Pure, continuous non-existence has no need of a cause; sound reason itself testifies that whatever has never come to be requires no cause to remain nonexistent.

For this reason Muslim dialecticians state that sheer non-existence needs no cause. If someone objects, “The cause of non-existence is the absence of the efficient cause,” then, on their own terms, the absence of that cause would also require a cause, provided one insists that every instance of non-existence must have a cause.

Granted, when it is said, “The absence of the cause entails the absence of the effect,” that is true; yet not everything that entails something else is an efficient cause. Whatever exists only through a cause will certainly be absent when its cause is absent, for the very lack of the cause renders the thing nonexistent in fact. Its non-existence, however, has no cause in itself at all.

Second, their claim that an eternal, everlasting being is nevertheless contingent—capable of both existence and non-existence, as they assert concerning the celestial sphere—is also false according to the vast majority of rational people among philosophers, adherents of the revealed religions, and others. Only this small faction has maintained it.

Among the philosophers, the first to affirm the eternity of the heavens in both form and matter was Aristotle, and those who followed him in that, such as Themistius and Alexander, adopted the same view.