The reply is:

First: The discussion concerns not the coming into being of the celestial sphere in particular, but that of every body. If a beginningless body other than the celestial sphere is supposed to be at rest, neither the argument he has presented nor the motion of the celestial sphere provides proof that this body came into being. This is especially so for those who maintain that the eternal, beginningless Creator is a body that has always been at rest, as many speculative thinkers among the Hishāmiyya, the Karrāma, and others assert.

It may also be replied:

Second: Although the celestial sphere is in motion, its spatial location remains one and the same; it has not left that location. Its motion is positional, not spatial motion involving movement from one spatial location to another.

Accordingly, his statement, “The possibility of motion has been established,” is not conceded if he means spatial motion. If he means another kind, such as positional motion, this does not entail the possibility of its moving from this spatial location to another.

Al-Āmidī had already raised this objection. In objecting to the first premise, he said:

“Beginninglessness does not denote a particular span of time or a specified moment, such that one could speak of a body occupying a spatial location within it. Rather, beginninglessness means nothing other than a thing’s having no beginning. Understood in this way, beginninglessness is truly predicated of that thing at every time at which it is supposed to exist.

Thus, to say, ‘The body is described as such-and-such in beginninglessness,’ means: while it possesses the attribute of beginninglessness.

There is no time at which that body is supposed to exist without its being described as beginningless.

Whatever time is posited for that body to exist while occupying a particular spatial location, it does not