Thus, it is impossible for anything whatsoever in the universe to be coeternal with the Creator—glorified is He. This holds whether it is said that He creates by His will and power, as Muslims and others maintain; or it is said (1) that He is a necessitating agent by virtue of His very essence, or a cause that necessarily entails its effect; or He is termed a causal agent, since the term “causation” encompasses all these kinds. It includes an agent acting by choice, an agent acting by virtue of its essence (2), and other kinds. Rather, He alone is pre-eternal, whereas everything besides Him necessarily has the property (3) of being preceded by nonexistence.

However, establishing this by the Jahmite–Mutazilite method (4)—the method of accidents, motion, and rest, which is founded on the claim that bodies are temporally originated because they are never devoid of temporal events, and on the impossibility of a beginningless succession of temporal events—is a method (5) innovated in the religion, by consensus of those learned in the Sunnah, and a method (6) fraught with danger and cause for concern from a rational standpoint. Indeed, it is condemned by many groups even if (7) its invalidity is not known (8), because of the number and obscurity of its premises and the disagreements concerning them among many speculative thinkers, such as al-Asharī in his Epistle to the People of the Frontier (9), and those who followed his course in this matter, such as al-Khattābī (10) and Abū Umar