depends on it, they cannot be intrinsically necessary existents, for whatever is intrinsically necessary cannot depend on something else for its subsistence.

If the celestial sphere is moved by another, it cannot be a necessary existent; it must therefore be intrinsically contingent. Whatever is intrinsically contingent can exist only through what is intrinsically necessary. It must therefore depend on an originating agent, just as it depends on a beloved object which it longs to resemble.

This approach can thus be used to establish the existence of the Necessary Existent. They, however, did not present this argument, and in their terminology they do not call what is necessary through another “contingent.”

Only their later thinkers followed this approach. Yet these later thinkers did not use it to establish that the celestial sphere is contingent rather than intrinsically necessary. Thus, the arguments of their predecessors were deficient in one respect, and those of their successors in another.

Because they fell short of establishing that the celestial sphere is contingent and created, the eternalists among them came to hold that it is intrinsically necessary.

[Return to Ibn Rushd’s discussion in response to al-Ghazālī, with Ibn Taymiyya’s comments]

Thus, when Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī debated them and demonstrated their inability to establish that every body is contingent—just as they acknowledged that not every body is temporally originated—he said:

“If it is said: The proof that a body cannot be a necessary existent is that, if it were a necessary existent