the world.”
It may be said in response:
This argument presented by al-Rāzī is sound and well-founded. It confronts them with the observed temporal occurrences, sometimes called everyday occurrences. These must have a complete cause. If that cause is eternal, then a temporally originated thing can come into existence from an eternal cause, and their claim is invalidated. If the cause is temporally originated, then, according to their position, it must originate simultaneously with the effect, not before it, since they have established that a complete cause must coexist with its effect in time, without the effect coming later.
Their position therefore requires that the complete cause coexist with its effect, and the effect with its cause, neither preceding the other in time. Thus, any particular temporally originated thing must have a cause that originates simultaneously with it, and the cause of that cause must likewise originate simultaneously with it. This entails the existence of infinitely many causes and consequences—that is, causes and effects—at a single time. The impossibility of this is self-evident to reason, and all rational people agree that it is impossible.
Al-Urmawī’s objection to him therefore fails.
His argument, in summary, is that what necessarily follows is the temporal origination of the cause, or of some of its conditions; and they allow conditions and preparatory factors to originate successively.
It may be said to them:
They allow one temporally originated thing to follow another, saying: “The origination of the first is a condition for the origination of the second, and the condition exists before that which depends upon it.”
Yet this contradicts their assertion that a complete cause necessarily coexists with its effect in time, and that the effect must exist when the cause becomes complete, without coming later. For this entails that, when the condition completing the cause comes into existence, the effect comes into existence simultaneously with it, without coming later; and whenever