A Big Problem for Aquinas?

Philosopher Owen Anderson poses the following Big Problem for Aquinas.

Hold up! Classical theists do not think the universe is eternal in the same way God is eternal. So yes, there is a problem here. However, the problem is conflating two common usages of eternal, which is Professor Anderson’s problem, not Aquinas’s.

More to the point, God’s eternity consists in God being trans-temporal or outside time altogether, since God’s eternity piggybacks off God’s immutability (for Aquinas, time is the measure of change). An eternal universal, however, really just means an everlasting universe, signifying something which has always existed in time upon the causal activity of God.

Moreover, an eternal universe — even if such a universe were actual, which Aquinas denies on faith — could never escape time altogether, because of its changing nature. And because there is only one perfectly simple and immutable being, there is only one “truly eternal” being, which is God.

So much for this “big problem” for Aquinas.