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

they held that all things could be different from what they are and this
applies necessarily also to the intellect; still, they believed that in the
products of art, to which they compared the products of nature, there exist
order and proportion, and this was called wisdom, and they called the
Creator wises The argument by which they tried to show that there is in
the universe something like this principle was that they compared natural
acts to acts of will and said that every act, in so far as it is an act,
proceeds from an agent endowed with will, power, choice, life, and
knowledge, and that the nature of an act, in so far as it is an act, demands
this; and they tried to prove the truth of this by arguing that what is not
living is inorganic and dead, and, since from the dead there cannot
proceed any act, there does not proceed any act from what is not alive.
Thus they denied the acts which proceed from natural things and
moreover they refused to admit that the living beings which we see in the
empirical world have acts; they said that these acts seem connected with
the living in the empirical world, but their agent is only the living God in the
divine world. But the logical conclusion for them would be that there is in
the empirical world no life at all, for life is inferred from things in the
empirical world, because of their acts;b and, further, it would be interesting
to know how they arrived at this judgement about the divine world.’
The manner in which they established this creator was by assuming that
every temporal product must have a cause, but that this cannot go on
infinitely, and that therefore of necessity the series must end in an eternal
cause; and this is true enough, only it does not follow from this that this
eternal principle cannot be body. They need therefore the additional
proposition that a body cannot be eternal, but this proposition causes
them many difficulties. For it is not sufficient for them to prove that this
world is produced, since it might still be argued that its cause is an eternal
body which has none of the accidents, no circular movements, nor
anything else, through which---although they themselves admitted an
eternal composite being-they proved that the heavens must be produced.
Now, having assumed that the lileavcnly body has been produced, they
supposed that this production had taken place in quite a different way from
what is understood by production in the empirical world. In the empirical
world, namely, things are produced from something, in time and space,
and with a definite quality, not in their totality, and in the empirical world
there is no production of a body from that which is not a body. Nor did they
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