The order of cause-before-effect is not the only order causation admits. A hand moving a stick that presses a stone illustrates concurrent dependence: while the contact and applied force obtain, the stone's acceleration is produced without a temporal gap between the applied force and its effect. Releasing the hand need not stop all motion instantaneously, because inertia remains. Simultaneity is a causal structure too, and Aquinas sees in it the template he needs: an eternal God could simultaneously ground every moment of a temporal world without entering the time of what it grounds. The *per se* causal series runs through a stack of concurrent dependencies rather than a sequence of prior ones. Cause at the top, effect at the bottom, no temporal interval between them. Remove the top and the whole column falls in the same moment. If the picture works, the stack can be finite upward while terminating in an atemporal source, and the atemporal cause at the summit never needs to enter the time of the stones it moves.

Simultaneous causation is the mechanism that lets classical theism have both the atemporal God and the temporal world. The tradition developed the doctrine to resolve a specific problem: how an atemporal, unchanging being could cause a temporal, changing world without either being changed by the causing or leaving a gap in the causal order. Aquinas (*ST* I.2.3) deploys simultaneous causation in the First Way, the *per se* series that stops at an Unmoved Mover. Aquinas's *De Aeternitate Mundi* addresses explicitly the coexistence of eternal cause and temporal effect. Avicenna's continuous-creation doctrine in the *Kitāb al-Shifā* develops the parallel position in the Islamic tradition: God is the necessary, atemporal cause whose causing of contingent existents is itself eternal even though the existents are temporally extended (Jon McGinnis, 2010); (Peter Adamson, 2013). The continuous-creation model is not a separate escape but the same atemporal-sustaining picture in Islamic dress, and it meets the reply given below to the occasionalist and conservationist kindred: a continuously creating cause must still individuate what it sustains (S), order it (T), and carry it across (Φ). Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason* refines the concept in the Second Analogy, distinguishing logical from temporal priority and illustrating with the ball resting on the pillow. Stump and Kretzmann's "Eternity" (Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981) proposes ET-simultaneity as a relation between the eternal present and each temporal moment. Craig's *God, Time, and Eternity* (William Lane Craig, 2001) develops the contemporary version closest to biblical-theism commitments: God timeless without creation, temporal with creation. Against the doctrine: Wolterstorff's "God Everlasting" (Nicholas Wolterstorff, 1975) presses the case for divine temporality against Boethius and Aquinas. Padgett's *God, Eternity, and the Nature of Time* (Alan G. Padgett, 1992) defends a relative-timelessness alternative. Mullins's *The End of the Timeless God* (Mullins, R. T., 2016) presses the most sustained contemporary argument that timelessness is internally incoherent. Morriston (Wes Morriston, 2002); (Wes Morriston, 2010) has pressed the simultaneous-causation move specifically for two decades: if the cause is eternal, the effect must be equally eternal. The present reply sits closest to the Mullins–Wolterstorff wing in holding that timeless grounding does not cohere, and adds what that wing does not specify: the failure is not primarily biblical or doctrinal but structural; the logical priority the doctrine requires is itself a structured relation, and the structure is what was supposed to be escaped.

Applied here, the move offers the theist a path to concede the structure's dominion over the created order while preserving God as external ground. The argument holds that any ground of the structure must itself instantiate the roles. The simultaneous-causation theorist counter-claims that grounding need not be temporal, spatial, or substantial: it can be purely logical, a relation of eternal dependence that places the effect within T, S, Φ (the three structural Conditions, borne by Time, Space, and Substance) without placing the cause there. On this picture, the demand that grounds instantiate what they ground fails at the central claim: God grounds the structure atemporally, the structure grounds creatures temporally, and the argument's reach stops one level short of fundamentality.

The move bears directly on the Cartesian Certainty for change of [§2.2](<2.2 Cartesian Certainty.md>), the Intermediate Necessity of [§2.3](<2.3 Necessary Possibility of Change.md>), the identification in [§2.4](<2.4 Structural Requirement.md>) of the modal constraint with T, S, and Φ, and the Triconditional account in [§2.6](<2.6 Triconditionality of Nature.md>) of the Conditions as Nature. Simultaneous causation is the specific mechanism by which classical theism tries to exempt God from the structural conditions while accepting their application to creatures. If the exemption holds, a changeless ground is possible after all, provided the ground relates to change by logical rather than temporal priority. Three forms of the move take up the objection: the *per se* causal series, Kant's logical/temporal distinction, and Craig's modal refinement. The replies below argue that each discovers temporal asymmetry inside the logical priority it was supposed to replace.

