As for the second answer:
“If he says, ‘He has always been creating and acting,’ I say instead, ‘It has always been the case that He would create and act.’ We can establish this in two ways:
First, an act does not necessarily entail the existence of a created thing. Rather, one act may subsist in Him after another act subsisting in Him, and so on, without there being any created thing separate from Him.
Second, even if an infinite regress of effects were posited, like an infinite regress of acts, every effect and every act comes into being after not having existed. Thus, no effect or act exists alongside Allah in beginningless eternity, since each comes into being after not having existed. Whatever comes into being after not having existed cannot coexist in beginningless eternity with the Eternal One, who has always existed.
If it is said, ‘Acts or effects, considered as a kind, have always existed,’ things that come into being do not exist all together as a kind; they exist only in succession.
When it is said, ‘The agent has always been acting, and the Creator has always been creating’—whereas an act can only be a particular act, and an act of creation and a created thing can only be particular—it may be understood that the Creator of the heavens and humankind has always been creating the heavens and humankind, and that the agent responsible for this has always been doing it. This is not so. Rather, it has always been the case that their Creator would create them, and that the agent responsible for this would perform it.
Thus, for every created thing and every act, the Lord, Most High, is described as One for whom it has always been the case that He would bring it about. He is not described as having always been its agent and Creator in the sense that it existed alongside Him in beginningless eternity. Even if it is posited that, before this act, He was performing another act, and that, before this created thing, He was creating another created thing, it has always been the case that, with respect to every