end. This is the approach of the Mu'tazilah and those Ash'arīs who agree with them, such as Abū al-Ma'ālī—based on the premise that the bodies comprising the world are temporally originated, and that everything temporally originated has an originator.
[Ibn Taymiyyah’s Commentary]
As for the first premise, their arguments concerning it and their mutual contradictions have already been made clear. For its sake, they committed themselves either to denying Allah’s attributes and the acts subsisting in Him, or to denying some of these. They also stipulated conditions for Allah Most High’s creation of the world that are incompatible with His creating it, thus opening themselves to attack by both the adherents of religious traditions and the philosophers.
As for the second premise, it is too clear, familiar, and self-evident to reason to require explanation. Yet they based it on the propositions that everything temporally originated is contingent in its existence, and that whatever is contingent requires an existing cause to bring it into existence. Each of these two premises is true in itself. Nevertheless, the proposition that something temporally originated requires an originator is clearer and more evident to reason than the proposition that something contingent requires an existing cause. Thus, even assuming that they establish these two premises, they will have needlessly prolonged the argument and led minds along a circuitous route that makes it harder to know Allah Most High and acknowledge His existence. Along that route, minds may encounter impediments that prevent them from reaching the intended goal.
They are therefore like the man who was asked, “Where is your ear?” He raised his hand, passed it around his head, stretched it out, and strained to reach, then said, “Here is my ear.” He could instead have pointed to it directly, by the shortest route, and said, “Here is my ear.”
It is as the verse says:
For days he laboured, turning it over in his mind;
Then, after all that toil, he likened water to water.