according to them, is incompatible with dependence upon an agent(1) and with being an effect. Temporal origination(2), therefore, is for them a necessary consequence of a thing’s being an effect; hence, they hold that an effect cannot be beginningless. This is not merely the position of the Qadariyya and the Jabriyya; rather, this(3) is the position of the great majority of rational people, whether adherents of religions or [not adherents of religions](4), and it is the position of the great majority of the leading philosophers.

As for the claim(5) that the celestial sphere is a beginningless effect, this is held only by a small group of philosophers. The great majority of rational people regard its falsity as necessarily known. Thus, whenever a rational person conceives that Allah created the heavens and the earth, he conceives that they came to be after not having existed. Likewise, whenever someone conceives that any existent thing was fashioned and brought about by Allah, he conceives it as temporally originated. As for conceiving something as both an effect and beginningless, the intellect can entertain this only hypothetically, just as it can hypothetically entertain the conjunction of two contradictories. Whoever maintains this position must labor greatly to posit its possibility and make it conceivable, just as all who maintain impossible doctrines must labor to do so. Yet despite this, innate human dispositions reject and repel it and do not accept it(6).

More astonishing still is that these people(7) call the world temporally originated, by which, in describing it as temporally originated, they mean—