If someone says, “He was able from eternity to create in the unending future,” this is a contradictory statement, because, according to them, it was not possible for Him to act from eternity. If acting was not possible for Him from eternity, He could not have possessed power from eternity. To affirm both His power and the impossibility of what that power encompasses is to combine two opposites: when the act was impossible, He did not possess the power to perform it.

Moreover, the act would pass from being impossible to being possible without a necessitating cause determining this, and without an impossible nonexistence.

Furthermore, in every state the mind can conceive, the act is possible and He possesses the power to perform it. If something Allah willed is supposed to have preceded that, the same applies. Thus, He has always possessed power, and acting has always been possible. His power and His ability to act have no beginning. He has always possessed power and been able to act; acting has never been impossible for Him.

They also claim that acting is impossible in beginningless eternity. Yet beginningless eternity is not something bounded at which the mind can stop. Whatever limit one reaches in conceiving how far back an act might occur, beginningless eternity extends before it without any fixed limit. Even if one were to suppose that there were cities many times more numerous than all the cities of the earth, each filled with mustard seeds, and that one mustard seed perished every million years, all the mustard seeds would perish without beginningless eternity having been exhausted. Even if this were multiplied many times over, it would never be exhausted. Thus, whatever time one supposes, beginningless eternity extends before it.