Thus it is the Creator who must originate it—just as the Qadariyyah denied this with respect to animals. The Naturalists, for their part, affirm that in natural bodies there is a force that constitutes the principle of motion, yet they posit above that force another entity that produced it; they therefore concede that causes come into existence together with their effects. These philosophers, however, regard the celestial motion as ever-renewed although nothing new arises to require that renewal. Their statement is worse than that of the Magians, who spoke of two principles, one producing good and the other producing evil, whether they considered the author of evil to be eternal or created. The Magians, after all, still ascribed the good that occurs to the eternal god who performs good, whereas these thinkers do not affirm that God has produced anything at all—neither good nor evil. For them there is no agent for contingent events except the motion of the spheres, and the spheres move through the concepts and volitions they themselves generate, without God—according to them—doing any of that.

Furthermore, the Magians either declared the producer of evil to be another eternal being, thereby excluding some events from the Lord’s creation, or they deemed him created, in which case they resemble the Qadariyyah; and the doctrine of the Qadariyyah is still preferable to theirs. It is well-known that every contingent event must have an originator, and that when an animal becomes an agent after not having been one, a determining cause and producer are indispensable; otherwise, if its state while acting were identical to its state while not acting, preference would occur without a preferring cause. Accordingly, something must arise within it at the moment of action whereby it becomes an agent. If that contingent feature originates from the animal itself, the same argument applies to it as to the first case and to all other contingencies—this would necessarily entail the occurrence of a contingent event without