and therefore did not explicitly affirm either an eternal will or a will that comes into being. Rather, what it explicitly stated most evidently indicates that will brings into existence things that come into being. This is His saying, exalted is He:

“Our word to a thing, when We will it, is only to say to it, ‘Be,’ and it is.”

“This is so because the general public cannot conceive of things coming into being through an eternal will. Indeed, revelation explicitly affirms neither the origination nor the eternity of will, since this is among the matters that are unclear to most people. The theologians have no conclusive proof that a will that comes into being cannot subsist in an eternal being.

“For the principle on which they rely in denying that a will that comes into being can subsist in an eternal substrate is the premise whose weakness we have demonstrated: whatever is never free of things that come into being must itself have come into being. We shall explain this more fully when discussing will.”

I say:

The discussion of will—whether it is multiple or a single entity, universal or particular, eternal or originated, and whether its origination concerns its kind or a particular instance of it—and people’s disagreements about these matters do not belong here. This is among the most perplexing issues confronting speculative thinkers.

Discussion of it resembles discussion of speech and the like. Yet merely conceding