The substance of the argument is that, if something temporally originated were to subsist in Him, it would have been impossible for Him to have been without it beforehand. Yet no proof has been established for this.

(Second: You have presented no rational proof in your books that He must possess this perfection and be free of deficiency. Rather, you and your teachers, such as Abū al-Maʿālī and others, say that this is known not through reason, but through transmitted evidence. Since you acknowledge that you have not established this premise through reason, transmitted evidence must consist either of a scriptural text or of consensus. Yet you have cited no scriptural text as proof. Indeed, more than a hundred texts in the Quran constitute evidence against you, as do the mass-transmitted hadiths.

“And the claim of consensus”: if it is eternal, that which is received must be capable of existing from eternity. The proof of this is that a thing’s receptivity to something else is a relation between the recipient and what is received. A relation between two entities depends upon the actual existence of each, and the possibility of the relation depends upon the existence of both. Thus, since it has been possible from eternity for temporally originated things to subsist in the Creator, it necessarily follows that the existence of temporally originated things has been possible from eternity.

The response to you is this: The very same argument applies to His having power. For a thing’s having power over something else is a relation between the possessor of power and the object of that power. A relation between two entities depends upon the actual existence of each, and the possibility of the relation depends upon the existence of both. Thus, since