is it We who create?” He thus argued that man is created because he consists of atoms that are never free of combination and separation. Since these atoms are never free of temporally originated events, they are themselves temporally originated. This method depends on all bodies being of this nature.
This is the well-known method followed by the Jahmiyyah, the Mu‘tazilah, and those who followed them among later scholars affiliated with the four schools and others among the followers of Abū Hanīfah, Mālik, al-Shāfi‘ī, and Ahmad. It was set out by al-Qādī and Ibn ‘Aqīl, among others; by Abū al-Ma‘ālī al-Juwaynī and the author of The Supplement, among others; by Abū al-Walīd al-Bājī and Abū Bakr ibn al-‘Arabī, among others; and by Abū Mansūr al-Māturīdī and al-Sābūnī, among others.
However, those who argued from the creation of man applied this argument specifically to man, supposing that this was the Quran’s method. They elaborated at length and in minute detail, going so far as to argue that man’s very entity and constituent atoms are created, because they supposed that sense perception and self-evident reason establish only the temporal origination of accidents, not of atoms. They claimed that, in everything Allah brings into being—clouds, rain, crops, fruit, man, and animals—He brings into existence only accidents, namely, the combination and separation of atoms that already existed.