is beginningless and has always existed?’

He is told:
‘If matters were as you claim, it could not be acted upon, affected, transformed, or changed. For that which is beginningless cannot undergo transformation or change, nor can it display the marks of having come into being. Whatever undergoes these things and bears the signs of being fashioned is never free of the marks of having come into being. Whatever does not precede that which has come into being must itself have come into being and been fashioned. Thus, the claim that the drop of semen and other bodies are beginningless is disproved.”

[Al-Bāqillānī’s discussion in Sharh al-Lumaʿ]

Al-Qādī Abū Bakr said:
“Know that what he has stated is the principal basis for arguing that all bodies have come into being.

By saying, ‘If they were beginningless, they could not be acted upon, affected, transformed, or changed,’ he meant that they could not pass from a condition they possessed to one they had not possessed: from rest to motion, for instance, or from motion to rest; or become hard after being soft, or separated after being conjoined; or undergo successive states and other changes. For something beginningless that possesses a particular attribute cannot cease to possess it, in accordance with the principle he has stated.

Thus, if something beginningless has always been conjoined, for example, or dependent, or moving or at rest, or possessed of one of these attributes, it cannot cease to possess that attribute. For its being as it is in its beginninglessness must be either by virtue of its own essence, because of a cause, or by virtue of neither its own essence nor