If they adopt the first position, as they claim to do, it follows that nothing new can arise in the world, contrary to sensory experience and observation.

If they adopt the second, every effect of His must be preceded in time by something else. Thus, nothing in the world can be beginningless and eternal alongside Him—which is precisely what was to be established.

Since a product’s being simultaneous with its maker is impossible even on the assumption that the maker necessarily entails it, such simultaneity is all the more impossible if no such necessary entailment is assumed.

It is therefore clear that nothing in the world can be beginningless under either assumption. This is evident to anyone who fully grasps the matter.

Yet confusion and error arose in this matter because of the Jahmiyyah, the Muʿtazilah, and those speculative theologians who agreed with them. When they asserted what their opponents regarded as impossible according to the unequivocal judgments of reason—that the effect of a complete causal agent follows it after a delay, and that newly occurring events arise because of a newly occurring event—their opponents sought refuge in the claim that a causal agent’s effect is simultaneous with it, and that no event occurs except because of another newly occurring event. They did not, however, properly establish either point. Rather, their position was even more unsound and contradictory than that of those speculative theologians.

For the assertion that a causal agent necessarily entails its effect can mean two things:

The first is that the effect—the thing brought into being, produced, and made—is simultaneous with the causal agent and its causal action, without following it after any temporal delay whatsoever. The majority of rational people know, by the unequivocal judgments of reason, that this is false in every case. They can point to no complete causal agent in the world whose existence coincides in time with its effect, such that the effect produced comes about at the same time as the causal action. Rather, causal action is intelligible only if the effect immediately follows the causal agent, even where the two are continuous, as with the successive portions of time and motion that come into being one after another, despite their continuity.