[Giving Preference without Anything to Determine It]

As for the second premise—giving preference to one possibility without anything to determine that preference—they used it to challenge those who maintain that things come into being without a newly arising cause. Yet it applies still more forcefully to them, for newly occurring events require newly arising causes. Thus, on any supposition, things must come into being.

As for the beginningless essence that necessarily entails its effect: if the occurrence of events proceeding from it does not depend on anything else, those events must coexist with it from eternity. This is plainly false, both by necessary knowledge and by sensory experience. If their occurrence depends on something else, and that other thing is beginningless and eternal, it would coexist with the essence, again requiring those events to coexist with it. If, however, that other thing came into being, the question of what caused it to come into being is the same as for all other occurrences.

These philosophers thus objected to the speculative theologians who deny acts subsisting in Him, charging that they affirmed the occurrence of events without a newly arising cause, even though the agent is endowed with attributes of perfection. Yet the philosophers themselves affirmed that all events come into being without a newly arising cause or an essence endowed with attributes of perfection. Indeed, their position amounts to saying that events come into being without an agent who brings them about. For they explicitly state that the complete, beginningless cause must coexist with its effect. This leaves events with no agent whatsoever—neither that cause nor anything else.

It is therefore clear that their position is far more contradictory than that of the Muʿtazilah and others like them. The argument they advanced for the world’s beginninglessness is stronger evidence for its having a beginning than for its beginninglessness, when each of the argument’s two premises is considered.