Him, and this is necessarily the case.

The second sense is that time understood in terms of the hypothetical existence of night and day—the time by which, as we mentioned, nonexistence precedes existence—is not something actually existent. There is therefore no impossibility in His preceding creation in terms of such time, as explained above.

The third sense is that He precedes created things by virtue of Himself and His attributes, even if nothing else, whether existent or nonexistent, comes to mind as a basis for His precedence. Rather, He precedes them in Himself. If any of this is called time or duration, the dispute is merely verbal.

As for the sense over which there is disagreement, it concerns His performing another act and exercising an activity subsisting in Himself, on which what is predicated of Him depends. This is disputed, as explained above.

The best-known proponents of the view that the world is eternal through its necessitating cause are the Peripatetic philosophers, the followers of Aristotle. They altered the true religion of the Sabians. The most prominent argument on which they relied—which was also adopted by the foremost of their later thinkers, Ibn Sīnā, and other heretics like him—is