If it is asked, “What is the difference between this infinite regress and an infinite regress in the attainment of complete causal efficacy for one particular thing after another?”

The answer is that they differ in several respects.

First: these people have said that He was a fully effective cause from eternity. A fully effective cause necessarily has its effect present with it. Your position therefore entails that nothing can come into being through Him; rather, all contingent things would be eternal, without beginning. This is disproved by sense perception and observation.

They thus asserted two false claims: one, that He was a fully effective cause from eternity, and that the effect of a fully effective cause accompanies it in time, so that the effect is simultaneous with the cause.

If it is said that the cause precedes the effect in causal priority, this differs from the position of someone who says that He has always produced effects in one thing after another. The latter does not say that He ever produced an effect in any particular thing from eternity, nor that He was ever a fully effective cause from eternity.

Second: if they say that the effect must be accompanied by its effect in time, it follows that nothing can come into being.

If, instead, they say that the effect follows the cause in time, it follows that nothing eternal exists alongside Him. In that case, whoever holds this position says that He has always produced effects in one thing after another, and that everything other than Him has come into being after not existing.

Third: these people say that, for every particular event, the complete efficacy of its cause must come into being, and the event itself then comes into being after that complete causal efficacy. Thus, whatever Allah brought into being came into existence after