The later innovators within Islam—namely the Muʿtazilites, the Jahmites, and all who shared their foundational premise—confused the origination of individual created entities with the origination of their genus. In the same way, they conflated the pre-eternity of the category of God’s Speech with the pre-eternity of a specific utterance. Imagining that no individual can come into existence unless its genus itself first comes into existence, they concluded that the Lord—magnified be He—was, in pre-eternity, devoid of speech and action, incapable of either, thereby stripping Him of the attributes of perfection. For this reason the Salaf and the leading Imams—the heirs of the prophets—rose against them, branding them innovators and deviants, indeed even declaring them unbelievers. The philosophers then demolished for them the iron rampart that had long blocked the doctrine of the eternalists; thus they neither brought victory to Islam nor conquered the unbelievers. They did not hold fast to the rope of God, nor did they follow the Book and the Sunnah. Instead, they fragmented their religion into sects and exchanged the divine Law for innovations spawned by their own opinions.

This is further clarified by the fact that the evidences of dependency apparent in the entities of the universe and their need for a Maker are so manifest—indeed, known by immediate intuition—that ordinary people instinctively realize that every one of them is originated, created, and brought into being after not existing. The matter rests on two premises: first, that any given thing is in need of an agent, for it is not necessary in itself; and second, that whatever is in need of an agent must be originated. Accordingly, everything in the universe for which these two premises hold true is necessarily originated.

As for comprehending that a particular entity is an effect, a creature, ruled and sustained by its Creator, inseparably linked to its Agent by virtue of the very act whereby He produced it—linked to Him as His life is linked to Him, or, as some claim, even without any act subsisting in Him—this is not something people grasp through the innate disposition upon which they were created.