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

I say:
impossible that it should exist in the essence, and be all the
same eternal and without an agent. All the proofs of the
philosophers amount to nothing but the production of a
shock by the use of a depreciating expression: `possible’,
`permissible’, ‘consequent’, `connected’, `effect’-but all this
may be ignored. For it must be answered: If by this you
mean that it has an agent, it is not true, and if only it is meant
that it has no agent, but that it has a substratum in which it
exists, then let this meaning be indicated by any expression
you want, and still it will not become impossible.
This is using many words for one idea. But in this question the
difference between the opponents consists in one point, namely: `Can a
thing which has a receptive cause be without an agent or not?’ Now it
belongs to the principles of the theologians that the connexion of condition
and conditioned appertains to the domain of the permissible’ and that
whatever is permissible needs for its realization and actualization an agent
which actualizes it and connects the condition with the conditioned, and
that the connexion is a condition for the existence of the conditioned and
that it is possible neither that a thing should be the cause of the condition
of its existence, nor that the condition should be the efficient cause of the
existence of the conditioned, for our essence is not the efficient cause of
the existence of the knowledge which exists in it, but our essence is a
condition for the existence of the knowledge existing in it. And because of
all these principles it is absolutely necessary that there should exist an
efficient cause which brings about the connexion of condition and
conditioned, and this is the case with every conjunction of a condition and
a conditioned. But all these principles are annulled by the philosophical
theory that heaven is eternal, although it possesses essence and
attributes, for the philosophers do not give it an agent of the kind which
exists in the empirical world, as would be the consequence of these
principles; they only assume that there is a proof which leads to an eternal
connexion through an eternal connecting principle, and this is another kind
of connexion, differing from that which exists in transitory things. But all
these are problems which need a serious examination. And the
assumption of the philosophers that these attributes do not constitute the
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