temporally originated events have no agent, and that these contingent events came into being after not existing, without a necessary existent or an agent.

As for the first alternative—his having always been acting, whether called a necessitating cause or an agent acting by choice—this does not entail that this world is beginningless. Its existence could depend on preceding acts, just as other particular events arise.

[Section]

The point here is that those who deny that Allah is above and distinct from His creation have not agreed upon a single premise on which to base their conclusion. Rather, each challenges the other’s premise. If their agreement upon this denial rests on the premises that led them to believe it—and those premises are disputed among them, with no agreed premises upon which to establish the stated conclusion—then it is clear that their shared conclusion was a consequence associated with the disputed propositions they accepted, not with self-evident propositions.

Their agreement upon this denial therefore does not rule out their agreeing on something contrary to self-evident knowledge. Suppose a man had considerable wealth and many creditors, and each creditor produced two witnesses to establish a claim for a certain sum and collected it, until all the man’s wealth had been exhausted, while each creditor challenged the other’s witnesses. Accepting the testimony of all these witnesses would result in taking all that man’s wealth. One could not say, “These people are so numerous that they could not all agree upon a lie,” for they did not agree upon a single report. Rather, each group