these people can offer is the term “composition” and the assertion that what is composite cannot be a Necessary Existent. The ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings involved in this have already been explained.

The most the others can offer is that accidents do not persist—which the majority of rational people dispute—and that acts must be finite. The disagreement among rational people concerning this is well known, and most of them deny that it is impossible for acts to be finite in both directions.

We have already mentioned the objections of al-Urmawī and others among his teachers to these premises. Al-Rāzī and others had preceded him in this, criticizing them in a manner that demonstrated their invalidity and to which they offered no objection. Although al-Rāzī’s arguments rely on these premises elsewhere, his inquiry ultimately settled on criticizing them.

Likewise, Athīr al-Abharī, in his book known as Tahrīr al-dalā’il fī taqrīr al-masā’il (Refining the Proofs for Establishing the Propositions), and others criticized these methods and demonstrated the invalidity of the argument’s central premise: that events without a beginning are impossible.

Al-Abharī mentioned the earlier argument—the argument from motion and rest—and their assertion:

“If a body were beginningless, it would have to be either in motion or at rest. Both alternatives are invalid.

“The first is invalid because, if it were in motion, this would entail its being both preceded by something else and not preceded by anything else. Motion entails being preceded by something else, whereas beginninglessness entails not being preceded by anything else; thus, both would have to hold together. Furthermore, if it were in motion, it would be in a state in which it was never free of temporal events. Whatever is never free of temporal events must itself have originated in time; otherwise, something that originated in time would be beginningless. That is impossible.

“Moreover, if it were in motion,