They would reply: “Rather, the existence of what exists and the attainment of what is attained are precisely what he intends and chooses.”
As for your statement that he would be intending to bring into existence what already exists: if you mean something that exists independently of his intention, this is not conceded. This argument would hold only if it were established that something beginningless cannot be willed or intended—which is the very point at issue. If, however, you mean bringing into existence something that exists through his intention, that is precisely the claim being advanced. It is as though you had said: “If something intended by a beginningless agent existed through his intention, it would exist through his intention.” Since this is precisely the claim being advanced, why have you declared it impossible?
On this supposition, however, these thinkers must concede that there is no distinction between an intrinsically necessitating cause and an agent acting by choice. They say: “If by an intrinsically necessitating cause one means that it has always been acting, this does not, on this supposition, preclude its acting by choice. If one means that what it necessitates—its effect—is inseparable from it, this too does not, on this supposition, preclude its acting by choice.”
This latter alternative is undoubtedly false, whether it is called a necessitating cause or an agent acting by choice, because it entails that no temporally originated event ever occurs. For if what it necessitates is inseparable from it—and whatever is inseparable from an inseparable concomitant is itself inseparable—then all the effects it necessitates would be beginningless concomitants. Thus, nothing temporally originated could proceed from it or from anything else, since the same reasoning applies to anything else supposed to be necessary in existence. It follows that temporally originated events would have no agent.
There is no doubt that this conclusion follows inescapably for the theistic eternalist philosophers and others, such as Aristotle, al-Fārābī, and Ibn Sīnā, and that their position entails that