Einstein gives an example of inertial motion as a cart being pushed on a smooth road. If one makes the road more and more smooth, and the axles of the wheel more and more frictionless, we can imagine the cart rolling forever. Somehow, everyone forgets the push. Why is the example not an example of how the living sets the non-living in motion? Say we re-tell the example with the wind simply gusting and getting the cart started. How does this change anything, other than appeal to our ignorance of causes? One can posit limitless beings all moved by another, and so construct a limitless physics, but we cannot come to a rest until we strike upon what moves itself by its own initiative, and is therefore by definition living.
Once initiated the mobile continues in motion. Does it do so as mobile? No, for as a mobile is is indifferent to motion or rest. It is then in relation to another. This is another chain of movers which arrives at the living.
And even if we considered the agent only so far as it gets the mobile started, but thought it not needed after this, we would still see the motion as an instrument of the living, as the arrow is the instrument of the archer. The deist does not understand all his position implies. Living beings do not move things so as to forget about them, for the living acts by itself and also for itself.
Just Thomism 