It may therefore be said to them:

The arguments you advance for the necessary beginninglessness of “agency” invalidate your own position just as they invalidate that of the adherents of innovated speculative theology. For if they established continuous agency in the sense you claim, it would follow that nothing could come into being in the world. According to you, an effect must coexist in time with its efficient cause, and everything other than the First is His effect. Everything other than Him would therefore coexist with Him, so nothing could come into being in the world. This contradicts observation and reason, is false by the agreement of all humanity, and runs contrary to sense perception and rational understanding.

Furthermore, if an effect must coexist in time with its cause, then whenever anything comes into being, an infinite number of other things must come into being simultaneously with it, none preceding another. This amounts to affirming the existence of an infinite number of causes, which is likewise false according to clear reason and the agreement of rational people. Nor is there any difference here between the impossibility of this concerning the cause itself and its impossibility concerning one of its conditions. Just as it is impossible for an infinite number of causes themselves to come into being at a single instant whenever anything comes into being, the same applies to the conditions that complete the cause, for these constitute one of its two components. An infinite number cannot therefore exist at a single instant in either component. This is agreed upon among people.

As for the dispute over “the existence of an infinite succession,” part of their argument has thus fallen away. Their argument does not yield what they claimed; rather, it entails “the other position”: that the agent has always been bringing one thing into being after another. In that case, every effect comes into being after not having existed. This is the very opposite of their position. Indeed, this is among the strongest arguments supporting what the Messengers conveyed: that Allah