And if it is said, “Rather, His necessitating the second part is conditional upon the first part coming into being, and so on,” this would mean that His necessitating each part is conditional upon the existence of another part preceding it, and He is a complete cause of one of those parts. It must therefore follow that none of them occurs, because those parts succeed one another without beginning or end, and any time one posits is like every other time. Thus, at no time is He a complete cause of any temporal occurrence. His bringing each occurrence into being would therefore be conditional upon an occurrence that He did not bring into being. The same argument applies to the occurrence that serves as the condition as to the occurrence that depends upon it. If He does not bring the first into being, He does not bring the second into being either. Hence, on their assertion that “He is a complete cause,” He would not bring any temporal occurrence into being. This is what was to be established.

For if he were to say, “If He necessitated effects by His very essence, no change would occur in the world,” this would demolish their position. They face two alternatives: either they say that He is not a complete cause of His effects, or they say that His effects necessarily accompany Him. As for combining His being a complete cause from eternity with His effect coming into existence little by little, this combines two opposites.

A complete cause is one that necessarily entails its effect: its effect does not come after it, nor does its producing that effect depend upon anything else.

Yet they say that, at any given time, He is not a complete cause of what He brings into being at that time. Rather, His act is conditional upon something preceding it, and He is not a complete cause of that preceding condition. He would therefore be a complete cause of neither the earlier temporal occurrences nor the later ones. Temporal occurrences must consequently have some other cause that brings them about.

This objection does not apply to someone who says, “He brought temporal occurrences into being through successive volitions or successive acts.” Such a person does not say that He necessitates contingent beings by His very essence, nor that He is their complete cause from eternity. Rather, his position is that He is not a cause at all of any of His creatures, but brought them into being by His will