As for the accidents that subsist in a person’s soul, such as knowledge, will, and the like, they are even less susceptible to division than the accidents in the body. The soul is also even further removed than the body from being composed of indivisible atoms, even if it is said to be a body.

Accordingly, to say that a single instance of knowledge concerning a single object subsists in the soul is like saying that a single perception of a single object subsists in the eye, or that a single act of hearing a single sound subsists within the ear.

These and other arguments are their answer to the philosophers who say that the rational soul neither moves nor remains at rest, neither ascends nor descends, and is not a body. Their principal basis for this is that something indivisible subsists in it—such as knowledge of something indivisible—and therefore the soul must be indivisible. If it is indivisible, it cannot be a body. Neither premise, however, is conceded, as has been explained at length elsewhere in answering this argument, which is their mainstay.

When al-Rāzī and other theologians like him found it difficult to answer this argument, they came to believe that the doctrine of resurrection rested on affirming the indivisible atom. They supposed that this argument could only be answered by affirming the indivisible atom, and that the doctrine of resurrection required holding that the parts of the body became dispersed and then came together again.

This is not the case. Affirming the indivisible atom is something rejected by the leading scholars of the early generations, the jurists, hadith scholars, Sufis, the majority of rational thinkers, and many of