a fully sufficient determining cause in eternity past; otherwise, temporal events (1) would have been impossible. Consequently, nothing [coexistent with it] (2) could have proceeded from the determining cause in eternity past, and the eternity of the celestial sphere was therefore impossible.

Moreover, it became the determining cause of what it determines after not having been so. Temporal events therefore had to be attributed to it, since temporal events (3) must necessarily be attributed to the fully sufficient determining cause. This establishes that above the celestial spheres there is an agent whose causal action occurs anew, which is precisely what was to be proved.

If these people do not affirm this, they are denying that the motion of the celestial sphere and temporal events (4) have an agent. This denial is graver than denying that the acts of human beings [have an originator] (5).

Moreover, they have held that the celestial sphere [acts] (6) independently, just as the Qadarites have held that a living being acts independently, without Allah creating for it, with every motion, a power (7) concomitant with that motion. For according to them, the second motion arises from the celestial sphere after the first, and the completion of the first is a prerequisite for the second—like someone who traverses (8) a distance bit by bit. Yet the one traversing the distance traversed its second stretch only through a power and will subsisting in him, and through movements by which he traversed that second stretch. Thus, there arose anew in the agent the will and power with which he traversed the second stretch of the distance. It would therefore have been necessary for the celestial sphere, at every moment, to acquire anew some measure of