The reply is:

First, you have established neither action nor origination on His part. Rather, on your account, it is nature that acts. All you have established concerning the First is that He is loved as an object of imitation—and you have asserted even this without proof.

Second, you may be told: If mere possibility requires a possible thing to coexist with the Necessary Existent, it follows that everything whose existence is possible must be eternal. This flies in the face of both sense perception and reason.

If you say, “Some possible things depend upon conditions, or there may be an impediment to their existence,” you may be told: What, then, rules out the First’s bringing [the world] into existence being dependent upon conditions, or subject to an impediment, while the First has always been performing acts subsisting in Himself, or producing effects distinct from Himself, as leading figures among your fellow philosophers—those who preceded Aristotle or others—maintain?

Third, you may be told: If the world is necessary in itself, many of its acts have nevertheless occurred later. It follows, then, that some acts of that which is necessary in itself occur later. If, however, the world is contingent in itself, its Maker has delayed many of the acts that occur within it.

In either case, those effects that occurred later did so after the existence of that which is necessary in itself. It is thus clear that not all its effects must coexist with it. If some of its effects may occur later, why may the celestial spheres not be among those later effects?

He said:

“However, some hold that it necessarily follows from this—I mean from the necessary coexistence of the world with the First Cause—that the First Cause has no agency by choice in the existence of