As for Ibn Rushd’s statement, “Either each of its two parts is a condition for the existence of the other, or neither is, or one is a condition for the other without the converse being true,” and his statement, “The first case cannot be eternal, for composition itself is a condition for the existence of the other. Thus the parts cannot be the cause of the composition, nor can the composition be its own cause, unless a thing were its own cause,” the first response to him is as follows:

Calling this “composition” and “parts” is not part of the ordinary language in which human beings communicate. In human language, something possessing attributes is not said to be composed of them, nor are they said to be its parts. When we address you using your own terminology, you know that “composite” means nothing more than an essence possessing attributes inseparable from it, the presence of qualities within it, or a conjunction of qualities and things, and the like. It does not mean that there is a composite which another has composed, such that one could say, “A composite requires an agent to compose it.”

For whoever accepts your terminology and calls the necessarily existent essence, characterized by its inseparable attributes, a “composition” does not mean that some agent composed it. No rational person would say this. Nor do you yourselves claim that the mere term denoting this meaning entails that it has an agent; rather, you claim