described with the attributes of perfection, just as the leading scholars of the Sunnah have described Him: He has never ceased to speak whenever He wills; He has never ceased to be living, performing acts that subsist in His very being; He has never ceased to be all-powerful, and everything other than Him is His creation, newly brought into existence by Him. The coming-to-be of things issues from Him successively, one after another; nothing was with Him from eternity, nor did anything accompany Him in any respect whatsoever. And Allah knows best.

This, then, is among the indications that every single component of the universe is originated, though this is not the place to expand upon it. Our purpose here is merely to expose the unsoundness of the proof on which they chiefly rely. We have shown that their claim entails the occurrence of events without an agent and an infinite regress of causes—both plainly impossible according to sound reason and even by the admission of their own disputants.

The arguments we have cited become still clearer in the third proof—though we have already hinted at it—namely, that a sufficient cause must exist concurrently with its effect, not prior to it. They themselves concede this; accordingly, every event must have a sufficient cause present at the moment it occurs. If the immediately preceding event were the sufficient cause, one part of the cause would precede the effect, so the sufficient cause would not be present when the effect arises. This would mean that events occur conditioned by something prior to them.

If it were permissible for things to come into being through an agent that precedes them, or through a contingent condition that arises before them, a sufficient cause would no longer be required. In that case no event would possess a sufficient cause whose every constituent is present with it. Thus, if only an eternal sufficient cause existed and no event had such a cause, it would follow that these events have no producer at all—an impossibility.