 One reason for thinking that the persistence of created objects must depend on some exercise of those objects’ causal powers, and not God’s creative power alone, is that an object that did not depend on its earlier existence could not really be the same object. To persist, an object’s later existence must be due (at least in part) to its own earlier existence. Persistence, in turn, is a necessary condition of conservation, since a world without persistent objects would not be conserved in being but rather succeeded in being.