The decisive clarification is this: the terms “effecting,” “acting,” “bringing into being,” and the like may be understood, with regard to God, in three distinct ways.

1. They may refer to His effect upon everything other than Himself—that is, His originating the whole created order.
2. They may refer to His effect upon a particular entity, namely His creating that specific thing.
3. They may denote mere, unrestricted causation, meaning only that He is One who brings about something or other.

If by “effecting” one intends His originating every single thing from pre-eternity, that is impossible by the compelling evidence of sense perception and reason alike, for temporal events are plainly observed. Moreover, for a thing to be both originated and eternal is itself impossible.

If the term refers to His effect upon a particular object, it is equally clear that such an effect is contingent upon the coming-to-be of its result; the production of a specific effect can only be something that occurs in time.

Should “effecting” be taken in the third sense—bare action, meaning only that He is, in general, an agent—then we say to the philosophers: your inquiry negates only its opposite. You have shown that it is impossible for Him to act after having been wholly inactive with respect to everything; you have not shown that He cannot act upon one thing after having acted upon another.

Your argument does not require that He be a “complete agent” from eternity in the sense of having effects co-eternal with Him. It establishes merely that He has never ceased to possess the attribute of agency in an unrestricted sense; it does not imply that He became an agent after having once not been.

If this is correct, it indicates that He has ever been bringing one thing into being after another, but it in no way proves that any given created entity is eternally co-existent with Him.

Yet the philosophers insist that His act accompanies Him from eternity because, they say, He is a complete agent from pre-eternity, and a complete agent necessitates its effect—an effect that cannot be dissociated from Him. For were He once incomplete and then became complete, and nothing subsequently came to be, that would amount to a preference without a preferrer.