saying:

“The determining factor is the agent’s knowledge and will, or His power, or the possibility of acting and the absence of the impediment—namely, beginningless eternity—or the attainment of a benefit.”

Upon examining each of these claims and the others they have advanced, none proves to be a sound answer. For knowledge accords with what is known as it actually is, and what is known follows the will. If the determining factor does not exist in reality, knowledge cannot serve as a determining factor.

As for the will, many of them claimed that, by its very nature, it necessitates singling out one of two identical alternatives.

This claim runs counter to what is intelligible about the will. The will is not known to favor one of two alternatives identical in every respect; rather, one must possess some distinguishing feature that necessitates its being favored.

Affirming a will of the sort they describe has no basis in revelation or reason; rather, it contradicts both. There is nothing in the Book and the Sunnah implying that everything that comes into being has arisen through one and the same will, which precedes everything willed by an infinite span. The same applies to everything else they have mentioned.

Furthermore, if these things are eternal, no new determining factor has arisen. If, however, any of them—or any relation to them—arose after not having arisen, then something originated without anything necessitating its origination, and one of two identical alternatives was favored without a determining factor. Thus, something originated without anything necessitating its origination, while the determining factor was the same before its existence as after its existence: it had not been incomplete and then become complete.

Al-Rāzī answers, as his associates do, that the will serves as the determining factor, but then declares this answer weak. At other times he says:

“Rather, the intellect and the souls are eternal; then a conception arose from among