 By contrast, Maimonides—at least on a literal reading of his Guide of the Perplexed—rejects any attempt to reconcile the eternity of the world with the creative role of the Abrahamic God, which for him involves will and choice. Rather, he denies that Aristotle had succeeded in demonstrating the eternity of the world and claims even that Aristotle himself accepted he had not done so (II, 15 [1963: II, 289–293]). He does not, however, like Philoponus, try to demonstrate that the world has a beginning, but just provides strong, but non-demonstrative arguments for the position. The strongest of them binds his views here even more tightly with his idea of God as a wilful agent. Maimonides argues that his account of physics in the sublunary world, Aristotle’s account of how the universe derives from the One (Maimonides has in mind the emanation theory developed by al-Fārābī) is explanatorily insufficient. The only way he sees that the required explanation can be provided is through God’s will: it happens in this way, because God so chooses. But God can will and choose, Maimonides thinks, only if the world he created has a beginning (II, 19–25 [1963: II, 302–330]).