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

I say:
cause, and asks why it gave this thing this special size; and
if the question about the cause may be answered by saying
that this special measure is not like any other, because the
order depends on it exclusively, the same answer may be
made about the thing itself, and it will not need a cause. And
there is no escape from this. For if the actual size which has
been determined and has been realized were equivalent to
the size which has not been realized, one might ask how one
thing comes to be differentiated from a similar one,
especially according to the principle of the philosophers who
do not admit a differentiating will. If, however, there is no
similar size, no possibility exists, and one must answer: ‘This
has been so from all eternity, and in the same way therefore
as, according to the philosophers, the eternal cause exists. “
And let the man who studies this question seek help from
what we said about their asking about the eternal will, a
question which we turned against them with respect to the
points of the poles and the direction of the movement of the
sphere. It is therefore clear that the man who does not
believe in the temporal creation of the bodies cannot
establish a proof that the First is incorporeal.
This indeed is a very strange argument of Ghazali’s. For he argues that
they cannot prove another creator than the heavenly body, since they
would have to give an answer by a principle in which they do not believe.
For only the theologians accept this principle, since they say that heaven
receives the determinate size it has, to the exclusion of other sizes it might
have, from a differentiating cause, and that the differentiating principle
must be eternal. He either attempted to deceive in this matter or was
himself deceived. For the differentiation which the philosophers infer is
different from that which the Ash’arites intend, for the Ash’arites
understand by ‘differentiation’ the distinguishing of one thing either from a
similar one or from an opposite one without this being determined by any
wisdom in the thing itself which makes it necessary to differentiate one of
the two opposite things. The philosophers, on the other hand, understand
here by the differentiating principle only that which is determined by the
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