and it is the one to be relied upon. He stated that this is the well-known line of argument among the Ash'arīs. Al-Rāzī and others like him did not rely on this argument, because it rests on the premise that accidents cannot persist. Al-Āmidī challenged the approaches on which al-Rāzī relied.

Al-Āmidī said:

Our argument is as follows: the world is composed of temporally originated parts, and whatever is composed of temporally originated parts is itself temporally originated. Therefore, the world is temporally originated. The first premise is established as follows: the parts of the world consist exclusively of substances and accidents; substances and accidents are temporally originated; therefore, the parts of the world are temporally originated.

The first of these claims is established by what was discussed earlier concerning existence and the contingent.

As for the second claim, to establish that accidents are temporally originated, we have shown that accidents cannot persist. Whatever cannot persist is temporally originated and preceded by its own nonexistence. Thus, every accident is temporally originated and preceded by its own nonexistence. Accordingly, either accidents succeed one another in existence without end, or their succession terminates at an accident beyond which there is no other accident. The first alternative is impossible, as we demonstrated, when establishing the Necessary Existent, that there cannot be a succession of temporally originated events with no first event to which it can be traced back. Thus, only the second alternative remains: that their totality is finite