But nothing in this establishes the soundness of their claim that anything in the world is beginningless. Rather, it entails that everything other than Allah has a beginning. For if action as a kind has always existed, it follows that things produced continually come into being, one after another. Everything produced has a beginning and is preceded by its own nonexistence. Yet these philosophers supposed that what is produced must coexist in time with its agent, without the agent preceding it in time.

This is an obvious error to anyone who grasps it, and rational people generally recognize its falsity through reason. Hence, only a small group of rational people maintained that the heavens and the earth are beginningless and eternal; and only a small faction within that group maintained that they are produced yet beginningless. These people contradicted both reason and authentic transmitted revelation.

Their claim that an eternally fully sufficient cause necessarily entails its effect, in the sense they allege—namely, that the effect coexists with its cause, without the cause preceding it in time—entails that nothing ever comes into being in the world. This contradicts what is observed. Thus, they have asserted something contrary to sensory perception, reason, and the reports of the prophets. These are the avenues of knowledge.

Thus, it is only an infinite regress in the very basis of causal efficacy, and a concurrent infinite regress of any kind, that is impossible. As for a successive infinite regress of effects, one after another, they explicitly affirm it and acknowledge its possibility.