Nor may those successive completions be said to proceed from the eternal, all-sufficient Cause, for that would require them to exist alongside that Cause. It is likewise impossible for the eternal Cause to be a complete cause for any one particular event, for the very notion of particularity demands a fixed starting point; yet every single event is preceded by another, so none can be singled out over the rest. Moreover, no one of those events can itself be a complete cause of a series of successive occurrences while the cause remains in a single, unchanging state, because a changing effect cannot arise from a complete cause that does not change.
If, therefore, the events have no originator other than the eternal, all-sufficient Cause—and it is impossible for a temporal event to issue from such a cause—it follows that the events would have no originator at all. Abū ʿAbdullāh al-Rāzī called attention to this point, but did not explain it with full clarity. Consequently, al-Ārmūy objected, failing to grasp the real force of the argument; he imagined a difference between the coming-to-be of the conditions of a cause and the coming-to-be of the cause itself.
That distinction, however, holds only if there is some factor other than the cause that necessitates the occurrence of its conditions, so that one might say the cause’s efficacy is contingent upon further conditions produced by something else. But if nothing necessitates the events except the very essence of the cause—assumed to be complete, with its effect never failing to accompany it—then its efficacy cannot depend on any condition outside itself; its effect must accompany it, and thus no new event could ever arise from it.
Know, then, that this is the linchpin of their argument for the world’s eternity. Yet it is now clear that their reasoning contradicts itself and invalidates their claim. The foundation of their position is that the agent causing the world must be complete, so that its effect can never be absent from it; but that very premise prevents it from bringing any temporal events into existence, whether that be conditioned or unconditioned.