In short, if your method is blameworthy, he deserves less blame for it than you do. If it is sound, he did employ it at the end of his argument. He did not, however, make establishing the existence of the Maker, Exalted is He, dependent on establishing that bodies have a beginning. He knew that this was not the case and that such a claim contradicted the religion of the Muslims and all other religious communities. Thus, agreeing with you in adopting this method at the outset would have contravened revelation and reason.

As for the claim, mentioned by this Muʿtazilī, that whoever acknowledges something originated and created thereby acknowledges the Creator, and whoever acknowledges an effect acknowledges its agent, this is indeed so.

For this reason, al-Ashʿarī did not address the proof of this. Rather, he treated the fact that something originated points to an originator as firmly established knowledge rooted in human nature, since disputing this is even more egregious than the disputation of the sophists.

Al-Qādī Abū Bakr, however, sought to defend al-Ashʿarī in another way. He claimed that the dependence of something originated upon an originator is known through inference rather than self-evidently, and that al-Ashʿarī had established this. He stated that al-Ashʿarī established it on the grounds that an act implies an agent, just as an agent implies an act.

It is well known that al-Ashʿarī’s words contain nothing of this, nor does his argument require it. The error arose from al-Qādī Abū Bakr’s assumption that knowledge