The Muʿtazilite theologians committed certain errors that the philosophers shared, so the philosophers turned those very points—such as the negation of the divine attributes—into weapons against them. The Muʿtazilites also espoused other mistakes unique to themselves, unshared by the rest of the Muslims or by the philosophers, and these too were exploited by the philosophers. Among such claims are: that a created being needs its Maker only at the moment of origination and not for its ongoing existence; that an omnipotent, volitional agent may prefer one of two possible acts over the other without any determinant; and that a contingent entity may tip toward one of its two alternatives whenever existence is deemed more appropriate for it than non-existence, even before it attains actual existence.

These notions and their like—tenets of the Qadariyya rejected by Ahl al-Sunnah and the vast majority of Muslims—are what gave Ibn Sīnā free rein to speak against them. On the question of denying the attributes, the Muʿtazilites and the philosophers stood together, and Ibn Sīnā followed the same course. Whoever scrutinizes his writings will find them borrowed from theirs, for the statements of the earlier philosophers on this issue are exceedingly scant. Indeed, the philosophers only came to possess a theological discourse of any weight through Ibn Sīnā and his peers, drawing on what they had learned from the innovators among the Muslims.

For that reason the early philosophers did not call this discipline “the science of divinity.” Instead they referred to it as “metaphysics”—the science of what comes after nature with respect to existence, or the science of what comes after nature with respect to our knowledge of it. Its subject is absolute being and its concomitants, such as unity and what follows from it, the division of being into substance and accident, and the subdivision of accident into the nine genera: quantity, quality, relation, where, when, and position.