Thank you for sharing this delightful essay, Steven. Unfortunately, most of us in the West are blithely ignorant of the rich intellectual heritage of the Islamic world that preceded, and gave rise to, the European scholastic and humanistic traditions from Aquinas right up through the Italian Renaissance. It is a terrible hiatus in our education, rooted in the hegemonic rivalry of Christianity and Islam, which has caused anti-intellectualism and religious bigotry to prevail in both religious cultures more recently.
As to this thinker’s main idea—God as a “necessary existent” first cause without which nothing else could exist, I understand the reasoning process that leads to this conclusion, which you summarize eloquently. It finds some confirmation in the latest cosmological speculations positing the Big Bang and black holes as symmetrical mirror opposites—a sort of yin-yang polarity engendering all phenomena. Or as Lao Tzu deftly put it, “The Tao gave rise to One; one gave rise to Two; two gave rise to Three: and three gave rise to the Ten Thousand Things…”