and a brilliant proof that cannot be evaded. Other arguments, too, reveal the error of these people, who are more unbelieving and further astray than polytheists in general, who set up equals to their Lord.

To clarify this: what they actually maintain is that complete causal efficacy for any event necessarily entails its occurrence. Thus, whenever the celestial sphere revolves, its revolution produces a preparedness in the recipient and an emanation from the agent which together necessitate the event. It is their combination that makes the causal efficacy complete. This is what their position actually amounts to.

If complete causal efficacy comes into being successively, just as its effects come into being successively, then both the causal efficacy and its effects come into being successively. Yet some of its components are eternal—either necessarily existent in themselves, or necessarily existent not through themselves but through another—while some of its components come into being.

If that is so, there must be a cause for causal efficacy to come into being successively, since nothing that comes into being brings itself into being. Celestial motion, for example, occurs successively, and the arising of its causal efficacy must have a cause that itself comes into being. If it is said that this cause consists of renewed conceptions, renewed longing, or whatever else might be proposed, then