First, everything other than Allah has come into being. The possibility of origination is therefore a shared property, which must have a shared cause. What they share is either origination or existence. Origination cannot be the cause of its own possibility, so that possibility must be grounded in existence. It would follow that Allah has come into being.”

The reply is that the possibility of origination is not a property peculiar to existing things. Rather, it is a property of things whose existence is possible, whether they exist or not. This differs from co-location and separation, which pertain exclusively to existence, not nonexistence. The possibility of origination, however, is shared by contingent existents and every possible nonexistent. There is thus a difference of scope between the possibility of origination and the necessity of either co-location or separation: the possibility of origination extends to possible nonexistents, unlike the necessity of co-location or separation, and unlike visibility.

Moreover, it is not known that the necessity of either co-location or separation, or visibility, does not apply to Allah. By contrast, it is necessarily known that the possibility of origination does not apply to Allah Most High.

Accordingly, the cause of the possibility of origination must have precisely the same scope as that possibility. This cause cannot be origination, since origination is narrower in scope: not everything that can come into being has actually come into being. Nor can it be existence, since not everything that exists can have come into being. What has precisely the same scope is possibility in the strict sense. Thus, the possibility of origination has a shared cause: possibility in the strict sense. This is a cause