“An agent endowed with power and choice prefers one of the two alternatives within his power (1) over the other without a determinant.” They distinguished between such an agent and everything else, as the Qadariyya did. At times, they distinguish (2) between the Lord’s act and the servant’s act by saying that the Lord determines by His eternal will (3), which is a necessary concomitant of His essence, whereas the servant’s will is originated by another.

Most people, however, said: The position of those who maintain that the eternal, beginningless will is itself the determinant, without anything new arising, is of the same kind as the foregoing position. For the will bears the same relation to every time that may be posited for originated events, and it bears the same relation to all possibilities. Thus, one of two identical alternatives is preferred over the other without a determinant. Likewise, if the agent’s state is presumed to be the same before the act and at the time of the act, and one of those two states is then presumed to be specifically associated with the act, preference without a determinant necessarily follows. This is the furthest extent reached by the reasoning of these groups.

This is why those who did not understand their discourse, such as al-Rāzī and his likes, vacillated (4) between the cause posited by the Eternalists, the agent endowed with power posited by the Qadariyya, and the willing agent posited by the Kullābiyya (5). They do not hold that the Lord has been capable from eternity of acting and speaking by His will and power (6). Since the Jahmiyya and the Qadariyya were in this position—[not holding that the Lord has been capable from eternity of acting and speaking by His will] (7)—the Eternalist philosophers, such as Ibn Sīnā and his likes, made (8) this (10) their principal basis for denying the origination of the world