[Ibn Rushd’s discussion of the attribute of will in Manāhij al-adilla and Ibn Taymiyya’s response]

Ibn Rushd said:

“As for the attribute of will, it is evident that He possesses it, since a condition for something to proceed from a knowing agent is that the agent wills it, just as another condition is that he has the power to bring it about.

To say, however, that He wills things brought into being by an eternal will is an innovation—something unintelligible to scholars and unconvincing to those members of the general public who have attained the level of dialectical reasoning. Rather, one should say that He wills a thing to exist at the time of its existence and does not will it to exist at any other time, as the Most High says:

‘Our word to a thing, when We will it, is only to say to it, “Be,” and it is.’ [al-Nahl: 40]

For there is nothing that compels the general public to say that He wills things brought into being by an eternal will, except the theologians’ mistaken assumption that whatever events subsist in must itself have come into being.

It has become clear from what we have said that the events which entail the coming into being of the substrate