in its case is the same as in the first. If it is not moving, this entails successive motions proceeding from something that does not move. This is their position, and it is false.

The successive parts of motion occur one after another. The cause that brings about each of these parts cannot have been a complete necessitating cause from eternity. Were that so, its effect would necessarily coexist with it, since the effect of a complete cause cannot be delayed beyond its cause. This would entail that something temporally originated is eternal, which is impossible. Alternatively, one may say: if a complete cause necessarily entails the coexistence of its effect, that consequence follows. If it does not, then later motions may arise from an eternal necessitating cause. Thus, something could begin to move after not having been in motion, without any newly arising cause—and this invalidates your position. If the complete necessitating cause of these motions did not exist from eternity, it must itself have come into being. The argument concerning its coming into being is the same as that concerning anything else coming into being: neither it nor anything else can come into being from an eternal complete cause. Thus, if no new act arises in the agent, nothing newly arising can proceed from it. Consequently, motions cannot proceed from something that does not move.”

Among the points acknowledged by Ibn Rushd and other philosophers and theologians is what he said concerning his fellow philosophers: they rely on two grounds.

The first is that an agent’s acting entails its undergoing change, and everything that changes has something that changes it.

The second is that what is eternal does not undergo certain kinds of change.

He said: “All of this is difficult to demonstrate.”

I say: This issue—namely, the origination of events from an essence in which no