 Avicenna’s cosmological argument from the contingency of the world contrasts with another major type of argument for God’s existence in Islamic natural theology, one that aims to demonstrate the existence of God from the beginning of the world in time. Al-Ghazali (1056-1111), in The Incoherence of the Philosophers, develops this type of argument in two steps. The first aims to establish, against a prominent Aristotelian tradition, that the world is not eternal but has a beginning in time. The second step reasons that for any being that begins to exist at a time, there must be something that determines that it comes to exist at that time. And thus, because the world begins to exist at a time, there must be something which determines that it comes to exist at that time. As al-Ghazali puts it, “every being which begins has a cause for its beginning; now the world is a being which begins; therefore, it possesses a cause for its beginning.” He then argues that it must be God who by free choice determines that the world comes to exist at the time it does, and we can thus conclude that God exists. These argumentative themes are characteristic features of the Ash’arite theological tradition in Islam; in recent times, al-Ghazali’s argument has been defended by William Lane Craig (1979).