They may therefore be answered as follows: in fact it is your own position that makes His action dependent on something other than Himself, for the events that come into being are not necessitated by His essence. An eternal essence that produces its effects by its very nature cannot at the same time necessitate occurrences that are newly arisen. Hence, according to you, He could not bring about temporal events except through a partner.

Those who uphold the doctrine of origination (ḥudūth) advance two views. The first is the view of those who say that the First has never ceased bringing about occurrences, one after another. On this account His essence entails acting, while the acts and the things acted upon are all successive and contingent—nothing among them is eternal—and no partner is involved. Even if His production of the second event is said to hinge on His production of the first, He Himself produces them all and therefore needs no one besides Him; no dependence on anything else exists.

The second view is that He acted after previously not acting. Its advocates maintain that He acted solely by virtue of His power, or by His power together with His will and motive; they do not hold that His action depends on any being outside Himself. And should they say that His act was deferred until the prior non-existence had elapsed, that lapse, in their understanding, requires no positive cause. Thus, on either view, they are farther removed from associating partners with God than the philosophers are.

As for those philosophers, they possess no proof whatsoever that any part of the universe is eternal, nor that any creature has eternally accompanied the Creator. The most they can claim is that He has always been acting; yet establishing an everlasting kind of action does not entail the eternality of any specific act or any particular creature.