If that attribute were originated, it would stand in need of another, which would stand in need of yet another, entailing an infinite regress and making Him a receptacle for successive events. And if the attribute were eternal, the effect would have to be eternal as well. The conclusion of this argument—that temporal events may subsist in the One who is pre-eternal—is not deemed impossible either by them or by the Salaf and the majority of ḥadīth scholars. Should one declare it impossible, the celestial spheres would necessarily be originated, and the proof for their eternity would collapse; and if it is not impossible, the proof collapses all the same. In both cases, therefore, the argument is void. A fuller treatment of this point appears elsewhere.

The aim here is simply to draw attention to the fact that they have no evidence whatsoever for the eternity of anything in the universe. By contrast, those who debated them—the Jahmiyyah, the Muʿtazilah, and their followers—confined the very kind of His act and its object to a definite beginning and end, as stated by Jahm ibn Ṣafwān and Abū al-Hudhayl, the two leading figures of these sects. Others among their adherents declared perpetual continuance impossible with respect to the past but not with respect to the future. They went on to say that it is impossible for the Lord to speak by His own choice in pre-eternity and impossible for Him to perform voluntary acts in pre-eternity. Indeed, the Muʿtazilah and the Karrāmiyyah held that He was incapable of speech and action in pre-eternity, while the Kullābiyyah, Ashʿariyyah, and Sālimiyyah maintained that He was incapable of action in pre-eternity and incapable of speech both then and forever. In their view, speech is like life: it is not described as something over which He has power, nor do they affirm that He speaks by His will, power, and choice.

Many of them further assert that the universe will be annihilated altogether, so that the Lord will no longer be acting upon anything—just as, according to them, He was not acting before it existed. Such, in their estimation, is the extinction of this world. They claim that both revelation and reason testify to this, while some insist that revelation alone teaches it, and that God’s restoration of the universe consists in annihilating it completely and then bringing back precisely the same universe He had previously annihilated.