preclude His necessary existence as established by proof. It only precludes what is disputed concerning necessary existence, for they supposed that the Necessary Existent neither does anything by His choice nor has anything inhering in Him by His choice. This is sheer error.

[The Seventh Argument]

This becomes clear through the seventh argument, which is as follows:

If the statement that He is necessarily existent in every respect means that He cannot cease to exist in any way, this is true: He cannot cease to exist in any way.

If it means that every state established as belonging to Him is necessarily existent, in the sense that He Himself necessitates it and does not depend on anything else for it to belong to Him, this too is true.

For none of the attributes and acts established as belonging to the Lord, Most High, requires Him to depend on anything else. Rather, He Himself necessitates them. However, those acts and their consequences that can exist only through His choice cannot, in their particular identity, have existed from eternity; rather, they must occur later—whether it is said that He knows by His essence, or that it is separate from Him. He is what necessitates it when it exists; nothing other than Him necessitates it.

But if saying that He is necessarily existent in every respect means that nothing attributed to Him can occur later than Him, and that all of it must instead have existed from eternity, this is false and unsupported by any proof. Indeed, the evidence establishes the contrary, for we continually observe newly originated things, and they originate from Him, whether through an intermediary or without one. Their coming into being necessarily entails the coming into being of that by which they were brought into being. Otherwise, if His essence is assumed to be in the same state before and after them,