*First.* The *per se* causal series, regimented, runs:

1. *Two series.* A *per accidens* series (events in time) differs from a *per se* series (grounding relations that hold at every moment).

1. *The First Way.* Aquinas's First Way holds that a *per se* series of causal dependencies requires no temporal extension: it is a relation of ontological priority rather than temporal sequence.

1. *Conclusion.* So God can be the *per se* cause of the world without being in time: the world depends on God at every moment, and the dependence relation is not itself a temporal event.

If C is a sufficient cause for E, whenever C obtains E obtains. The will of the Maximally Great Being (MGB) is held to be eternal, changeless, and sufficient. An eternal sufficient cause entails an eternal effect. Morriston (Wes Morriston, 2002) presses the point: if the cause is eternal, the effect must be equally eternal; if the effect is finite, a simultaneous cause must be equally finite. (The Stump–Kretzmann ET-simultaneity reply to this eternal-cause/eternal-effect point is engaged at [§4.2.1](<4.2.1 The Changeless Ground.md>).) The *per se* series resolves nothing, because the structural question reappears within it: how can an eternal, changeless ground produce a finite, changing effect without the ground itself being modally or structurally differentiated between its producing and its non-producing state? The doctrine gestures at logical priority while silently importing the temporal directionality it was supposed to avoid. If temporal priority is denied, the causal relation must still supply asymmetric dependence; otherwise the remaining relation is structurally indistinguishable from simultaneous coexistence, two things obtaining together without one producing the other. The issue is not whether every cause must come earlier in clock-time. The issue is whether “cause” has determinate content without ordered priority, distinguishable relata, and a stable dependence relation. Those are the structural roles in non-clock form. That identification is not stipulated here. The minimal floor was established independently at [§5.1.1](<5.1.1 Rasmussen's Foundation Argument.md>), showing that even a timeless grounding intellect must exhibit asymmetric grounding-order, relational distinction, and identity-retention across the relation in order to count as a ground at all. Asymmetric ontological priority is not being relabeled temporal by fiat; it is being held to the floor that any grounding relation must clear, and that floor is T, S, and Φ read at their most minimal. The simultaneous-causation theorist cannot keep the priority while refusing the floor, because the priority is precisely what the floor articulates.

The deeper problem cuts across all three forms: whatever the priority relation is called, simultaneous causation turns the contingency of creation into a dilemma. If God is necessarily creator or sustainer, and the sustaining relation is sufficient, then the sustained order follows necessarily from God. A necessary sufficient sustainer does not leave the sustained order contingent unless the sustaining relation is itself contingent. But if the sustaining relation is contingent, creatorhood is not necessary in God; and if the sustaining relation is necessary, the particular order God sustains is necessary with God. It will not do to answer that Nature is necessary in any case: the necessity of the structural conditions is affirmed here (□(T∧S∧Φ)), and [§4.4.9](<4.4.9 Modal Collapse Objection.md>) shows why necessary structure does not necessitate any particular configuration within it. That reply is available for the structure and unavailable for a contingent created world. A necessary complete sufficient cause would necessitate its effect. The classical theist therefore distinguishes God's necessary existence from a contingent free willing or from the contingent obtaining of the creation relation. Whether that distinction is coherent under timelessness and divine simplicity is the modal-collapse question; simultaneous causation alone does not settle it. The doctrine alone has not preserved a free creator beyond Nature; it has purchased the atemporal ground at the price of leaving in dispute the contingency it was meant to protect.

A second pressure compounds the first. Creation, considered not as a clock-time event but as a dependence relation, has structural requirements of its own. A creating relation has an asymmetric order: source and recipient are not interchangeable, and the dependence runs from ground to grounded rather than the reverse. It has a distinction: creator and creature must be distinguishable relata rather than one undifferentiated item. It has relation-stability: the recipient must be something whose being is held by the source, not a label that vanishes as soon as the relation is named. Those are the structural roles in non-clock form. Strip T from the relation and there is no directed dependence, only co-obtainment. Strip S from it and there is no creator/creature distinction. Strip Φ from it and there is no recipient whose being is sustained or produced. Eternal creation avoids a first temporal moment only by shifting the issue from temporal beginning to asymmetric dependence; it does not remove the structure that makes dependence intelligible. There is no third option in which creating obtains without order, distinction, and a bearer of the relation: that description names the absence of a creating relation, not a special kind of one.

