Those philosophers who contested the foregoing argument—namely, the advocates of the eternity of the celestial spheres such as Aristotle and his disciples—allowed for events with no first beginning and made no distinction between the two cases.

The eminent authorities of the revealed traditions, together with the most penetrating of the philosophers, did make that distinction. For if the entity that never ceases to be conjoined to events is itself, along with those events, an effect produced by another, then it would be eternal yet subjugated, and its Lord would necessarily bring it into existence by His very essence, such that its existence would coincide with His. But a cause that necessitates by its own essence from all eternity neither necessitates a single temporal event nor a temporal event together with its companion; for to necessitate a temporal kind in pre-eternity is impossible, and likewise to necessitate a particular event along with what accompanies it in pre-eternity. Either claim would entail that the temporal is inseparable from the necessitating cause from all eternity—an impossibility, since a temporal entity only occurs step after step.

Should it be argued that what is necessary is merely the kind that comes into being little by little, we reply that none of this is necessitated by a cause through its very essence, nor is it necessitated in pre-eternity. Its production can be necessitated only successively, event after event. Consequently, it is inconceivable in pre-eternity to posit a self-necessitating cause, and equally inconceivable to posit an eternal being whose Lord is other than himself. The reason is that to be a necessitating cause from pre-eternity presupposes the perfection of its power to necessitate and effect. Whatever is called an agent, necessitator, requirer, effector, or any similar term used in this context, cannot truly effect until every condition required for causation is fully satisfied; and once those conditions are complete, the effect must follow, for the existence of an effect without the completion of the conditions of causation is impossible.