arguments, although many speculative thinkers had already exposed their weakness before these men.

Any speculative thinker who addresses an issue examines what his predecessors have said; either he has taken it from them, or their minds have worked alike.

In any case, these two—along with al-Rāzī and others like him—are among the finest later thinkers of their kind. Their agreement therefore indicates the strength of these objections, especially when the person examining them possesses independent insight by which he can distinguish truth from falsehood in this matter. Rather, his high regard for these proofs stems from the fact that many theologians, both these men and others, relied on them to establish the temporal origination of bodies. When he sees these and other speculative thinkers criticizing them and demonstrating their invalidity, he realizes that the speculative thinkers themselves disagree over these approaches. Those who invoke them as evidence are the very same people who criticize them, and criticism of them became their settled position. Others, such as Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī, likewise criticized them.

This is not the place to list exhaustively those who criticized these arguments. The purpose is simply to challenge these approaches, which they call rational proofs and use to oppose the texts of the Quran and Sunnah and the consensus of the early Muslim generations. Yet their own most accomplished thinkers criticized them.

[Al-Āmidī’s Method of Proving the Temporal Origination of Bodies]

As for the first approach mentioned by al-Rāzī, al-Āmidī said:

“The sixth approach, adopted by some of our later scholars to establish the temporal origination of bodies, is that if bodies were without a beginning, then in eternity past they would either