Sixth:

If the states are inseparable from it, then supposing that it acts without those states would be an impossible supposition. Accordingly, the Essence that necessarily entails successive states cannot act without them. If an agent acts only by means of successive states, it is impossible for any of its effects to be beginningless; for anything beginningless requires a complete, eternal cause. Yet that which necessarily entails successive states cannot, from all eternity, completely and eternally necessitate any particular thing. Rather, its necessitation of each effect becomes complete only when the states through which it becomes an agent exist.

Seventh:

If successive states may subsist in the agent, then it is possible—indeed necessary—for everything other than Him to have come into being. If that is not possible, then either it must be said:

Nothing can come into being—yet the existence of temporal events is known;

or it must be said:

Rather, they come into being without any newly arising cause within the agent. This would entail that everything other than Allah Most High can come into being. For if He can perpetually bring temporal events into being without a cause necessitating their occurrence, then it is all the more possible for all of them to come into being without a cause necessitating their occurrence. This presents the lesser difficulty; for if coming into being is possible despite the greater difficulty, it is all the more so with the lesser.

Furthermore, if the First necessarily entailed those temporal events, they would all be beginningless, which is impossible, as shown above (1). If it did not necessarily entail those temporal events, they would have come into being after not existing, which entails the occurrence of temporal events without any newly arising cause. [And if it necessarily entailed their kind but not the individual instances, the falsity of that has already been established in several ways] (2). And if (3) temporal events could come into being without any newly arising cause, it would be possible for the world to have come into being,