being contingent and admitting both existence and nonexistence, does not exist. Thus, everything postulated consists solely of nonexistent things.

[Third]
The third response makes this clear:

We say: what someone calls “a contingent being that has not come into existence” is nonexistent; it does not exist at all. Whatever is nonexistent and has not acquired anything necessitating its existence remains continually nonexistent.

If someone says, “Neither of a contingent being’s two alternatives can prevail over the other without a determining factor,” this is clear and evident with regard to existence: it cannot exist without something necessitating its existence, since it has no existence of itself.

As regards nonexistence, however, some say, “The cause of its nonexistence is the absence of the cause of its existence.” They thus assign a cause to its nonexistence just as they assign a cause to its existence. This is the view of Ibn Sīnā and his followers.

The correct conclusion, held by most speculative thinkers among the theologians and philosophers,