Indeed, many people do not fully conceive of this. Whenever they conceive of an event that comes into being, they posit a starting point in their minds, then imagine something before it, then something before that—but only to finite limits, according to what their minds envisage. This is like the mind imagining one number after another: whatever it imagines is finite. Some people, when told of “beginningless eternity,” or that “this existed in beginningless eternity,” conceive of it in this way. This is mistaken. “Beginningless eternity” has no beginning, just as “endless eternity” has no end. Whatever limit the mind points to, beginningless eternity lies beyond it. A fuller discussion of this belongs elsewhere.

The point here is that those who said that knowledge of the Lord can be attained only through rational inquiry, and then said that it can be attained only through this particular inquiry, are the Jahmī and Qadarī speculative theologians and their followers. The early generations of the Muslim community, its leading scholars, and the majority of scholars, both speculative theologians and others, have agreed that these people are mistaken in making this particular form of inquiry obligatory and in claiming that knowledge of the Lord depends upon it. For it is necessarily known from the religion of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, that he neither made this obligatory upon the Muslim community nor commanded them to undertake it. Indeed, neither he nor any of the community’s early generations even followed this method to attain such knowledge. Now, concerning this rational inquiry—this argument—people hold three views.