Second: their later adherents maintained that this argument proves only the origination of bodies, for bodies are never devoid of successive events. They said: if it is admissible that there exist beings that are not bodies—such as intellects and souls—nothing in the proof demonstrates that those beings are originated.

Al-Shahrastānī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, al-Āmidī, al-Armuwī and others cited the matter in this way, so that some later theologians who followed them would write in their creeds: “Bodies are originated.” They would not commit themselves to the pre-eternity of the intellects and souls, but would suspend judgment on that question while affirming with certainty that bodies are originated, for in their view this alone is what reason establishes. Some of them even claimed that the cause of the origination of bodies lies in the successive conceptions produced by souls, and with that answer they sought to meet the objection their opponents raised concerning origination.

Al-Rāzī asserted in al-Maṭālib al-ʿĀliya that this is the brilliant response to the philosophers’ argument, and al-Armuwī followed him in his book, alleging that the early mutakallimūn had failed to answer it. The truth is otherwise: the senior theologians stated in their works that no contingent being can exist except as a body or an accident, and they showed that what the philosophers claim to establish outside those two—such as intellect, soul, matter and form—is false. All of it reduces to positing things that subsist only in the mind, not in external reality, and they belong to the category of accidents.