—in the past is established, just as it is also established that there will be no limit to them in the future—and that everything apart from Allah is a created thing, coming into existence after not having been. Nothing shares eternal pre-existence with Him; such a notion is impossible by sound reason and invalid according to the Sacred Law, for Allah has declared that He is the Creator of all things. To claim that the Creator is an eternal, fully adequate cause whose effect accompanies Him of necessity is false both rationally and scripturally, for it would make it impossible, by definition, for a complete cause to coincide with the emergence of anything new in the world. Events that arise after non-existence cannot be simultaneous with a cause that necessitates them.
It has already been shown that describing the Agent as a complete cause inseparable from His effect is untenable, and that action can occur only by bringing something into being. Yet there is a difference between the origination of a specific entity and the continual origination of events, one after another. Conclusive proofs establish that the Lord acts by His own choice and power. Thus, if one says that He “acts necessarily by His essence,” intending thereby that He produces—through His will and power—whatever He wills, this does not contradict His acting by will and power. But if the intention is what the eternalist philosophers such as Ibn Sīnā maintain—that an essence stripped of all attributes necessarily produced the world with all its diverse and contingent phenomena—then this is one of the most corrupt claims, refuted alike by reason and revelation.
Positing an essence devoid of attributes, or an existence divested of every positive qualification—or qualified only by negations—does not correspond to any real entity; it cannot exist in external reality but is only conceived by the mind, just as the mind can conceive other impossibilities. Equally baseless is their assertion that the attribute is identical with the One described, that one attribute is the same as another, that the intellect, the intelligent subject, and the intelligible are a single thing; that pleasure, the pleasurable object, and the one who experiences pleasure are one; that knowledge, power, and will are one; that power is simply the Powerful and knowledge is simply the Knowing, and the like—claims whose incoherence and contradiction have been exposed elsewhere.
The aim here is merely to note that some people, owing to a certain confusion, imagine a scholarly consensus where none exists: they assume certain matters fall under consensus when they do not, and exclude others from it when in fact they belong to it—just as some misread the texts of the Quran and the Sunnah, including in them what does not belong and excluding what does.