“cause.”

Their discussions of the question of the Necessary Existent are largely based on this equivocation. For a contingent being, which exists only through someone bringing it into existence, necessarily requires a necessary being that exists in its own right, not through someone bringing it into existence.

This, then, is the meaning of the Necessary Existent whose existence is demonstrated by contingent beings. Yet they seek to make it absolute existence, having no quality, attribute, or reality other than absolute existence, on the grounds that necessary existence would otherwise be an effect of that reality and would therefore not be necessary.

The term “effect” is ambiguous, for they give the impression that this existence would be something produced by that reality, with that reality serving as its efficient cause.

Clearly, this is impossible in the case of necessary existence. But if the necessary reality is supposed to have an existence subsisting in it, this entails only that this existence has a substrate: the reality in which it subsists. This is what they call the receptive cause.

Clearly, the proof establishes only an existent that has no one who brought it into existence. Their proof does not establish an existent whose existence does not subsist in a reality—if there is indeed any existence that subsists in a reality.

This is according to the view that the existence of each thing is additional to its reality, as maintained by a group of Mu'tazilite theologians and others. The correct view, however, according to Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamā'ah, is that the existence of each thing—meaning its existence in external reality—is identical with its reality existing externally. Thus, every existent has a reality particular to it outside the mind, and the existence to which one points in the external world is that very reality, not some other existence subsisting in it.