Thus, when it is asserted that the very genus of temporal events can arise only through another event, the statement really means that no event whatsoever could exist until some event already exists; accordingly, not a single event would ever occur unless an event preceded it. Yet that so-called preceding event is simultaneously treated as posterior to the event under discussion, and all events are placed after it—an arrangement that would require a thing to be prior to itself.

If, on the other hand, it is said, “This particular event does not occur until another event occurs, and that event itself does not occur until yet another event takes place,” the issue divides into two possibilities. Should one claim that an event cannot occur until an event before it has occurred, this is an infinite regress of effects, about which the Muslims hold three opinions. The disagreement is not, as many imagine, between the religious and the irreligious; rather, it exists among the followers of the revealed religions themselves. Indeed, the foremost scholars among them—namely, the People of the Sunnah and Hadith—allow such debate regarding God’s words and acts. They maintain that the Lord has never ceased to speak whenever He wills, and that God’s words are everlasting, eternal in their kind, having neither beginning nor end. This topic, together with related matters, has been treated at length elsewhere, where some of the statements of the leading Sunni authorities have been cited.

As for the claim—repeated by many scholastic theologians—that Muslims, Jews, and Christians supposedly teach that God was eternally inactive, neither speaking nor acting, and that speech and actions subsequently occurred without any contingent cause, such a position is found in none of God’s Books: neither the Qur’an, the Torah, the Gospel, nor the Psalms. It has not been transmitted from any of God’s prophets, nor was it ever voiced by a single Companion.