Likewise, al-Rāzī, al-Āmidī, al-Ṭūsī, and others are sometimes cited in this connection.
Al-Rāzī claimed in his Muḥaṣṣal that the position which holds a contingent, effected being to be eternal with respect to a necessarily acting Cause is one on which both the philosophers and the theologians agree—although, he adds, the theologians still speak of origination because they regard the Agent as acting by choice.
This is an error regarding both parties. No one—neither the theologians nor the earlier philosophers whose words have come down to us, such as Aristotle and the like—ever maintained such a view; it was only Ibn Sīnā and those who followed him who said so.
When the theologians affirm the eternity of what inheres in the Lord—His attributes and the like—they do not consider those attributes to be produced or to be effects of an efficient cause. Rather, in their view, the eternal Essence itself is characterized by these attributes, which are inseparable from It. The Necessary Being cannot truly be necessary and eternal except together with His essential attributes, as has been explained elsewhere. They also hold it impossible that any contingent entity, which by nature admits both existence and non-existence, could be eternal in itself, irrespective of its agent.
The leading philosophers concur: for them it is impossible that something eternal could be susceptible to annihilation, and equally impossible that a contingent being could have been necessary from all eternity, whether said to be necessary in itself or through something else.
It was the assertion of Ibn Sīnā and his followers—that a contingent being may yet be eternal, necessary through another, pre-eternal and everlasting, as they claim for the celestial sphere—that opened the door to a host of incisive objections against their doctrine of possibility, objections they have been unable to answer, as has been set out elsewhere. This is not the place to elaborate that refutation; I mention it only to indicate that their syllogistic proof yields merely general propositions and does not establish the perpetual existence of particular contingent beings.