If, however, you say that something arose which necessitated these events, you are asked about its agent: if it is the First, the original objection arises anew; if it is another, your position entails events arising without an agent. If you concede that it did not produce them until something arose within it, you have abandoned your own position.

Furthermore, when an agent satisfies all the conditions for acting, either its effect can come into existence after not existing, without a newly arising cause, or it cannot. If it can, this is your opponent’s position, which you claimed was self-evidently false. If it cannot, its effect must coexist with it, with no part of that effect coming later. Thus nothing can newly arise from the agent, given what you and your fellows maintain: that it is a complete cause and a fully necessitating agent. A complete cause cannot be followed later by its effect or any part of its effect. Hence, whatever comes after the First is neither an effect of the complete cause nor something produced by the First Agent. Nor can it be the act of another agent, since the same reasoning applies to that other agent. It follows that all events arise without anything bringing them into existence.”

This consequence necessarily follows for these metaphysical philosophers just as it does for their fellow natural philosophers. The falsity of this position is among the most self-evident truths. These matters have been discussed at length elsewhere. The purpose here was merely to draw attention to the kinds of ambiguous expressions with which these people and others like them mislead, such as “composite” and similar terms, just as they mislead through the terms “specification” and “specifier”; and to show that the arguments of Abū Hāmid and others like him in debating them are better and sounder than their own.