[Refutation of their claim]

As for the assertion, “The cause precedes the effect even though it coincides with it in time,” and the claim that the Creator stands in this relation to the world:

The first response

He should be told: If by “cause” you mean a condition for the effect’s existence, rather than that which originates it, your statement actually means that the Necessary Existent neither originates contingent beings nor is their Lord; rather, His existence is a condition for theirs. This is what these people’s position really amounts to. According to their principles, the Lord and the world are inseparable, each being a condition for the other. The Lord needs the world just as the world needs the Lord. They go to great lengths to affirm His independence of everything else, yet their principles make Him dependent on something else, just as some created beings are.

The furthest that a pretentious thinker among them, such as Aristotle, goes is to make the celestial sphere necessarily existent and incapable of nonexistence, while nevertheless dependent on the First Principle in order to resemble it, and to make the First Principle independent of everything else.

But it is contradictory to say that the Necessary Existent depends on something else. Moreover, the eternal entity he affirms has no reality, as has been explained at length elsewhere.

If, however, by “cause” he means that which originates its effect, this is inconceivable when its time is that of the effect: it has not genuinely preceded the effect, whereas genuine precedence is the intelligible kind of precedence.