[Sixteenth Argument]

It may be said:

What is the deficiency from which you have declared it free? Deficiency can only be understood as the absence of a perfection or the presence of something incompatible with a perfection.

The absence of knowledge, life, and power is called a deficiency; likewise, the presence of deafness, muteness, and speechlessness, which are incompatible with these attributes, is called a deficiency. Moreover, whatever is capable of possessing attributes of perfection is more perfect than that which cannot possess them.

If, according to you, it neither possesses these attributes nor is capable of possessing them, this is the utmost conceivable deficiency. What, then, is the deficiency from which you have declared it free?

If they say:

“We have declared it free of seeking completion from outside itself, for its completion being attainable only through an external cause is a deficiency.”

They may be answered:

This is false for several reasons.

First: If this is a deficiency, the deficiencies you have ascribed to it are greater and more numerous.

Second: It may be said: Its being capable of attaining completion and seeking it is more perfect than its being incapable of completion and not seeking it.

Third: Why do you say that this is a deficiency? Something is deficient only when it lacks what ought to exist or what can exist. If something is posited whose existence in pre-eternity is impossible or inappropriate, why do you say that its absence is a deficiency?

Fourth: It may be said: Your assumption that its completion requires a separate cause is mistaken, as has been explained at length elsewhere. It does not need any cause external to itself for any of its acts, let alone for its attributes or essence.

[Seventeenth Argument]

It may be said:

Why do you say that, if the First acts and produces effects