It is not, however, the method of Aristotle and the ancient philosophers.

Ibn Sīnā admired this method and said that he had established the Necessary Existent from existence itself, without needing to argue from motion as his philosophical predecessors had done.

There is no doubt that his method establishes a necessary existent. Yet it does not establish that this existent is distinct from the celestial spheres except by demonstrating the contingency of bodies, as al-Rāzī reported from them. Their account of the contingency of bodies rests on their conception of divine oneness, which is founded on denying Allah’s attributes, as already noted. This is among the most unsound arguments, as has been explained elsewhere on several occasions.

Their approach opened the way for proponents of the unity of existence and other proponents of heresy who advocate indwelling and union, such as the author of al-Fusūs and others like him. Their position amounts, in reality, to an outright denial of the Maker and the adoption of the position of the naturalist eternalists rather than the theistic eternalists.

[The Third]

He said:

“The third approach: inferring the existence of the Maker from the contingency of attributes, whether bodies are necessary and eternal or contingent and temporally originated.”

He said:

“The argument may be set out as follows: each body’s being distinguished by its particular