What al-Qādī Abū Bakr and others have stated is clearer than the argument advanced by Abū al-Husayn and others: that coming into being must be either necessary or contingent.

What Abū al-Husayn and his followers have stated—that a contingent, possible being would have no greater claim to existence than to nonexistence were it not for a cause bringing it into being—is clearer than what Ibn Sīnā, al-Rāzī, and others have stated: that a contingent, possible being has no greater claim to existence than to nonexistence, nor to nonexistence than to existence, except through a determining factor external to it.

Some of their methods are sounder and more direct than others.

What we have explained demonstrates the invalidity of al-Qādī Abū Bakr’s claim that no one disputed the view that the dependence of something brought into being upon one who brings it into being is not known self-evidently, but can only be established through inquiry and investigation—except for a small group whose opinion carries no weight, who claimed that this position was self-evident.

[Al-Ashʿarī’s discussion in al-Lumaʿ of establishing Allah’s existence, and Ibn Taymiyyah’s commentary]

He may then be told: If this is true, al-Ashʿarī offered no proof of it in al-Lumaʿ, but simply took it for granted. He merely established that man came into being and that he