those who have gone astray supports the opposite of what they seek to establish, just as the arguments from revelation that they invoke do.

An example is their argument for the eternity of the celestial spheres: if He exercises causal efficacy upon the world, that efficacy either has real existence or has none. The latter is necessarily known to be false.

Yet this is the position of many Muʿtazilīs and Ashʿarīs, and of those who maintain that the act of creation is identical with the created thing. If, on the other hand, causal efficacy has real existence, then, if it arises anew, this entails an infinite succession and entails that newly arising events subsist in Him; He therefore cannot be eternal. If it is eternal, whatever it necessitates must also be eternal, so its effect must be eternal.

The first response is that this would mean that none of His effects comes into being, which contradicts what we observe.

This argument entails that an effect accompanies an agent whose causal efficacy is complete. If that is so, then whenever an event comes into being, complete causal efficacy must have been absent in eternity. The same applies whenever anything new arises. It follows, then, that no causal efficacy necessitating its effects existed in eternity—and this contradicts their position.

It therefore follows that causal efficacy arises anew and occurs in an unending succession. And if causal efficacy has real existence