Fifth Consideration: Let it be said that if contingent events were occurring within the soul one after another, each would necessarily require a producer. Yet the Eternal, in whom no new state ever arises, cannot be the source of anything, as has already been shown. Consequently, the claim of these people that such events originate from Him is no different from the philosophers’ assertion that the motions of the celestial spheres originate from Him while nevertheless remaining eternal.

Sixth Consideration: This would imply that the Lord brings forth the intelligences and souls by the sheer necessity of His essence, that He is not an agent who acts by choice and performs deeds in succession, and that those intelligences and souls are generated from Him in a self-emanating manner. Both reason and revelation declare this to be false, and it is contrary to the religions of the Muslims, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, idolaters, and Sabaeans alike.

Seventh Consideration: If, on this assumption, He produces by the necessity of His essence, there would be no reason to privilege the particular moment at which bodies came into existence over the moments before or after it, for no voluntary acts can be ascribed to the Eternal. Someone might say that certain of those intellectual conceptions become the cause of the effusion of bodies from the Eternal, yet this could hold only if there were an antecedent cause that necessitated the rise of conceptions different from those that preceded them. Such a situation can obtain only if the Lord acts by His own volition and if volitional acts subsist in His essence. But if one posits that He does nothing by choice, that no voluntary act inheres in Him, and that He is stripped of attributes and actions so that nothing new proceeds from Him to warrant origination, then the impossibility of bodies coming into existence in that case is identical to their impossibility of originating from the Eternal at the outset.