 Vallicella observes first that if conservation has a patient, God’s conservation of it must be diachronic. If the act of conservation were simultaneous with the effect of the object’s existence, then God’s act at a time would both cause and presuppose the existence of that object at that time. So the act must occur at an earlier time or over an earlier interval. Next Vallicella argues that if God creates an object ex nihilo at t, God cannot conserve it at t since it does not yet exist. Clearly God cannot begin to conserve an object at a time after it is created, since the object would only exist at that time if it had already been conserved. So there is no time at which God can begin to conserve an object. Miller responds by wondering why the object would not exist at t. Vallicella’s distinction between the time of an object’s coming into existence and the first time at which it exists is dubious, since a nonexistent object could not undergo a process of coming into existence (Miller 2009, 477).