This, then, is one of al-Ghazālī’s replies in The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and it is the very answer adopted by al-Āmidī and others. Yet the majority of rational people hold that its falsity is self-evident, and al-Rāzī likewise demonstrated—speaking in the philosophers’ own idiom—the weakness of this response. Thus it may be said to the philosophers: on your own premises this argument is unsound and internally contradictory, for all it really amounts to is that if the efficient cause was not fully sufficient from pre-eternity—