…contrary to the dictates of reason, for they posit an effected being that is contingent—its existence equally possible or impossible—yet at the same time they declare it eternal, without beginning or end. They further describe it as an effect that depends on an acting cause, while insisting that it has accompanied that cause eternally, with no priority in time. Each of these claims flatly contradicts what the vast majority of rational people, ancient and modern, have held—indeed, even their own forerunners such as Aristotle never advanced such notions. Those early philosophers said that the celestial sphere is itself eternal and uncreated, but that it moves in imitation of the First Cause; hence it depends on that Cause only in this respect, not because the Cause brought it into existence. In fact, they make the First Cause merely a condition for the world’s existence even while they hold the world to be necessary in itself—thereby rendering what is necessary in itself dependent on something outside itself. Later thinkers like Ibn Sīnā and his circle reject this view.

Similarly, those who speak of a “necessitating cause”—Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd, al-Suhrawardī, and others—reduce the First to nothing more than a prerequisite for the existence of contingent beings; they do not acknowledge Him as their maker or agent. In their scheme no true originator of events exists: the heavenly sphere, they say, is contingent and has a maker, yet it moves by its own choice just as a human being moves by his choice. The sphere possesses a celestial soul just as man possesses a soul, and above it stands nothing from which anything else proceeds.

Even when they label the sphere an effect, their position is worse than that of the Qadariyya concerning the actions of living creatures. The Qadariyya maintain that Allah created animals by His power and will, endowed them with capacities suitable for opposite actions, and that the animals then generate their intentions and deeds by means of those capacities and their own volition. These philosophers, by contrast, do not truly regard the heavenly sphere as created at all, even though they may call it an effect. And were they to deem it created, they would still contend that its motion is a voluntary, psychic act, arising from an intrinsic will and power, with nothing above it to initiate or perform that motion. The sphere, they say, moves only to imitate the First, thereby perfecting its own form and configurations.

Should they allege that its motion issues from the First, the claim is empty. Every rational person knows that a simple entity, perpetually in one uniform state, cannot produce anything—let alone a succession of varied events—and that mutable phenomena can never proceed from what is absolutely simple. A fuller discussion of these matters appears elsewhere.