another motion, and no event occurs without being preceded by another event, without end—what grounds have you for rejecting the view that events provide no indication at all that a body came into existence, since their existence has no beginning and each is preceded by another, without end?

He should be told:

We reject this for several reasons. The most immediate is that what you have said is impossible and self-contradictory. For the events that have occurred and passed must either have originated and come into existence from a beginning, having been brought about and completed, or include some whose existence has no beginning and which did not come to be through origination.

If past events had a beginning and a starting point, and have run their course, then your assertion that they have always existed, one before another, is impossible. For whatever has always existed is eternal and has no beginning. Yet calling them events entails that they had a beginning and came into existence from a first point. Combining these two claims is contradictory and impossible.

If, among the things to which we apply this designation—namely, ‘events’—there is something that exists without a beginning and comes to be from nonexistence, then whatever exists without origination and has not come to be from nonexistence must necessarily be eternal. Likewise, in your view, the celestial sphere and the elements of things—water, earth, fire, and air—are eternal, since they exist without having come from nonexistence and did not come to be through origination. Thus, the celestial sphere must be eternal, with no beginning to its existence.