refute the position of the Mu‘tazila and others like them, who hold that all events come into being without any cause newly arising, merely through power, or through power and will that have always remained and will always remain in the same state.

If, however, they do not allow something changing to arise from what does not change, their entire position collapses.

For the celestial sphere is itself changing and varied, with differences in magnitude and attributes; according to them, it also changes through the motions that occur within it. Yet, according to them, this change proceeds from what does not change. Whether they say that it proceeds from the unchanging intellect, as Ibn Sīnā and others like him maintain; from the One whose existence is necessary in itself and who does not change, as Ibn Rushd and others like him maintain; or from the Necessary Existent through the mediation of the intellect, as Nasīr al-Tūsī and others like him maintain—or whatever else they may say along these lines—on every supposition they must accept that something changing arises from what does not change.

Their argument against the Mu‘tazila is thus invalidated, while they themselves embrace to an even greater extent the very falsehood they had established as false and used to refute the Mu‘tazila’s position.

For they hold that the entire class of motions and events came into being with no originator whatsoever, since nothing among the effects and necessary concomitants of the eternal, beginningless cause can come after it. Whatever comes after it, therefore, is not necessitated by it, whether through an intermediary or without one.

Nor did those events originate