reason requires that the agent must precede its act, and that positing an effect while supposing that it has always coexisted with its agent—the agent never preceding it, but accompanying it from eternity and forever—contradicts sound reason. It is firmly established in people’s innate dispositions that for an effect to be created means that it came into existence after not existing. Thus, Allah’s statement in His Book that He created the heavens and the earth conveys to all people that they came into existence after not existing. As for supposing that they have always existed alongside Him while also being His creations, this is rejected by people’s innate dispositions. Only a small faction of eternalists, such as Ibn Sīnā and others like him, have maintained this.

The majority of eternalist philosophers, such as Aristotle and his followers, do not maintain, as these others do, that the celestial spheres are effects of an efficient cause. Although their position is even more unsound than that of their later counterparts, they did not contradict sound reason on this particular point as the latter did, even though they contradicted it in other respects.

They also examined the true nature of the position held by the speculative theologians of the Jahmiyyah and Qadariyyah and their followers. They found that, according to this position, the agent began to act after not acting, without anything occurring that necessitated its acting. They saw that sound reason requires that, if an agent begins to act after not acting, something new must have occurred; that it is rationally impossible for something to become possible after having been impossible without some new occurrence; that there is no cause necessitating the occurrence of a time that began at the time of origination; and that time as such cannot have a beginning. Thus they came to