We shall now point out the considerations that reveal the unsoundness of their claim and invalidate their proof—matters that we have already treated at length elsewhere. We say to them: If the Maker is eternal, necessitating His effects by His very essence, and if the cause that issues from Him is a complete, everlasting cause, it necessarily follows that none of His effects or products can be delayed from Him, just as they themselves maintain. For if that which is temporally subsequent had its complete cause present from all eternity, it would itself have to be eternal and never postponed. If, on the other hand, it did not yet exist, then its complete cause must have arisen after previously not existing—whether the contingent event itself supplied one of the conditions required for the completion of the cause or not.

The same argument applies to the cause of that cause, and so on ad infinitum, which means that no contingent event can possess a complete cause from pre-eternity. This consequence is inseparable from their own doctrine, for a complete cause entails its effect. Hence a contingent occurrence cannot have its complete cause existing from all eternity, and it follows that no contingent event could ever proceed from the complete cause that is the Necessary Existent.

At this point only two possibilities remain: either the events come into being by themselves—a notion that is self-evidently false and which they themselves concede to be impossible—or they arise through some agent other than the Necessary Existent. In that case the agent itself must have a cause. If that agent is not a Necessary Being in its own right, it in turn requires another cause, and the same discussion about the origination of events from it will recur. If, however, it is itself a Necessary Existent, the very same critique applies to it as to the first Necessary Existent: if it constitutes a complete cause, no contingent could issue from it; but if it is not a complete cause, their theory of a being that necessitates its effects by its essence collapses. Thus their position is shown to be untenable on every count. The most they can say is that every contingent event is conditional