the former in terms of the latter amounts to explaining what is clearer by what is more obscure.

Moreover, the methods presented in the Quran are better than the method of al-Ash‘arī and others. They establish the existence of the Maker through the very things people observe: entities coming into being. That entities come into being is known through observation; there is no need to establish this by arguing that their attributes come into being and that whatever is never free of temporal occurrences must itself have come into being.

Rather, those who follow this path supposed that entities do not come into being, but only their attributes do; that they had never witnessed a body or a self-subsisting substance coming into being, but had only witnessed the attributes of bodies coming into being; and that bodies are alike, composed of substances that are alike, with these substances passing from one attribute to another within them.

They said: “This, then, is what is observed coming into being. Through this, one then knows that whatever bears these temporal occurrences has itself come into being.” Thus, they denied what people know through their senses and direct observation: that the bodies they witness coming into being do indeed come into being. Yet they then needed to establish that these entities come into being through the argument they mentioned: that they are never free of temporal occurrences, and whatever is never free of temporal occurrences must itself have come into being.

Anyone can see that this method is unnecessary, given the entities they witness coming into being. Its proponents themselves concede that it is unnecessary, given the attributes they witness coming into being, as al-Rāzī and others have mentioned. On either account, then, it has been established that this method is unnecessary.