Philoponus' Disagreement With Proclus

Philoponus objects to the idea that God is forced to create a universe at all. Proclus insisted that a divine cause, like the demiurge or the forms, cannot begin to produce their effects after not doing so. Philoponus retorts that this would make the causes somehow dependent on their own effects. Here he can yet again turn his enemies' weapons against them because Aristotle himself said that infinity cannot be traversed or completed.