an infinite series of causes and effects is possible, so you have not established the existence of anything without a cause.

Second, it may be said: at most, this demonstrates the existence of a Necessary Existent. Anyone who says, “All existence is one and is necessary; it is not divided into necessary and contingent, or eternal and originated,” has therefore satisfied what your proof requires. This reveals the ultimate reach of these thinkers’ arguments.

Since this was the furthest their arguments reached, those who followed their approach divided into two groups.

One group says that the Necessary Existent has not been established, since an infinite series of causes and effects is possible. They raise objections to the refutation of infinite regress which, they say, cannot be answered. Such are al-Āmidī and others.

The other group says that all existence is necessary, both the eternal and the originated. There are not two existents—one eternal and the other originated, one necessary and the other contingent. Rather, the very existence of the originated, contingent being is identical to the existence of the eternal Necessary Existent, as Ibn ‘Arabī and his followers, such as Ibn Sab‘īn and al-Qūnawī, maintain.

Let anyone whom Allah has guided reflect on this immense contradiction to which this unsound approach, followed by Ibn Sīnā and his followers in establishing the Necessary Existent, has led.

Their speculative thinkers acknowledge that no proof has been established for the existence of a Necessary Existent, nor even for a contingent existent in the sense he posited.

Clearly, this is sophistry in the extreme, for the division of existence into