in the Eternal. Moreover, anyone among them who allows attributes to subsist in the Creator also allows temporal events to subsist in Him, as do many of their leading authorities, both early and late, such as Abū al-Barakāt and others. These, then, are the two well-known positions they hold. As for a third stance—permitting attributes but not acts—I know of no one among them who espouses it; and were someone to do so, our response to him would be the same as to those theologians who advance that view.
On this basis, an infinite regress is not entailed; and were one to concede a regress, it would be nothing more than a regress in effects—one utterance following another or one act after another. The controversy over this point is well known. Its outright denial is found only among the Jahmiyyah, the Qadariyyah, those of the Kullābiyyah and Karrāmiyyah who side with them, and certain jurists who follow their lead. By contrast, the leading scholars of the Salaf and the champions of the Sunnah do not forbid this; indeed, they allow it—rather, they deem it necessary. They state that God has never ceased to speak whenever He wills, and that He has never ceased to act, with volitional acts arising in Him by His will and power. All of this is discussed at length in its proper places.
The point relevant here is that His being an agent necessarily entails that attributes subsist in Him, for action is a positive reality, and His acting belongs to the realm of existence. The presence of a created effect without either creation or act is impossible. If the act of creation subsists in Him, then knowledge and power—indispensable to creation—must all the more surely subsist in Him.
If they say that the act entails the effect but not the attribute, on the grounds that the entailing entity depends on what it entails, this is a flagrant contradiction. And if they maintain that it entails neither, that would all the more clearly invalidate their position on attributes and acts. The evidence plainly shows that both acts and attributes subsist in Him, and that attributes do so even more fittingly than acts. Thus the argument by which they deny the attributes under the label of “composition” collapses.
The “One” of whom they assert, “From the One only one proceeds,” is a One stripped of all attributes—a mere “existence” defined solely by negations. Such a notion has no reality outside the mind, and any imaginable created being is more perfect than this mental phantom that has no existence in the external world.