrain from producing them until something arose within itself?

“If you affirm the former, you are asked: Are these events perpetual, or do they have a beginning? If you say that they have a beginning, this is your opponents’ position. If you say that they have no beginning, then all events arise from an agent without anything newly arising within it. Yet you have said that the agent’s state in relation to the newly produced effect at the time of acting cannot be exactly the same as its state when it was not acting. You must therefore maintain that its state when the events of the Flood occurred was not the same as its state when the preceding events occurred, since these events differ.

“If its state can remain the same while different events arise, then its state can remain the same as new events occur. For a subsequent event, such as the Flood, involves things that had no precedent before it. These, then, are unprecedented events, and there is no difference between bringing this event into existence and bringing any other event into existence. If changes occurring in the celestial sphere are taken to be what necessitates this, then the same argument concerning the origination of changes in the lower realm applies to the origination of those changes in the upper realm.