This is also the position of most of the Muʿtazila, the Ashʿarīs, and others: they acknowledge the Maker who brings things into existence without any newly arising cause. For this reason, they have faced severe criticism on this point. Their critics have said:

“This undermines the very principle by which you established the Maker’s existence: neither of the two alternatives for a contingent thing can prevail over the other without a determining factor. If all times are alike, and the agent remains in one unchanging state, with nothing new arising in him throughout eternity, past or future, yet one particular time is singled out for something to come into existence, this would amount to one alternative prevailing without a determining factor.”

The position of those Dahriyya, and that of Muhammad ibn Zakariyyā al-Rāzī and others like him, who attribute origination to the soul’s attachment to matter and similar things, all tend toward a single principle: affirming that something comes into existence without a newly arising cause.

The philosophers who maintain that the world is eternal, such as Aristotle, Ibn Sīnā, and others like them, used this as an argument against those who maintain that the world came into existence. Yet their own position entails this and something still more objectionable. They claimed that all temporal events arise from an eternal, complete cause that necessarily entails its effect, with no part of its effect coming after it. Thus Ibn Sīnā and others like him say that the First moves the things that move, meaning that they move in order to resemble him—not that he originated their motion, just as, in their view, he did not originate the moving things themselves. It therefore followed from