It is thus clear that this method conflicts with revelation and reason, with what Allah sent His Messenger with, and with the innate disposition upon which He created His servants. Its adherents are like those who said:

“If only we had listened or reasoned, we would not be among the companions of the Blaze.”

Elsewhere, we have demonstrated the falsity of al-Rāzī’s claim that the argument from necessity and contingency is among the greatest methods. We have shown that this argument is unsound, that it yields no knowledge, and that its proponents have established no proof for the existence of the Necessary Existent. We have also shown that the argument from perfection is superior to it and has been relied upon by rational people, both ancient and modern. Indeed, toward the end of his life, he acknowledged that he had reflected upon the methods of speculative theology and the approaches of philosophy, but found that they neither healed the sick nor quenched thirst, and that he found the Quran’s method to be the most direct.

No one before Ibn Sīnā had pursued the argument from necessity and contingency. He derived it from the discourse of the speculative theologians, who classified what exists as either temporally originated or eternal. He instead classified it as either necessary or contingent, so that he could maintain that the celestial sphere was contingent despite being eternal. In doing so, he contradicted the general body of rational thinkers, both his predecessors and others. He also contradicted himself, since in his writings on logic he had stated, as his predecessors had, that whatever is contingent must be temporally originated. This has been discussed at length elsewhere.

Moreover, those who pursued this method were ultimately led by it to Pharaoh’s position, for