Furthermore, if the perpetuity of events is admissible, then the bringing-into-being of those events by the Agent must likewise be perpetual, so that He would be producing them one after another. Yet a pre-eternal, fully sufficient cause whose effect is concomitant with it does not produce things successively, for such succession flatly contradicts the simultaneity of its effect with it.

An effect must either necessarily accompany the complete cause that possesses every condition for causation, or it must be possible for it to be delayed. If delay is possible, then the complete cause could have been firmly established from pre-eternity while the world emerged from it only later—thereby overturning the very foundation of their argument. This, in turn, entails preference without a preferrer and origination without a cause: for if the cause is in an identical state both while acting and before acting, with nothing to distinguish one state from the other, the two states are equivalent. To act in one of them while refraining in the other would then be a preference of action without a preferring factor—a notion that the intellect immediately deems impossible, for it closes the door to affirming the Necessary, Eternal Creator.

Conversely, if the effect must accompany the complete cause, it follows that everything that has ever come into existence obtained its complete cause only concurrently with it. The complete cause would thus become a cause after previously not being one, while the effect would depend on a complete, simultaneous cause. An infinite regress is impossible—both with regard to something’s being a cause at all and to the completion of its causality, as shown earlier. For if the completeness of the cause for this entity does not exist until the completeness of the cause for another exists, and that one, in turn, awaits the completeness of yet another, then no complete causes would ever exist—just as if one were to say, “This cause will not exist until that cause exists.” Such a claim amounts to positing an endless succession of non-existent entities, an unbroken chain of absences and the very postulation of non-existence itself.