Yet to assert categorically that every rational objection is excluded is to make an assertion without knowledge. By contrast, someone who believes everything Allah has reported is certain that nothing rational contradicts the Messenger’s explicit statements, for he knows this with comprehensive, unqualified certainty.

If someone who accepts some scriptural texts but not others—thus resembling someone who believes in part of the Scripture but not the rest—says, “What I have denied is ruled out by reason, whereas what I have affirmed is not ruled out by reason; rather, it is rationally possible,” he is asked:

“When you say that reason does not rule it out and that it is rationally possible, do you mean possibility in the mind or possibility in external reality?”

If you mean possibility in the mind, in the sense that no rational proof has established its impossibility, this does not exclude the existence of something that actually renders it impossible but of which you are unaware.

If you mean possibility in external reality—that you have established by reason that it is possible in external reality—this is something you cannot establish for many of the reports.

Those who claim to establish such possibility by reason will say, “If we supposed this to be the case, no impossibility would follow,” as al-Āmidī and others do. Or they say, “This does not entail the transformation of kinds, or attributing injustice to the Lord, or such-and-such,” enumerating a limited number of kinds of impossibility.

It is well known that excluding a specified set of impossibilities does not entail excluding every impossibility.

When someone says, “If we supposed this to be the case, no impossibility would follow,” if he means, “I do not know that any impossibility follows from it,” this is of no help to him.