does not depend upon His will and power without showing that it is necessarily entailed by His essence. Yet they cannot show that it is necessarily entailed by His essence without negating His will and power. Their argument is therefore unsound.

If they say:
“Those matters upon which the act depends, if beginningless, entail that the act is beginningless; otherwise, their coming into being must have a cause.”

The response is:
“At most, this establishes that an infinite regress of conditions and effects is necessary, and you yourselves allow this.”

We further say: If an infinite regress of conditions is possible, this objection fails, since the conditions may regress infinitely. If it is impossible, the objection likewise fails, since temporal events as a class must then have been preceded by nonexistence.

Third:
It may be said: “When you say, ‘His essence is sufficient,’ do you mean that it necessarily entails the existence from eternity of what follows necessarily from it, or that it suffices for this even if its existence is delayed? If you mean the first, your claim is refuted by things brought into being in time. For you must hold either that they are beginningless or that He requires a separate cause—if whatever His essence does not suffice for requires a separate cause.

“If you mean the second, this becomes an argument against you, since that for which His essence suffices may come into existence later.”

Fourth:
It may be said: “When you say, ‘He requires a separate cause,’ do you mean a cause brought about by Allah, or a cause not brought about by Him?”

As for the first, it does not entail His dependence upon anything other than Himself. For if He produces the causes and, as their producer, brings things into being through them, then He produces them all. He does not depend upon anything other than Himself in performing any act—unless what is meant is that one of His two acts occurs only on condition that He performs the other.

This does not involve