was created last among all creatures could not have witnessed his own creation or the creation of anything before him. As Allah Most High says:
“I did not make them witness the creation of the heavens and the earth, nor their own creation.” [al-Kahf 51]
What he has witnessed of created things offers him a lesson concerning what he has not witnessed.
The third point concerns his statement: “As for entities coming into existence in the first place, this is something we have never witnessed at all, and neither our conception nor our imagination admits its possibility.”
The response is: When you say, “Neither our conception nor our imagination admits its possibility,” do you mean that our conception and imagination deem it impossible and rule it out, or that they do not know it to be possible? Whichever you mean, there are two answers.
The first is that we do not concede that our conception and imagination deem this impossible and rule it out, for two reasons. First, conception and imagination do not rule out everything for which no counterpart is known, even if it is said that they cannot apprehend it—unless you mean a defective conception and imagination, in which case there is no dispute.
Second, conception and imagination have apprehended something analogous to this, as we explained earlier concerning imagining what one has perceived through the senses of the origination of substances