other than Him depends on Him in every respect. Nothing is more dependent on anything than the creature is on the Creator, and nothing is more independent of anything than the Creator is of the creature. No form of dependence or independence resembles creation’s dependence on Him or His independence of them.

When we say, “Like a product in relation to its producer, a manufactured object to its maker, an originated thing to its originator, an effect to its cause, or what is necessitated to what necessitates it,” and the like, all these are inadequate approximations, reflecting our own limitations and shortcomings. For nothing that exists stands in relation to anything else as creation stands in relation to the Creator. Nor is there any product with a single agent that suffices for it, or any effect for which a single cause suffices to sustain its existence.

Rather, whenever anything in existence is thought to be the product or effect of some created thing, the most that can be said—if that created thing is indeed an agent and a cause—is that it is needed in one respect but not another. The effect needs something else in another respect, and that created thing is its agent and cause in one respect but not another. But nothing in existence depends on an agent or cause as created things depend on the Creator.

This is one reason these people have gone astray: they have gone astray by drawing analogies between the Creator, to whom nothing is comparable, and created things. They thus make the relationship of created things to Him like that of the products of human action to those who produce them. Indeed, some of them hold views worse than this.

Also falling into this category is the view of those who regard the nonexistent as something established in external reality,