 Associated with issues concerning motion and change was that of causality, namely, “What or who is the agent that brings about change?” Many of the earlier theologians subscribed to a theory of engenderment (tawallud), which preserved a degree of causal efficacy for humans, whereas most later theologians adopted an occasionalist worldview, which reserved all agency for God and God alone. For the earlier theologians causal agency required a full knowledge (ʿilm) that one is acting as well as the knowledge of what results from that action. Thus causal agency is limited to God and humans. That humans had the power to engender certain actions was assumed by most of the earlier theologians. The question, then, was whether humans had the power to engender action solely in themselves or in other things as well. One of the arguments used by those who thought humans could engender effects in things other than themselves came from the knowledge criterion for agency. It took as an example that when a person beats another, he knows the beating of the other, in which case the knowledge is of the action of the one beating the other (al-Ashʿarī 1980, 401–402). Generalized, the argument seems to be that if one knows that one is an agent (and again it was taken for granted by the early theologians that humans are agents), then one must know the effects of his action, and yet one knows that the effects of certain actions are in others, as in the case of beating and so causing pain. In contrast, others argued that humans only engender actions within themselves, and it is God who brings about the effect in others, as for example, a human may produce the action of willing to throw a stone, but it is God who actually causes the stone to move. One way of defending this thesis was to observe that God creates bodies all at once and that at each moment He recreates them (Ibid, 404). The assumption seems to be that since God recreates bodies, human or otherwise, at every moment, no body survives between two moments such that an action willed in the human body at one moment could be causally efficacious on some other body at a second moment; for in one sense any purported efficacy of what was willed at one moment is wholly disconnected with the events of some second moment.