Their critics challenged them by invoking future events, and they presented the critics’ objection. They said:

“If it is asked: ‘The inhabitants of Paradise will remain there forever, without interruption. If affirming events with no end is not implausible, then neither is affirming events with no beginning.’

“We reply: What is impossible is for infinitely many individual things to enter existence successively. Expecting things to come into existence in the future does not entail that infinitely many things exist. It is impossible for things within the power of the Creator, exalted is He, to enter existence in a quantity that no number can encompass and no span of time can account for.

“What establishes this is that an event, by its very nature, has a beginning. Affirming events while denying a beginning is contradictory. Having an end, however, is not part of the very nature of an event.”

The critics answered this argument by saying that what is past entered existence and then passed out of it, so it is not now in existence. What is future will enter existence and then pass out of it. Thus, neither is presently in existence, and both necessarily involve entering existence and passing out of it. The two are therefore alike in entering and leaving existence, and in their present nonexistence.

However, the entry and departure of the former are past, while those of the latter are future. This difference does not prevent them from sharing these features, which they do share—especially since past and future are relative notions, for there is no