Feser's defense of the per-se series through the act/potency distinction merits direct engagement at this point. The per-se causal series is, on Feser's reading in *Aquinas* (Feser, Edward, 2009) and *Five Proofs* (Feser, Edward, 2017), not merely a sequence of concurrent dependencies but an analysis of what it is for one thing to be the *actualizer* of another: the cause supplies actuality that the effect has only potentially, in the very instant of causation. The causal series terminates in *actus purus* (pure act without potency) because any cause that retains potency is itself in need of actualization.

The structural reply does not contest the act/potency analysis on its own terms; it shows that T, S, and Φ are what the analysis describes. Actualization supplies asymmetric dependence and distinction between actualizer and actualized, directly yielding thin order and difference roles. Thomistic concurrent actualization need not be a temporal transition from an earlier potential state, and dependence need not by itself be spatial extension. The richer T, S, and Φ types require the separate realizer arguments. Feser's act/potency machinery, taken on its own terms, is an analysis of what asymmetric causal dependence consists in, and the structural roles are what that analysis bottoms out in. The conclusion is the same as the main reply: the per-se series, whether described in the language of actualization or in the language of asymmetric dependence, presupposes the structural conditions at the terminating cause rather than exempting it from them.

The engagement with the *actus purus* form of simplicity and with the analogy-of-being machinery that underwrites it lives at [§5.2.1](<5.2.1 Divine Simplicity.md>); the structural question raised there and here is the same: whether a fully-actualized being can bear the causal roles the doctrine requires without bearing the structural conditions those roles presuppose.

*Second.* Kant's logical/temporal distinction pushes the case further. A cause and its effect can be simultaneous in time (the ball resting on a pillow creates the indentation at the moment it rests there) while the cause is logically prior: the indentation depends on the ball, not vice versa. Classical theism uses this template for God's relation to the world.

Kant's distinction is real and defeats the move rather than rescuing it. Logical priority without temporal priority requires a structural relation that holds between simultaneous states, a relation of asymmetric dependence between distinct elements within a single moment. Such a relation requires distinguishable relata, asymmetric dependence, and determinate obtaining at role-resolution. Logical priority within one moment is not thereby temporal asymmetry, and relation-stability is not automatically ordinary persistence. The ball-and-pillow analogy illustrates this vividly: the indentation depends on the ball because mass, resistance, and gravity are structurally active between them. The analogy works because ball and pillow are both in time, both in space, both substantial. Remove the structural roles and the analogy collapses: there is no ball and no pillow, only two labels with nothing between them. Kant's distinction describes the structure carrying the logical priority, not an escape from it. Without what the pillow supplies, the ball has nothing to indent, and the asymmetric-dependence relation the analogy illustrates has no content to carry.

*Third.* Craig's modal refinement goes furthest. God exists timelessly without creation and temporally with creation; the transition is not an event in God but a relational change: God stands in new relations to creatures without changing intrinsically. Simultaneous causation on this reading is what timeless grounding looks like at the temporal interface.

The refinement concedes the point while renaming the concession. If God stands in new relations to creatures with creation, then God's relational profile changes from no-relation-to-creatures to standing-in-relation-to-creatures. A change in relational profile is a change, and a change requires before-and-after, a prior state differing from a subsequent state.

Here the strict-timelessist will invoke the distinction between real and merely Cambridge change: God's coming to stand in relations to creatures is, on this reply, an extrinsic Cambridge change (as Socrates comes to be shorter than a growing Theaetetus without himself altering), not a real change in God, so timelessness survives untouched. The distinction is genuine; the Mullins–Padgett objection is that it does not cover this case. Craig's view is pressured by the claim that becoming temporal changes the subject's mode of existence rather than merely adding an external predicate. Craig denies this and treats the change as relational. The Mullins–Padgett objection holds that the Cambridge-change distinction does not cover this case: becoming temporal changes the subject’s mode of existence rather than merely adding an external predicate, and the move from real to Cambridge change requires defense rather than mere assertion. Cambridge change is the correct description of “shorter than”; it is the wrong description of “timeless, then temporal.” (The kindred ET-simultaneity reply, which relates the eternal present to each temporal moment without either term changing, is engaged at [§4.2.1](<4.2.1 The Changeless Ground.md>).) Timelessness-without-creation plus temporality-with-creation requires God to occupy two distinct modal-relational states and a transition between them. That transition is itself a structural event. Craig has not avoided making God temporal at the moment of creation. He has made God's atemporality conditional on not-creating and God's temporality conditional on creating, a structural description of a being whose modal status varies with its relational context. The result is not a being outside the structure, but a being whose structural position depends on which relational role it occupies.

