and more fully an agent than the first, because it brings its effect into existence and sustains it. The other agent brings its effect into existence, but another agent is needed to sustain it thereafter. This is the relationship of the mover to motion and to things whose existence consists solely in motion.

“The philosophers, believing that motion is the agent’s action and that the world’s existence cannot be complete without motion, said that the agent producing motion is the agent producing the world, and that if it ceased imparting motion for even the blink of an eye, the world would cease to exist.

“They understood their syllogism as follows: the world is an action, or something whose existence depends upon an action. Every action necessarily has an agent existing whenever that action exists. From this they concluded that knowledge has an agent existing whenever it exists. Thus, whoever considers it necessary that the action proceeding from the agent of the world have a temporal beginning says: ‘The world has a temporal beginning through an agent who has always been eternal, and whose action is eternal.’ That is, it has neither beginning nor end—not that it is an entity eternal in itself, as those who describe it as eternal have imagined.”

[Ibn Taymiyyah’s commentary]

I say:

Someone might respond: What Ibn Rushd has related here from the philosophers was intended to establish the approach of Aristotle and his followers, who inferred from motion the existence of a mover that perpetually imparts motion without itself moving, and which they call the First.