I've read (probably in wikipedia but can't track down the reference now) that the Asharite strand in Islamic theology couldn't accept that substance necessarily exists pre-eternally as the Quoran revealed Allah as the creator of this universe, and if something existed pre-eternally then there is no need for a creator.
Accordingly they dismantled time and space, by cleverly extending Democritus's theory of atomism from substance to both space & time. That is time and space emerged from a gathering together of time & space atoms.
(Of course one could say that these time atoms were also pre-existant before time itself. On a straight reading that question is nonsensical as time has been dismantled, there is no pre-, but to me, the question still has force, it is a matter of framing it correctly. How, I don't know, otherwise I would have framed it here.)
Does anyone have a reference where this is discussed, as it seems an interesting & fundamentally novel extension of greek atomism?
