has a greater claim to coming later than to precedence, and that describing it as earlier or later conveys distinct meanings, unlike mere labels that convey nothing—proves that none of them can come earlier neither by virtue of itself nor because of a cause.”

He said:

“The invalidity of these alternatives, which exhaust the possibilities concerning earlier and later occurrence, proves that an agent has brought forward those that come earlier and delayed those that come later.”

He said:

“This is one of the arguments relied upon to establish that acts must depend upon an agent.”

I say:

The substance of this argument is that the proposition that whatever comes into being must have an originator is established by the fact that its coming into being involves singling out one time rather than another. Such specification requires one who specifies, because it favors one of two equivalent alternatives over the other; and favoring one of two equivalent alternatives without a determining factor is self-evidently untenable. After this, he had no need to argue that favoring requires a determining factor on the grounds that it favors one of the two alternatives open to a contingent thing over the other and must therefore have a determining factor. We have noted further on that this is the approach followed by Abū al-Husayn, Abū al-Maʿālī, Ibn ʿAqīl, Ibn al-Zāghūnī, and others: they established the dependence of what comes into being