If, however, it is supposed that the cause itself brings temporal events into existence one after another, then it is not a complete cause for those events. And if, in addition, one posits another self-necessitating cause for something else that exists concurrently with the events, it might be claimed that the class of events is everlasting while that other entity remains, eternal and abiding. Yet our discussion concerns the case in which the entire cosmos is the effect of a single eternal, complete cause. On that premise such a position is impossible under every assumption, whether one maintains that the cosmos is never devoid of temporal events or that the events arose within it after not existing.

As for the first alternative: the cosmos did not exist apart from those events, and it cannot exist together with them by virtue of a complete cause whose effect is necessary. As for the supposition that the events came to be in it after not being, this would entail the occurrence of events without a cause and the privileging of one of two equal possibilities without a determinant. Moreover, on that account the cause would not be one that, by the necessity of its essence, produces events after previously not producing them—for that would combine two contraries. One must rather say that it is an agent by choice, able to act after having at one time not acted at all.

Upon that assumption, if His action is not eternal, then nothing in the universe can be eternal. But if His acting can be eternal, then His action must indeed be fixed from pre-eternity and He must be perpetually acting, for the requisite is present and no hindrance remains. The requisite for His agency is nothing outside His own being—it is impossible that He depend on anything else or that anything else exercise influence over Him—and it is assumed that acting is possible from pre-eternity. When the requisite stands and the obstacle is absent, the existence of the action necessarily follows.