what accords with the Messenger’s report. We have also shown that sound rational methods (1) accord with what the Messenger reported—such as these methods and others (2).

[Return to the Issue of the World’s Eternity]

Plain reason establishes that if the Maker of the world is said to be a complete, eternal cause, and a complete cause necessarily entails its effect, then no part of that effect could be posterior to Him in eternity. Nothing, therefore, could come into being from Him, whether through an intermediary or directly (3). Nor could He become the cause of one effect after another without something subsisting in Him by which He became the cause of the latter. Thus, while His condition remained wholly the same, it would be impossible for His effects to differ or for any of them to come into being.

No rational person disputes this once he has properly grasped it (4). The most accomplished among them acknowledge this, as stated by Ibn Rushd the Younger, Abū Abd Allāh al-Rāzī (5), and others: reason rejects the procession of diverse, changing things from the simple One.

[The same applies when He is called “a necessitating cause by virtue of His essence”] (6). The same also applies if it is said that He is an agent whose efficacy was complete from eternity, or a determiner whose determination was complete from eternity, or anything of that kind.

Likewise, if it is said that He possesses power and acts by choice, while whatever He wills must necessarily exist from eternity, then, if whatever He wills necessarily existed from eternity, nothing He wills could come into being. Consequently, nothing would come into being in the world, since nothing comes into being except by His will. If His will were eternal and necessarily entailed that whatever it willed coexist with it in eternity, it would follow that none of the things willed could come into being in time,