is comparable to that complete cause. All three of these premises are open to challenge. Why, then, do you say that if He is perfect in Himself and capable of acting, with no inability to perform the act when it is willed, the act must necessarily proceed from Him? The most you can do here is liken Allah to some of His creatures and infer His inability and deficiency by analogy with the inability and deficiency of those creatures.

Some theologians, such as al-Rāzī and others, answered them with a response likewise founded on a faulty analogy. They said to them: “You say, ‘All aspects of the Creator’s causal efficacy in relation to the world must have been present from eternity, and this entails that the world cannot fail to accompany Him.’ We reply: this follows only if He is a necessitating cause by His very essence, but not if He is an agent endowed with power.”

These theologians advanced the general proposition that an agent endowed with power does not require a determining factor to favor one of two equal alternatives over the other, for two reasons. First, when a person’s inclination toward two actions is equal—as when someone fleeing encounters two equally suitable paths, or a hungry person is presented with two equally suitable loaves—he favors one without a determining factor. Second, an agent endowed with power performs one of two acts within his power rather than the other