based this on contingency, arguing that its coming into being entails a particular determination requiring a determining agent, since it gives preference to one of the two alternatives open to a contingent thing. Thus, he infers an originator from something’s coming into being only on the premise that it is contingent and requires a Necessary Existent. He takes the contingent to indicate the Necessary Existent only on the premise that an infinite regress is impossible. Yet he himself raised an objection to the impossibility of an infinite regress which he said he could not answer.

Establishing the Maker’s existence does not depend on any of the premises he mentioned. Even supposing that it did, an infinite regress can be refuted, and those premises can thus be established. For establishing the Maker’s existence does not depend on bodies’ having a beginning, as explained earlier; rather, the very events whose coming into being we witness suffice. The knowledge that whatever comes into being requires an originator is among the clearest matters of self-evident knowledge. It is more evident than a contingent thing’s need for a determining cause. There is therefore no need to establish it by arguing that coming into being is contingent, or that it could have occurred in some other manner, so that its determination in one manner rather than another is a contingent possibility admitting either alternative and therefore requires a cause that determines and specifies one of them.

This method is followed by later theologians among the Muʿtazilah and the Ashʿarīs, and by those who agree with them in this among the followers of Ahmad, Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, Abū Hanīfah, and others.

We have already pointed out that, although this method is sound, it needlessly prolongs the argument: it is an argument for the more evident based on the less evident, and for the stronger