and if you do not know those methods, then you are ignorant of the methods of the prophets and of the means by which they demonstrated the existence of the Creator and the truthfulness of His messengers. You therefore have no right to say that their truthfulness can be known only through rational reasoning that contradicts what has been transmitted from them.

But if you say, “Allah cannot be known except through this method,” this is false testimony, a rejection of what you do not fully understand, and a negation you cannot substantiate. How could you know that all human beings, including the prophets and their followers, cannot know Allah except by establishing the existence of accidents, their origination, their necessary inherence in bodies, and the impossibility of a beginningless succession of events—or through some similar method? Who would venture to assert such a negation except someone among the most ignorant and misguided of people, furthest removed from understanding the paths to knowledge, its evidence, and the means by which people come to know what they did not previously know? Many Jahmiyyah and Muʿtazilah, and those who follow them, have asserted this negation. Such is its character, yet it is the mainstay of their argument.

[The second]

The second perspective:

They may be told: Rather, the truthfulness of the Messenger can be known through numerous methods that do not require this negation, as the majority of rational thinkers acknowledge. Indeed, leading Muslim and non-Muslim thinkers have acknowledged this even concerning the question of the world’s origination—including Moses Maimonides, the author of The Guide for the Perplexed, who is among the Jews what Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī is among Muslims and who blends the statements