They maintain that the cosmos itself can be the locus of volitional states—such as will, speech, and the like—and thus claim that the very first created events arose without any newly emergent cause. The objection that invalidates the others when they speak of particular events therefore rebounds on these thinkers with respect to the initial origination of events.

As for the Muʿtazilah and the remaining Qadarites, they share a single position on causation: a capable, choosing agent may give preference to one of his two possible acts over the other without any determinant at all.

Those who debated them—together with the philosophers—while following the Kullābī line, men such as Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Rāzī, when confronting the Qadarites among the Muʿtazilah argued that a volitional agent cannot prefer action over inaction except through a determinant. They insisted that the predominance of the servant’s acting over his refraining depends upon a complete cause that necessarily entails the emergence of the effect.

Yet when these same scholars disputed with the philosophers over the question of the world’s coming-to-be, they asserted that a capable, choosing agent can incline toward one of his two possibles without any determinant, claiming that a complete cause necessitates its effect only when the cause produces by the necessity of its own essence; if the cause acts by choice, the entailment no longer holds. Some even alleged that the difference between preference by a self-necessitating cause and that by a volitional agent is known by immediate intuition.

Such an inconsistency is plain to whoever reflects upon it. If the alleged distinction is valid, their argument against the Qadarites among the Muʿtazilah collapses, and it would follow that a human being could originate his own act without any new cause, since a choosing agent would then be able to prefer one possibility over another without a determinant. If, however, the distinction is invalid, their reply to the philosophers falls apart. One of the two consequences is unavoidable: either their proof against the first group is unsound, or their rejoinder to the second group is.