Their notion that only one simple being proceeds from Him is a false notion; hence the abundance of contradiction and error in their discourse, and the frequency with which people have refuted them and deemed them ignorant in matters of theology. Should they concede—​as the earliest masters conceded—​that attributes and acts are originated, the impossibility of any created thing accompanying Him from pre-eternity to post-eternity becomes even clearer than under their first assumption. Consequently, on either assumption it is impossible that, at the very moment He brings it about, He should be the cause of one motion after another. Rather, as has already been shown, the cause of a motion must accompany that motion and not precede it; the complete cause must therefore coincide with it and is thus eternal.

Now, a complete cause of successive motions cannot exist before its effect, for nothing precedes the Eternal; nor can it exist after it, for that would mean that while eternal it was devoid of motion, even though the premise is that it necessarily entails motion. It would also imply that the First Cause became causative after previously not being so, without anything to necessitate such change—an impossibility, for nothing external acts upon Him. Even if He were acting within it, this too would be impossible, for on that view He would affect only one event after another, His influence on each event occurring after His influence on the preceding one, while His own state remains unchanged with respect to all events.

The simultaneous existence of the celestial sphere together with all its events is likewise impossible, because events have arisen within it. If those events came into being after not existing, they would require an originator to bring them forth, and that would necessitate either that the originator itself be originated, or that its very act of originating them be originated at the very moment of bringing them into existence.