although their position actually amounts to saying that He is their necessitating cause by His very essence, and that He brings bodies into existence through certain conceptions and volitions arising in souls, which then become a cause of bodies coming into existence. Just as this view is known to be false according to revelation, it is also known to be false according to reason, as we shall explain, if Allah Most High wills.

We therefore say: The proof establishing that everything other than Allah had a beginning encompasses both of these categories.

“Furthermore,” if He is a necessitating cause by His very essence, then the bodies of the world coming into existence at that particular time, rather than before or after it, requires a determining factor. Nothing whose occurrence is confined to one time rather than another can proceed from a cause that necessitates its effects by its very essence. For if that were possible, He would not be a necessitating cause by His very essence, and it would be possible for the world to come into existence from Him.

Moreover, according to most philosophers, the souls they posit are accidents subsisting in the body of the celestial sphere; thus, they cannot subsist in it without the sphere existing. According to Ibn Sīnā and a group of others, however, the soul is a substance subsisting in its own right, but connected to the body through governing and directing it. In that case, if it existed without any connection to the body, it would not be a soul, but rather an intellect. It is therefore clear that the existence of the soul necessarily entails the existence of the body.

Thus, if these people say that the soul is beginningless while bodies are not, then this view would be