Mullins (Mullins, R. T., 2016) pushes the critique further: if God's atemporality is contingent on God's non-relations, then God's atemporality is not a necessary feature of the divine nature but a contingent fact about the divine's relational profile, and classical theism was supposed to deny exactly that. Padgett (Alan G. Padgett, 1992) presses from a different direction: the transition Craig posits (from timeless-without-creation to temporal-with-creation) is not coherent unless God was already in some temporal frame within which a transition could occur, which is why Padgett opts for relative-timelessness from the start rather than trying to combine strict atemporality with a creative act.

A kindred variant is Malebranchean occasionalism: God is the sole genuine cause, and what appear as natural causal relations are divinely ordained regularities holding between occasions rather than mechanisms. The reply is the same in thinner vocabulary. For God to occasion distinct events, the creaturely occasions must be differentiated and ordered, and the decree must supply determinate explanatory bearing. Occasionalists may construe the divine intention as one timeless decree rather than a persisting mental episode, so the move secures the minimal roles while leaving the loaded divine types contested. Occasionalism has not eliminated the structural conditions; it has relocated them into the divine willing itself. Another kindred: the conservationist account (Alfred J. Freddoso, 1991), on which God continuously sustains creatures in existence without directly causing their operations. The sustaining relation is a constant causal contact that persists across time, and persistence across time is the admission the doctrine was trying to avoid.

The changeless-ground objection is [§4.2.1](<4.2.1 The Changeless Ground.md>). The simplicity variant, which grounds the atemporal-cause picture in *actus purus*, is [§5.2.1](<5.2.1 Divine Simplicity.md>). The probabilistic-simplicity variant is [§5.1.4](<5.1.4 Argument from Simplicity.md>). The PSR-demand variant is [§4.1.3](<4.1.3 Principle of Sufficient Reason.md>). The Modal Collapse worry that necessity propagates from ground to grounded is [§4.4.9](<4.4.9 Modal Collapse Objection.md>).

*What converges.* Three forms of the exemption, each discovering temporal asymmetry inside the logical priority it was supposed to replace: the *per se* causal series must either supply asymmetric dependence, conceding the structural floor at its terminating cause, or strip directionality and lapse into simultaneous coexistence, and Morriston's point stands that an eternal sufficient cause entails an eternal effect; Kant's logical/temporal distinction requires asymmetric dependence between distinct elements within a single moment, where distinction, persistence, and directionality are T, S, and Φ at the single-moment level and the ball-and-pillow analogy works only because ball and pillow are both in the structure; and Craig's modal refinement concedes the point while renaming it, since a change in relational profile is a change and Mullins's critique cuts through, atemporality contingent on non-relation being no necessary feature of the divine nature.

Plato set the problem in the *Timaeus*: time is the moving image of eternity. The formulation gave Western metaphysics its longest-running project: to describe a relation between the eternal and the temporal that did not collapse one into the other. Augustine inherited the project; Boethius articulated eternity as the complete and simultaneous possession of illimitable life; Aquinas formalized simultaneous causation as the mechanism; Kant sharpened the logical-temporal distinction; Craig, Stump, and Kretzmann refined the apparatus across the last half-century. What simultaneous causation loses across the refinements is the still point: the eternal ground from which the world was supposed to hang. Two and a half millennia of work on the eternity/time interface converge on the same structural conditions the doctrine was designed to hold at arm's length: simultaneity, relational priority, and donation of being are all structured relations, and the structure is what the doctrine was attempting to transcend.


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← [5.1.2 Cosmological Argument](<5.1.2 Cosmological Argument.md>) | [5.1.4 Argument from Simplicity](<5.1.4 Argument from Simplicity.md>) →
