and rain, and other things. He called this the temporal origination of attributes only because he followed others who affirm the indivisible atom and maintain that bodies are alike, and that the events Allah, Most High, brings about consist merely in changing substances—which are bodies—from one attribute to another while the entities themselves persist. These thinkers deny transformation.
The great majority of rational thinkers and scholars, including jurists and others, agree that their position is false and that Allah, Most High, brings entities into being and creates them anew, even if He transforms an initial body into another body. They therefore do not say that the physical substance of the sperm-drop persists in the human body, or that the physical substance of the date stone persists in the palm tree.
These matters are discussed at length elsewhere. These statements encapsulate the innovated theological discourse that the early generations and the leading scholars condemned, rebuking those who engaged in it.
The point here is that these are the strongest supposedly conclusive rational arguments with which they oppose the divine scriptures, the prophetic texts, and the position of the early generations of the Muslim community and its leading scholars.
They should therefore be told: You, and every knowledgeable Muslim, know as a matter of self-evident certainty that the faith of the foremost pioneers among the Emigrants and the Helpers, and those who followed them in righteousness, was not founded upon these arguments based on the body. Nor did the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, command anyone to use such reasoning to establish the existence of the Maker. Nor did Allah, Most High, mention in His Book, or in His signs pointing to Him and His oneness, any of these arguments based on body and accident, the composition and temporal origination of the body, and their implications.
Thus, whoever says that faith in Allah and His Messenger can only be attained through this approach makes a claim whose falsity is self-evident from the religion of Islam.
And whoever says that following this approach is obligatory