That position entails a purely simple entity devoid of attribute and act, and from such a being it is impossible that mutable—indeed even simple—things should proceed. It is likewise impossible for the effect to be concurrent with its agent.

If you should reply, “By combining both lines of argument the desired conclusion is attained,” we say: The conclusion is not secured even by joining the two approaches. The “Necessary Existent” you have posited has no concrete reality outside the mind, much less can it be the First Cause; nor do your sound proofs contain anything that would forbid the celestial sphere itself from being the first. Moreover, what the other camp has established in no way precludes the possibility that the sphere is itself necessary in its own being. This is treated in detail elsewhere; the point here is that, from their very own words, the opposite of what they seek becomes evident. God knows best.

Know further that what these people say about the acts of the heavens is worse than what the Qadariyyah say regarding the acts of living creatures, and worse than what the Naturalists say concerning natural bodies—even though both latter doctrines are unsound. The Qadariyyah maintain that God created the animal and created within it the power by which it can choose good or evil, yet He leaves the preference of one over the other to a choice the creature itself originates, without anyone bringing that choice into being. The creature selects one course over another because it loves it; the things it loves, then, set it in motion—just as these philosophers have made the First a mover of the celestial sphere. These philosophers declare the motion of the heavens to be voluntary, and that the sphere generates its own cognitions without any creator bringing them about—yet they never affirmed that the sphere itself, or the power it possesses, is created.