They maintained that any substrate in which accidents—such as motion and the like—occur must itself be originated, for whatever does not precede events is, by definition, an event.

Many of them, however, failed at this point to distinguish between concurrency with a particular event and concurrency with an endless succession of event after event. Whenever the claim was articulated, the mind simply pictured something originated, not eternal, and assumed that nothing could exist before that event—only alongside it or after it; hence it concluded that whatever is coupled with an event must itself be an event.

Yet the mind’s judgment concerning a single, concrete instance is not the same as its judgment regarding a whole series of successive events or the class composed of an unceasing succession of particulars. A good number of scholars eventually noticed this distinction and advanced proofs for the impossibility of events without a beginning, some of which we have already pointed out. We have set forth those proofs in full in Darʾ Taʿāruḍ al-ʿAql wa’l-Naql, mentioning everything that has reached us on the matter.

Likewise, the adherents of this line of argument made no differentiation between the possibility that the thing accompanying events is itself a created, produced being in need of another—unable to act apart from events in pre-eternity—and the possibility that it is the very agent who brings things into being and is independent of all else. Their argument—namely, the impossibility of an everlasting chain of events—covers both cases indiscriminately.