He did not create them by His will and power, they say; rather, they themselves are the lord of the universe. According to them, the First Intellect originates everything other than God; the Second originates everything other than God and other than the First Intellect; and the chain proceeds until they reach the Tenth—the “Active Intellect” associated with the lunar sphere. This intellect, they contend, brought into being everything beneath that sphere—air, clouds, mountains, animals, plants, and minerals—and from it revelation and knowledge overflow to the prophets and to others. The speech Moses heard, they insist, occurred only within himself, not externally; it was simply an effusion that reached him from this Active Intellect, which some of them even identify as Gabriel.

Because the core of their doctrine is that the Maker of the universe cannot alter it and possesses neither power nor choice to shift it from one state to another, they strive to attribute every event to purely natural causes so that their thesis may run consistently and avoid contradiction. Yet the doctrine is itself corrupt and self-contradictory, for we plainly witness the occurrence of events: the motions of the heavenly bodies, the rising of the sun and moon, the falling of rain, the formation of clouds, the blowing of winds, and the coming into existence of animals, plants, minerals, and countless other phenomena.