Within the created realm there is not a single being from which something issues entirely on its own, nor any cause that brings about its effect in complete independence, without the participation of something else. The statement advanced by certain scholastic theologians—that knowledge is the cause of the state of being a knower—has, in the judgment of most of them, no real content, for the “state of being a knower” is not an addition to knowledge itself. Even those experiential mystics who treat it as something extra to the knower declare it to be non-existent in the ontological sense. Thus, nowhere in existence is there a cause wholly self-sufficient with respect to its effect.

It follows, then, that their contention that the Necessary Being is an autonomous cause whose effect proceeds from it alone contradicts the reality of things. Likewise, their claim that a simple, undifferentiated One can be a complete, self-sufficient cause for its effect runs counter to what actually exists; reason does not attest to it—indeed, it rejects it. What reason does affirm is that from any single entity, no generated effect can emerge except in conjunction with something else. Were the universe an effect generated from God, another entity would have to accompany Him so that the two together might bring about that generation, for generation occurs only from two sources. Hence, affirming causation and generation necessarily entails affirming a partner with God in originating the cosmos—an implication they cannot evade.

There is yet another aspect of the matter. The transient events we observe in the universe cannot plausibly be said to proceed from an eternal, complete cause, for such a cause would entail that its effect be co-eternal with it, and the effect would therefore not be originated. It is therefore necessary to posit for those events an agent other than that primeval complete cause, which again requires admitting a partner with God who brings about the events—an impossibility. For if the alleged producer of those events is itself produced, it is merely one more contingent thing in need of a maker; and if it is eternal, then events would be issuing from an eternal being. Yet if that being were an eternal, fully sufficient cause, the occurrence of temporal events from it would be impossible, and if it were a voluntary agent from whom events proceed, their whole doctrine collapses—whether they claim it became a producer of events after previously not being so, without any new factor arising, or that it has always been an acting, capable agent whose volitional acts subsist in itself.