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As for the philosophers who maintain that the world is eternal and emanated from an intrinsically necessitating cause, and that from it emanated one intellect, then another, then another, until there were ten intellects and nine souls—they sometimes assign the intellect the role of the male and the soul that of the female—their doctrine is more unsound, both rationally and according to revealed law, than that of the Arab polytheists and the People of the Book. The Quran’s demonstration of its falsity is more decisive still. This can be explained in several ways.

First:

These philosophers maintain that the celestial spheres are eternal, as are the spiritual entities whose existence they affirm and which they call immaterial entities, separate entities, and intellectual substances. They hold that all these have always existed eternally, without beginning. Yet whatever is eternal and beginningless cannot in any sense be the product of an act. Only something that has come into existence can be the product of an act. This proposition is self-evident to the great majority of rational people and is upheld by earlier and later philosophers and by all other peoples.

Hence, the great majority of peoples have maintained that whatever can either exist or not exist must have come into existence. Only a group of later thinkers, such as Ibn Sīnā and those who agreed with him, asserted the existence of an eternal contingent being dependent on a cause. They claimed that the celestial sphere