Yet you have no evidence whatsoever to rule this out. For you have no evidence against what pertains to His will and power inhering in His essence, except the reasoning by which you deny His attributes, just as you denied His knowledge. This is plainly among the most unsound views held by human beings.

The most that you and your companions can say is that this entails multiplicity and change. Both terms require clarification. This does not entail a multiplicity of gods; rather, the Lord is one God. It entails only multiplicity in His knowledge and words, which is true and is among His greatest perfections.

As for change, what is meant is not that He undergoes a transformation, but that He speaks by His will and power and brings events into existence by His power and will.

Clearly, one who is able, by his will and power, to do whatever he wills is more perfect than one who can perform no act of his choosing by which to bring created things into being, cannot speak by his own will, is not pleased with those who obey him, and is not angry with those who disobey him.

They know that a voluntary act inhering in the agent is an attribute of perfection. Indeed, even motion is, in their view, an attribute of perfection. On what grounds, then, do they deny this, while allowing for a beginningless succession of events—indeed, maintaining that it is necessary?

[The Eighteenth Argument]

His statement:

“Then, since intellectual substances apprehend things that are not their effects through the presence of forms within them, and they apprehend the First