have not been corrupted by false imitation. Since this is firmly rooted in people’s natural dispositions, the very acknowledgment that He is the Creator of everything entails that everything other than Him came into being and was preceded by nonexistence. Even if His creating one creature after another is assumed to have continued without beginning, this does not conflict with His being the Creator of everything, or with everything other than Him having come into being after nonexistence, with nothing else coeternal with Him. Rather, this is greater in perfection, generosity and bounty.

If, however, “cause” means something other than that which brings an effect into existence—as in their examples of a ring moving with the movement of the hand, or rays proceeding from the sun—this does not concern agency at all. Rather, it concerns something dependent on a condition, and a condition may coexist with what depends on it. As for an agent, its particular effect cannot coexist with it from eternity, although it is not impossible for it to produce one thing after another. Thus, the beginninglessness of action as a kind is like the beginninglessness of motion as a kind. This does not conflict with every individual instance of motion having a beginning; rather, it entails it, since no particular instance can be beginningless.

This is the position of the vast majority of rational people among all nations, including Aristotle and his followers. Although they held that the world is beginningless, they did not affirm that it has an originator or an efficient cause, but only a final cause that the celestial sphere moves to imitate, since the sphere’s movement is voluntary. This view—that the First does not bring the world into existence but is merely a final cause to be imitated—is one of the utmost ignorance and disbelief. Nevertheless, the point is that they agreed with all other rational people that a contingent being which is an effect cannot be coeternal with its cause, as Ibn Sīnā and those who agree with him claim. Hence Ibn Rushd and other philosophers like him rejected this view, having followed the approach of