comprehend all His names, he would comprehend all His attributes, and would thus be able to fully recount His praise, since His attributes are expressed through His names.

[Section: The Ways of Knowing Allah Are Many and Varied]

Since the ways of knowing Allah and acknowledging Him are many and varied, each group of rational thinkers follows a particular path to establish knowledge of Him. Some suppose that there is no other path.

This is sheer error and speaking without knowledge.

How could anyone know that knowledge of Him is possible only through this path? Such a universal negation is not self-evident and therefore requires proof. Yet the person making this denial has no proof to support it. Rather, the available evidence shows that there are other ways of knowing Him, and that most of those who know Allah—prophets and others, indeed people generally—came to know Him without that particular path.

In this book, we have drawn attention to a number of the methods employed by those engaged in rational inquiry and to their diversity, as will be explained below. Sometimes these methods differ in the fundamental proof they employ; at other times, they differ through the addition of premises that others can dispense with. One argues from contingency, another from temporal origination, and another from signs. One argues from the temporal origination of entities, another from the temporal origination of attributes, another from the temporal origination of a particular being, such as a human being, and another