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

moment from its action, the world would be annihilated. They use the
following syllogism: The world is an act, or a thing whose existence is
consequent upon this act. Each act by its existence implies the existence
of an agent. Therefore the world has an agent existing by reason of its
existence. The man who regards it as necessary that the act which
proceeds from the agent of the world should have begun in time says: The
world is temporal through an eternal agent. But the man for whom the act
of the Eternal is eternal says: The world has come into being, from an
eternal agent having an eternal act, i.e. an act without beginning or end;
which does, however, not mean that the world is eternal by itself, as
people who call the world eternal imagine it to be.
Ghazali says, on behalf of the philosophers:
The philosophers might answer: When we affirm that the
world has a creator, we do riot understand thereby a
voluntary agent who acts after not having acted, as we
observe in the various kinds of agents, like tailors, weavers,
and builders, but we mean the cause of the world, and we
call it the First Principle, understanding by this that there is
no cause for its existence, but that it is a cause of the
existence of other things; and if we call this principle the
Creator, it is in this sense. It is easy to establish by a strict
proof an existent for the existence of which there is no
cause. For we say that the world and its existents either
have a cause or have not. If it has a cause, this cause itself
either has or has not a cause, and the same can be said
about the latter cause, and either we go on ad infinitum in
this way, and this is absurd, or we arrive at a last term, and
this end is the First Cause, which has no cause for its
existence and which we call First Principle. And if the world
existed by itself without cause, then it would be clear what
the First Principle is, for we only mean by it an existent
without a cause and which is necessarily eternal. However, it
is not possible that the First Principle should be the heavens,
for there are many of these and the proof of unity contradicts
this, and its impossibility is shown on examination of the
attribute of the principle. Nor can it be said that one single
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