of both sides: those who affirm that the world originated in time and those who hold that it is eternal. You pitted their arguments against one another without favoring either position. Indeed, you stated that the divine scriptures and revealed evidence do not clarify this question. In your foremost work on speculative theology, you offered no argument establishing the world’s temporal origination—not even a conjectural argument, let alone a conclusive one. You claimed that this could only be established through a premise which, in your other works, you describe as self-evidently false: namely, one of a contingent thing’s two alternatives prevailing without a determining factor. How can someone in such a position claim that he and his followers uphold divine oneness and transcendence, to the exclusion of those who affirm the divine attributes and the philosophers?!

The reason for this is that they introduced both truth and falsehood into the question of the world’s temporal origination and sought to establish both together. No sound proof could establish falsehood alongside truth. Seeing this, their opponents grew hopeful of defeating them, although their opponents’ own arguments on this question were also unsound and contradictory. Both groups are therefore astray concerning it.

This is because this man and his followers took the path of the Mu‘tazila, accepting that the temporal origination of attributes entails the temporal origination of whatever bears them. On this basis, they committed themselves to denying that the Lord could possess any attribute. A further consequence of this—even though they did not accept it—was