that is itself nonexistent and affects its nonexistence, then, if the nonexistence of that nonexistent cause is necessary, its existence is impossible. An effect becomes necessary when its cause is necessary and impossible when its cause is impossible. The cause of the possible thing’s nonexistence would therefore be necessary, and its existence would be impossible. An effect becomes necessary when its cause is necessary and impossible when its cause is impossible. Consequently, (1) every possible thing whose possibility is posited would be impossible. This entails a conjunction of contradictories that is impossible in the extreme, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

If it is said:

“The nonexistence of its cause depends upon a nonexistence that affects the cause’s existence; that affecting factor, in turn, is nonexistent because another factor affecting it is absent; and so on,” then this entails an invalid infinite regress even more untenable than an infinite regress of existent causes.

[The response] (2) is the fifth: [It may be said] (3): Even if it were assumed that ongoing nonexistence has a pre-eternal cause, and that when the effect is ongoing nonexistence, its cause—which is itself ongoing nonexistence—is a beginningless cause, it would not follow that the particular existent which may either exist or be nonexistent is pre-eternal and beginningless, nor that its agent has always been acting upon it, such that the Agent of existent things has never brought anything into being at all. For comparing the necessary being—the pre-eternal, beginningless Creator and Agent of created beings—to ongoing nonexistence that entails ongoing nonexistence is among the most corrupt of analogies. It is a sheer analogy with no common ground. How, then, can an argument based on such a corrupt comparison be admissible in a matter such as this—