Should someone object, saying, “The First Cause perpetually necessitates a particular effect,” we respond:

The agent’s necessitating a determinate effect in the sense that the two are always concurrent in time is impossible, as has been demonstrated elsewhere. Likewise, for the agent to bring about successive events one after another while no new state arises within Him is also impossible, a point already set out in detail. It is equally impossible for Him to necessitate a determinate effect while excluding this event and that event, and it is impossible for Him to necessitate this specific event eternally—or that specific event eternally.

As for the notion that He necessitates events sequentially, this would require that He only necessitates an event at the very moment it comes into being. At that moment the conditions of necessitation are complete, so the act of necessitation itself must be renewed from moment to moment. Consequently, He would not be necessitating one determinate effect except through a determinate act of necessitation; and whatever entails temporal events cannot rest on a single, fixed act of necessitation. Moreover, an act of necessitation that is renewed bit by bit cannot yield anything eternal in itself, for the eternal can arise only from an act of necessitation that is itself eternal and unchanging.

Hence the fundamental dispute about Allah’s action—whether it is eternal, created, or temporally originated—parallels the dispute about His Speech. Many who debate His Speech and His Action accept only two alternatives: either something absolutely eternal with no beginning, or a class of things that is temporally originated and has a starting point. The first is the view of the philosophers who assert the world’s eternity; the second is the view of the theologians among the Jahmiyyah and the Muʿtazilah.

The question of the world’s origination is tied to this very issue, yet the Dahriyyah were unable to affirm