[coeternal with its agent](1). Yet no rational person, so far as we know, has embraced both of these positions. Even supposing that someone did, he would have embraced two false premises, each demonstrably false. No rational person has ever maintained their conjunction, and any rational person could refute him with decisive proof. He merely counters the arguments of each group with those of the other. The most he establishes is that part of this group’s position is false and part of the other group’s position is false. Yet it does not follow that he should be conceded the combined falsity of both positions, nor the combination of this error with that one. Rather, this makes the refutation of his own position all the more forceful.

Moreover, each of the two groups sought to escape one of the two errors while supposing the other not to be erroneous. Neither discerned how to embrace everything sound while avoiding everything false. He therefore has no right to impose upon either group what it knew to be false together with what it did not know to be false, thereby imposing upon it everything false and stripping it of everything sound. At worst(2), its position is piebald: it is(3) a mixture of white and black, [and piebald is better than black](4).

For the group which maintained that an agent possessing power can select one of two possible acts over the other without any determining factor said so only because it recognized(5) that the act of an agent possessing power must necessarily be temporally originated, and that(6) affirming both that he is an agent and that the act is eternal combines two contradictions. They did not discern the distinction between the kind of action and an individual instance of it. Rather—