they are told: “Your argument against temporal events subsisting in Him either rules out attributes subsisting in Him altogether, or applies specifically to temporal events. If the former, your position has already been shown to be false by demonstrating the invalidity of your argument for denying His attributes and refuting what you say about divine oneness—which amounts to denying His attributes—as has been explained at length elsewhere.

“If it applies specifically to temporal events, then your argument for denying them is this very argument for the impossibility of temporal events originating from Him. You cannot establish one by the other and then the other by the first, for that would be circular. This is begging the question: your denial of temporal events arising in His essence is no different from your denial of their arising in anything else. If you can deny this only by denying that they subsist in His essence, you have begged the question.”

[The Second Perspective]

It may be said to them: “When someone says, ‘The cause of temporal events is either the essence or something external to it,’ do you mean the cause of each temporal event, or the cause of temporal events as a kind? If you mean the former, your opponents will reject your alternatives as exhaustive and say to you, ‘Rather, the cause of each temporal event is the essence together with the successive temporal events subsisting in it.’”

If you say, “This requires temporal events to occur successively in His essence, and whatever is never free of temporal events is itself temporally originated,”

they will reply: “This invalidates your claim that the celestial spheres are beginningless and entails that they came into being.”