One may then ask, “And what, in turn, compelled this preparedness to be deferred?” If they answer, “Because yet another preparedness was itself delayed,” al-Armawī’s remark—that in their view the rise of the requisite conditions and instruments that overflow along with the effect is permissible—does nothing to salvage their position. For in that case the Necessary Existent would not be a fully sufficient eternal cause for those conditions, nor an ever-acting cause with respect to them; an eternally perfect cause allows none of its effects to lag behind it, whereas the postponement of effects is a matter of plain observation.

Al-Armawī’s further claim that an unending succession of such conditions and instruments may come to be, one after another, is likewise of no avail. On the contrary, it undermines their assertion that any part of the world is eternal. If an infinite chain of events and effects is admitted, a fully sufficient eternal cause for any one of them becomes impossible, for that would imply that the events themselves existed from all eternity—an obvious contradiction. Nor can those events arise from Him later on, for they occur only when something issues from Him that makes Him a fully sufficient cause for them; yet for an event to proceed from a cause that has entailed its effect since eternity is inconceivable.

Were they instead to concede that the act of the Lord—exalted is He—was not complete from pre-eternity, and that He brings everything other than Himself into existence successively, one thing after another, this would agree with their own premise that successive happenings are admissible. It would, however, overturn the eternity of any particular entity in the universe, whether the celestial sphere or anything else. Their proof for the world’s pre-eternity is built entirely on the supposition that He is an eternally fully sufficient cause. Yet it has been shown that He is not a fully sufficient cause for those entities, nor has it been demonstrated that He is so for anything else; their proof therefore collapses, leaving them with nothing to establish a fully sufficient cause existing from eternity.

Such a collapse would vitiate their argument even if the impossibility of an eternal fully sufficient cause had not already been established. How much more, then, once that impossibility has indeed been proven—for it necessarily entails the impossibility of the world, or any part of it, being without beginning.