knowledge without a knower or power without one who is powerful.
Even more impossible is that knowledge should be the knower, and that knowledge should be power. Yet this is the position of those who deny the divine attributes.
As for those who maintain that the world is eternal, their position entails that no temporally originated event can occur. For whatever is eternal is either necessary in itself or a necessary concomitant of that which is necessary in itself. The necessary concomitants of the Necessary Existent can neither be temporally originated nor necessarily entail anything temporally originated. Thus, temporally originated events are not among its necessary concomitants. Whatever is not among its necessary concomitants depends for its existence on the occurrence of a temporally originated cause. Therefore, if nothing temporally originated can proceed from the eternal—whether it is itself necessary or a necessary concomitant of the Necessary Existent—then temporally originated events cannot occur.
This is what their position actually entails. They claim that the world has an eternal cause that necessitates its existence, and that it is a necessary concomitant of its cause. According to them, its cause necessarily entails both its effect and the effect of its effect. Hence, nothing can come into existence, since a particular temporally originated event is necessarily a concomitant of the eternal, as all rational people agree.
If they say:
“A temporally originated event may proceed from that which is necessary in itself through an intermediary,”
we reply: The same argument applies to that intermediary as to the first cause. If it is eternal and a necessary concomitant of that cause, all the effects must be eternal. If it is temporally originated, it must have a temporally originated cause.
If they say:
“Every temporally originated event is conditional upon a preceding event, with no first event,”
we reply: Then individual temporally originated events are not necessary concomitants of that which is necessary in itself. If their kind is a necessary concomitant of the Necessary Existent, then that which is necessary in itself cannot exist without this kind. Yet the kind of temporally originated events is contingent in itself, and nothing within it is necessary in itself. Thus, the kind of temporally originated events proceeds from that which is necessary in itself. This does not require any particular part of the world—neither the celestial sphere nor anything else—to be eternal. This is the opposite of their position.