—does not, in their view, involve bringing a self-subsisting substance into existence; rather, it is nothing more than producing new accidents, by means of which the separate atoms are shifted from one state to another.
This stands in stark opposition to both revelation and sound intellect—as has been explained elsewhere—for these thinkers claim: “We have never observed the creation of any concrete entity. The Lord merely originated the isolated atoms, and every act of creation thereafter is simply the generation of accidents that inhere in those atoms.”
An even more wayward faction—further removed from both scripture and reason—reinterprets the creation of the heavens and the earth as mere emanation, causal dependence, or necessary self-effusion. They contend that the celestial sphere is eternal and without beginning, that it is an effect of the Lord produced necessarily by His very essence, existing from all eternity and continuing forever. Their talk of “necessary effusion” is, in truth, the same as the doctrine of “emanation”: the universe issues from Him without choice on His part and therefore “emanates” from Him—especially, they say, if He is living.
These people assert the actual eternity of the celestial sphere, claiming it has never begun and will never cease. Hence, when it is said that the Muslims unanimously reject their belief, or that whoever holds it has committed unbelief, the charge is well-founded—for it is known by the religion of the Messenger, beyond any doubt, that he affirmed the creation of the heavens and the earth after they had previously not existed. This differs from the allegation that the Maker remained eternally inactive and that action and speech were impossible for Him until some newly-arising cause transferred them from impossibility to possibility and enabled the Lord to become capable of action—or of both action and speech—after previously lacking that capacity.
Such claims, and others like them, are judged by the majority of rational people to be intellectually absurd, in addition to being invalid according to the Sharīʿah.
Anyone acquainted with the Qur’an, the Sunnah, and the consensus knows that the revealed law never propounded these notions, nor anything that points to them. Some speculative theologians merely imagined that this was the creed of the religious communities and tried to support it with the argument—rejected by the early Muslims and leading scholars—that “whatever is not free of temporal events is itself created.” What the early generations and the imams repudiated was the false discourse that conflicted with both revelation and reason.
Discussion of these matters has been expanded elsewhere, together with an explanation of how the two groups went astray when they failed to distinguish between the species and the individual, and with the citation of the position of the early Muslims and the leading scholars: that Allah has never ceased to speak whenever He wills, that His words know no end, and that the perpetual existence of things without limit