Tahafut_al-Tahafut-transl-Engl-van-den-Bergh

I say:
be? Could it be the existence of the world? But this is
impossible, since what happens is on the contrary the
termination of its existence. Could this act then be the
annihilation of the world? But annihilation is nothing at all,
and it could therefore not be an act. For even in its slightest
intensity an act must be existent, but the annihilation of the
world is nothing existent at all; how could it then be said that
he who caused it was an agent, or he who effected it its
cause?`
The philosophers say that to escape this difficulty the
theologians are divided into four sects and that each sect
falls into an absurdity.
He says here that the philosophers compel the theologians who admit
the annihilation of the world to draw the consequence that from the
Eternal, who produced the world, there proceeds a new act, i.e. the act of
annihilation, just as they compelled them to draw this consequence in
regard to His temporal production. About this problem everything has
been said already in our discussion of temporal production, for the same
difficulties as befall the problem of production apply to annihilation, and
there is no sense in repeating ourselves. But the special difficulty he
mentions here is that from the assumption of the world’s temporal
production it follows that the act of the agent attaches itself to nonexistence,
so that in fact the agent performs a non-existing act and this
seemed to all the parties too shocking to be accepted,’ and therefore they
took refuge in theories he mentions later. But this consequence follows
necessarily from any theory which affirms that the act of the agent is
connected with absolute creation-that is, the production of something that
did not exist before in potency and was not a possibility which its agent
converted from potency into actuality, a theory which affirms in fact that
the agent created it out of nothing. But for the philosophers the act of the
agent is nothing but the actualizing of what is in potency, and this act is,
according to them, attached to an existent in two ways, either in
production, by converting the thing from its potential existence into
actuality so that its non-existence is terminated, or in destruction, by
converting the thing from its actual existence into potential existence, so
124