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

I say:
‘was’ comprises a third entity, namely the past, and the past
by itself is time, and through another existent it is movement,
for movement passes only through the passing of time. And
so it follows necessarily that, before the world, a time
finished which terminated in the existence of the world.
In this in brief he shows that when it is said ‘such-and-such was without
such-and-such’ and then ‘such-and-such was with such-and-such’ a third
entity is understood, namely time. The word ‘was’ shows this, because of
the difference in the meaning of this concept in the past and in the future,
for if we assume the existence of one thing with the non-existence of
another in the past, we say ‘such a thing existed without such a thing’, but
when we assume the non-existence of the one with the existence of the
other in the future, we say ‘such a thing will exist without such a thing’, and
the change in meaning implies that there is here a third entity. If in our
expression ‘such-and-such existed without such-and-such’ the word
‘existed’ did not signify an entity, the word ‘existed’ would not differ from
‘will exist’. All this is self-evident, but it is only unquestionable in relation to
the priority and posteriority of things which are by nature in time.
Concerning the timeless the word ‘was’ and the like indicate in such a
proposition nothing but the copula between predicate and subject, when
we say, for example, ‘God was indulgent and compassionate’;’ and the
same holds when either predicate or subject is timeless, e.g. when we say
‘God was without the world, then God was with the world’. Therefore for
such existents the time-relation to which he refers does not hold. This
relation is, however, unquestionably real when we compare the nonexistence
of the world with its existence, for if the world is in time, the nonexistence
of the world as to be in time too. And since the non-existence
and the existence of the world cannot be in one and the same time, the
non-existence must precede; the non-existence must be prior and the
world posterior to it, for priority and posteriority in the moving can only be
understood in this relation to time. The only flaw in this argument is to
assume this relation between God and the world. Only in this point is the
argument which Ghazali relates faulty and does it fail to constitute a proof.
Then Ghazali gives the theologians’ objection to this argument of the
philosophers:’
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