The second view
holds that the sole ground of dependence is origination (ḥudūth), and that an originated entity needs an Agent only at the moment it comes into being, not while it continues to exist. This is the position adopted by a group of scholastic theologians—the Muʿtazilah and others—and it too is unsound.
The third view
affirms that the basis of dependence is both contingency (imkān) and origination together, without making either one a condition for the other, though some writers stress one side more than the other. Elsewhere we have shown that each of the two—origination and contingency—on its own proves a thing’s need for a Maker, even though the two are inseparable. When we know that something is originated, we know it must rely on One who originates it; and when we know that something may equally exist or not exist, we know that nothing can tip the scale toward its existence rather than its non-existence except an Agent who brings it into being.
That a thing stands in need of an Agent is intrinsic to its very reality; this need does not await some further cause to make it needy. Poverty is essential to its nature. Everything other than God is perpetually needy of Him and cannot dispense with Him for the blink of an eye. This is among the meanings of His Name al-Ṣamad: the One upon whom all things depend while He depends on nothing. Just as the Lord’s self-sufficiency is affirmed for Him by His very essence—not by some cause that renders Him rich—so too the creatures’ poverty and need for Him are affirmed by their very essences, not by an external factor that makes them needy.
Therefore, whoever says that the cause of dependence upon an Agent is origination, or contingency, or both together—if he means that these notions themselves render the essence needy, his statement is invalid. But if he means that by means of these notions we come to know the essence’s neediness, then he is correct. Each of the two implies the essence’s poverty: the essence is dependent on Him at the moment of its origination and throughout its continued existence; it can never do without Him—neither in one state nor in the other.
As for positing a contingent being that is equally receptive of existence and non-existence while, at the same time, being necessarily existent through another from pre-eternity to everlasting—this would unite two contradictories, for whatever is necessarily existent from pre-eternity and forever cannot in any respect admit non-existence. And to claim that, considered purely in itself, apart from