Whoever affirms that God has never ceased to act and to speak whenever He wills has met the requirements of this argument, and nothing in it indicates that anything in the universe is eternal in the least.

Your opponents, for their part, have confronted you and driven you to deny the actual occurrence of events altogether, and the invalidity of that stance has likewise become clear.

Should they object, “We allow an infinite regress of events that occur within the world, but your argument entails a regress before the world itself—or before anything in the world—came to be, and that we do not concede,”

you may reply, first: If an infinite regress in pre-eternity is possible at all, there is no difference between the two cases. It would then be equally permissible to say that there are voluntary acts subsisting in the Lord that have no beginning.

Second: This concession will not help you prove the eternity of the heavenly spheres and all they contain, for their coming-to-be might well depend on prior causes that themselves began to exist, and the same applies to everything else.

Third: If an infinite regress is thought possible either in the intrinsic acts inherent in the Maker or in His outwardly produced effects, each possibility on its own overturns your proof for the eternal pre-existence of the spheres and the elements; how much more so if both are granted together.

Third approach: The entire argument is built on the alleged impossibility of an infinite regress in effects. Yet whether “regress” refers to the very principle of causation or to the effects themselves, it still fails to establish the conclusion you seek. What properly concerns this proof is a regress in the origin of the act itself—and such a regress is impossible by common agreement.