of them. Even if the succession of originated things is supposed to extend infinitely, this does not alter the fact that they are all originated and all need an originator outside themselves. The originator outside all originated things can only be eternal.

On this supposition, none of them is an eternal, beginningless effect or a necessary effect, as those thinkers posited. For they posited an infinite succession of causes and effects, each originated and each contingent, while maintaining that the contingent may be necessary, incapable of nonexistence, and necessarily existent. They therefore needed to establish that something necessarily existent, eternal and beginningless can be an effect, so that the totality composed of such things would be an effect. Yet this is impossible for them, since they have combined mutually contradictory claims.

Ibn Rushd said:

“But if by ‘contingent’ he means those necessary things that have a cause, it has not yet been shown that this is impossible in the way it has been shown for truly contingent existents. Nor has it yet been shown that there is a necessary being requiring a cause, such that positing this would entail ultimately arriving at a necessary being without a cause—until it is shown that the totality of necessary beings, consisting of cause and effect, is like the totality of contingent beings.”

I say:

Ibn Rushd first stated that if by ‘contingent’ we understand the contingent