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

events involve a change in the substratum which change the essence of
the substratum, e.g. the changing of a thing from whiteness to blackness.
Their statement, however, that the act inheres in the essence of the agent
is a mistake; it is only a relation which exists between the agent and the
object of the act which, when assigned to the agent, is called `act’ and
when assigned to the object is called `passivity’ Through this assumption
the Karramites are not obliged to admit that, as the Ash’arites believed,
the Eternal produces temporal reality’ or that the Eternal is not eternal, but
the consequence which is forced upon them is that there must be a cause
anterior to the Eternal, for, when an agent acts after not having acted, all
the conditions for the existence of his object being fulfilled at the time he
did not act, there must have arisen a new quality in the agent at the time
when he acts, and each new event demands a new causes So there must
be another cause before the first, and so on ad infinitum.
Ghazali says:
I say:
The third sect is that of the Ash’arites, who say that
accidents pass away by themselves and cannot be imagined
to persist, for if they persisted they could not, for this very
reason, be imagined ever to pass away.b Substances do not
persist by themselves either, but persist by a persistence
added to their existence. And if God had not created
persistence, substances would have become non-existent
through the nonexistence of persistence. This too is wrong,
in so far as it denies the evidence of the senses by saying
that black and white do not persist and that their existence is
continually renewed; reason shrinks from this, as it does,
too, from the statement that the body renews its existence at
each moment, for reason judges that the hair which is on a
man’s head today is identical with, not similar to, the hair that
was there yesterday, and judges the same about the black
and the white.’ There is yet another difficulty, namely, that
when things persist through persistence, God’s attributes
must persist through persistence and this persistence
persists through persistence and so on ad in finitum.
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