Yet in any case, the atheists’ argument is the more untenable and their position the weaker. They faulted those theologians for positing new events without a new cause issuing from a willing, choosing agent—lest this entail preference without a preferrer and origination without a cause—and they reproached them for rendering the Creator idle with respect to creation from pre-eternity.

But they themselves have stripped the Maker of His attributes of perfection, indeed of action altogether; they have severed events from a Producer and the universe from its Creator. All they affirm is a bare, undifferentiated existence that resides only in the mind, not in external reality, and they allow happenings to arise without an agent that necessitates their occurrence. At most they portray the celestial sphere as a living being whose imagination, will, and motions generate events, while the Lord—exalted is He—according to them brings none of this about. Rather, they claim that He is a complete, timeless cause of the world with all its diverse species and transient phenomena, even though direct, self-evident knowledge attests