that a body has possessed from eternity must persist forever, just as its existence must. Just as something beginningless cannot cease to have its eternal existence, since its existence has been established from eternity, so too it cannot cease to possess any property it has had from eternity. Our knowledge that a body moves from the place it occupies and leaves it proves that it has not occupied that place from eternity. For it can leave any particular place and cease to be in any particular state. Since this is possible, it follows that it neither occupied that place nor possessed that attribute from eternity. If the first state was not beginningless, then the state that subsequently came into being after not existing is even less entitled to be considered beginningless. This establishes that the body did not exist from eternity. Had it existed from eternity, it would necessarily have occupied a place, or something treated as a place. Were that so, it could not have departed from that spatial relation, for the reasons we have mentioned; otherwise, its temporal origination would be indicated. Thus, what we have said is established.

This is the structure of the argument advanced by Judge Abū Bakr, Judge Abū Ya'lā, and others. It rests on the necessity of a body's having a spatial state, the necessity of that state's temporal origination, and the impossibility of a beginningless succession of temporally originated occurrences. This is the argument used by most of them.

Its substance is that a beginningless body must have a place: if it is beginningless, the body cannot leave it; if it is temporally originated, then something temporally originated must subsist in the body, and temporally originated occurrences must succeed one another in it. This is the argument used by al-Rāzī and others to establish the temporal origination of the world.