they used to establish the eternity of the world, and which you, O Muʿtazilah, and your followers among the speculative theologians who maintain that a perpetual succession of events is impossible, were unable to answer. For their argument is binding upon you according to your own principles: you posited the existence of a being who does not speak by His will and power and does nothing. Indeed, you held that, in eternity without beginning, no speech or action could possibly proceed from Him.
They said: ‘If we posit the existence of such a being, and that He continues indefinitely without speaking or doing anything, but then speaks and acts, there must be a cause that necessitated the occurrence of this speech and action—whether the emergence of power, will, knowledge, or some other cause. But if His state throughout eternity to come is assumed to be just as it was throughout eternity past, then no speech, action, or anything else can arise anew in Him.’
This, then, is the philosophers’ argument against you, and you have answered them only through obstinate denial or by turning the argument back on them.
‘Obstinate denial’ consists in your claim that events occur without any newly occurring cause. Indeed, you have made the eternal power or will itself single out one of two identical alternatives rather than the other, without any cause whatsoever, even though its relation to all identical alternatives is the same. Besides being self-evidently invalid, this closes off your route to ‘establishing the Maker’s existence.’ For that argument rests on the principles that events must have an originator, that whatever is determined in a particular way must have a determining factor, and that one alternative’s prevailing over another must have a factor that makes it prevail—when that determining factor or the factor that makes one alternative prevail is itself contingent or newly originated.
As for ‘turning the argument back on them,’ this is your statement that this difficulty is binding upon the philosophers just as it is