and for ever, so His effects would likewise subsist from pre-eternity to everlasting, and none of them could be delayed after Him. If they claim that the rise of the second event is conditioned by the first, we reply that the real issue concerns the origination of the first. No one of these events can possibly issue from an eternal, fully sufficient cause, for were it to do so it would be co-eternal with that cause. Rather, every single event requires that its own cause—or at least the completion of its cause—come into existence. Yet, according to them, nothing in the eternal, fully sufficient cause entails the coming-to-be of anything at all; it therefore follows that none of the events has its cause in Him.

Should they say that the motion of the heavenly sphere is the cause of events, we answer that the sphere’s motion cannot proceed from a fully sufficient cause in whom no event occurs, for that would entail the effect’s being posterior to its complete cause and the product and its necessitation being later than the fully sufficient necessitating agent. The discussion about the origin of the sphere’s motion is thus identical to the discussion about every other event.

Whoever understands this point knows with certainty the falsity of their doctrine and realizes that its real implication is that motions and events arise without any agent and without any cause that requires them. If, on the other hand, they concede that the First Agent possesses acts that arise within Him successively and say that these acts are the cause of changes, they thereby admit the possibility that the world and everything else could be brought into being, and their foundational claim collapses. As for the objection raised by Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī in the Arbaʿīn, it is indeed sound.