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

I say:
analogous to our decision, it does not suffice to produce the
thing decided upon, but the act of creation must be
accompanied by a new act of volition, and this brings us
again to the idea of a change. But then we have the same
difficulty all over again. Why does this impulse or volition or
will or whatever you choose to call it happen just now and
not before? There remain, then, only these alternatives:
either something happening without a cause, or an infinite
regress. This is the upshot of the discussion: There is a
cause the conditions of which are all completely fulfilled, but
notwithstanding this the effect is delayed and is not realized
during a period to the beginning of which imagination cannot
attain and for which thousands of years would mean no
diminution; then suddenly, without the addition of any new
fact, and without the realization of any new condition, this
effect comes into existence and is produced. And this is
absurd.
This example of divorce based on convention seems to strengthen the
argument of the philosophers, but in reality it weakens it. For it enables the
Ash’arites to say: In the same way as the actual divorce is delayed after
the formula of divorce till the moment when the condition of someone’s
entering the house, or any other, is fulfilled, so the realization of the world
can be delayed after God’s act of creation until the condition is fulfilled on
which this realization depends, i.e. the moment when God willed it. But
conventional things do not behave like rational. The Literalists, comparing
these conventional things to rational, say: This divorce is not binding and
does not become effective through the realization of the condition which is
posterior to the pronouncement of the divorce by the divorcer, since it
would be a divorce which became effective without connexion with the act
of the divorcer. But in this matter there is no relation between the concept
drawn from the nature of things and that which is artificial and
conventional.
Then Ghazali says, on behalf of the Ash’arites:
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