If they give the first answer, they should be told:

“The choice of this act rather than that one must have a cause. Since the servant is receptive to either choice, the occurrence of one rather than the other must have a cause that necessitated it.”

If they give the second answer, they have acknowledged the truth: that the servant’s choice of a particular act comes from Allah Most High, as He, glorified be He, says:

“For whoever among you wills to take a straight course. But you do not will unless Allah wills—the Lord of all worlds.”
[Al-Takwīr: 28–29]

Thus, when their position is closely examined and they are asked:

“This newly arising choice through which the act occurred—the servant’s newly arising will—who brought it into being?”

They say:

“The will admits of no causal explanation.”

I said to one of them who told me this:

“Do you mean that it cannot be explained by a final cause—that its end is unknown—or that it cannot be explained by an efficient cause, so that there is no one who brought it into being?”

As for the former, that is not what is under discussion here, although he himself holds that it can be explained in those terms. As for the latter, its falsity is self-evident: whoever allows some occurrences to come into being without an agent bringing them into being must allow the same for other occurrences. This is a point at which these speculative theologians have become bewildered.

The Qadarī Muʿtazila either deny the will of the Lord Most High, or affirm a will that He brings into being without a substrate and without a will, as their Basran adherents maintain. They are closer to the truth than their Baghdadi adherents.

In this regard, they are as the saying about them has it:

“They went from door to door among the schools,
Yet gained the basest of all goals.”

For they committed themselves to an accident arising without a substrate, and an occurrence coming into being without a will, just as