 In his On the Eternity of the World, Aquinas’s position is in some ways similar. He accepts on faith that, in fact, the world had a beginning, but rejects rather contemptuously the Philoponian arguments used by some of his contemporaries. He wishes, however, to argue for a different point: that it could have been the case that the world has always existed and yet “is caused by God according to everything that is in it”. Aquinas sharply distinguishes this position from the view that “something other than God could have always existed, as if something could exist and not be made by him”—which, he says, not just Christian teaching, but the philosophers reject as an “abominable error”. He is right, indeed, that the philosophers—not Aristotle, but Avicenna and Averroes!—did hold that the world was “made” by God. But, as al-Ghazālī pointed out, it is very unclear how—within the Aristotelian modal scheme Avicenna, Averroes and he all accepted  (§3.2)—an  eternal world leaves room for God to make the world in the sense Aquinas certainly meant: that of willing and choosing it.