—those inseparable attributes—could not exist except together with successive temporal events, and those successive events are His very acts. This would amount to saying that His Essence itself is in need of, or conditioned by, His successive acts.

Yet it is obvious that His acts depend on Him in every respect; hence it is impossible for Him to depend on that which depends on Him.

This is a third, independent proof on the question: the world cannot exist without successive occurrences. If His act of bringing the world into being were, like His inherent essential attributes, dependent on those occurrences, then His necessary attributes would be dependent on events—and that is impossible, for whatever is inseparable from and subsists in His Essence is by definition one of His attributes.

If, however, they claim—as a certain group of speculative theologians has—that the effect is identical with the act and the necessitated identical with the necessitating, this is unquestionably false. We know that the creation of the creature is not the creature itself, nor does this entail that creatures came into existence without an act on the part of the Lord.

Those among the scholastic theologians who advanced this idea—such as al-Ashʿarī and those who followed him, including Ibn ʿAqīl and others—did so only to avoid an infinite regress of effects, which they regard as impossible. They argued: if creation is other than the created thing and causing is other than the effect, then if that creative act were eternal the created thing would also have to be eternal, which is impossible, and if it were temporal it would require another creative act, leading to an infinite regress.

Their opponents fall into three groups. The first says that the act itself is eternal and without beginning, while its effect is originated in time—a view held by certain followers of Abū Ḥanīfa, Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, and Aḥmad, as well as many ḥadīth scholars, Ṣūfīs, and some of the speculative theologians.