of both categories, the same claim could be made regarding the other; otherwise, the answer applies equally to both.

As for the philosophers, it is said to them:

“You maintain that temporal events cannot inhere in what is beginningless, yet according to you it has never ceased to be a locus for temporal events. Thus, in your view, being beginningless does not preclude this. Rather, according to you, this is the only possible perfection, and no other is possible. They denied it only of the Necessary Existent because they supposed that He is not characterized by it.”

It has already been pointed out that their position on this is false—particularly because whatever successive temporal events subsist in cannot proceed from a complete, pre-eternal cause that necessarily produces its effect. A complete necessitating cause cannot have its effect, or any part thereof, delayed after it. Whenever any part of its effect is delayed, it is only potentially the cause of that part. For anyone who calls this a deficiency, it is a deficiency whose absence is possible.

If it is said:

“Creating created beings in pre-eternity is an attribute of perfection and must therefore be affirmed of Him,”

it is replied:

“The existence of all inanimate entities—or even one of them—would entail the existence of all temporal events—or one of them—in pre-eternity. It is therefore impossible for all successive temporal events to exist simultaneously at a single instant, whether