itself something that has come into being.

This is the method the Muʿtazilites initially followed to establish that bodies have come into being. On this approach, the fact that human beings have come into being is known through inference, not self-evidently.

If one adds to this the claim that knowledge of an originated thing’s need for one who brings it into being is inferential—as maintained by some Muʿtazilites and those who agreed with them, such as al-Qādī Abū Bakr and his followers—then both premises used to establish the Maker become inferential.

This is the weakest and longest of these approaches. Yet it rests on the principle that any newly occurring specification must have someone who specifies it. These thinkers regard this as self-evident, like the contingent’s need for the Necessary.

Then those who followed Ibn Sīnā’s approach treated this as inferential and established the impossibility of an infinite regress through Ibn Sīnā’s method, which is more direct than the methods that followed him.

Those who came after them, such as al-Rāzī, added to this the rejection of circularity. He, al-Āmidī, and others like them then established the impossibility of an infinite regress through lengthy arguments. Al-Āmidī found this so difficult that he said he was unable to make these arguments work or resolve the objections raised against them, as we have mentioned.

There is no doubt that making these arguments work while defining the contingent according to the interpretation introduced by Ibn Sīnā is impossible.

But making them work when the contingent is understood as that which exists at one time and does not exist at another is easy and straightforward, known through the self-evident principles of reason.

Consider, then, those who depart from paths that are sound according to both revelation and reason: the further they persist in their departure, the further they stray from the truth, making the path longer and more difficult, until this led