did not bring himself into being.

He then said:

“What we have described thus shows that he is not the one who moved himself through these states, and that he has one who moved him from one state to another and ordered him as he is, for he cannot pass from one state to another without one who moves and governs him.”

He thus stated this premise without offering any supporting argument. If someone who knows that man passes from one state to another cannot thereby know that he has one who moves and governs him except through proofs that must be presented, then al-Ash‘arī did not present those proofs. Rather, he advanced, without evidence, a claim requiring inferential proof and open to dispute.

In that case, the objections raised against his argument by his Mu‘tazilite critics would carry greater weight, for he provided proof neither that bodies came into being nor that whatever comes into being must have someone who brings it into being.

It may then be said: It is astonishing that the claim that the world came into being without anyone bringing it into being, and that some events occurred without anyone bringing them about, should be a view held by many philosophers and eternalists, or by a group of Muslim speculative thinkers; whereas the view that knowing that acts depend on an agent, that created things depend on an agent, and that a created being depends on a creator is self-evident knowledge was held only by a small group that is not