Allah sent His Messenger to convey and revealed in His Book. The truth they have forsaken thus becomes one of the strongest arguments that the proponent of falsehood can use against them. I have found that many theologians who are nearer to the truth than those they refute sometimes agree with their opponents on falsehood and at other times oppose them on matters of truth. Their opponents gain the upper hand over them both through the falsehood on which they have agreed and through the truth on which they have differed. Thus, theologians who deny the divine attributes—or some of them, such as Allah’s being above and other attributes—agree with those philosophical thinkers who deny these things, yet dispute with them over such matters as the persistence of accidents, the composition of bodies from indivisible substances, or the necessity that the entire succession of originated events be finite, and similar questions.

The point here is that Ibn Rushd reported that the philosophers affirm direction, and established this using their rational methods, which they call demonstrations. Yet he claims not to approve of the methods of the theologians. Rather, he and other philosophers like him call these dialectical methods, and call the theologians dialecticians, as do Ibn Sīnā and others like him.

Having divided the universal rational syllogism discussed in logic into demonstrative, rhetorical, dialectical, poetic, and sophistical types, they claimed that their syllogisms in metaphysics are demonstrative, whereas most of the theologians’ syllogisms are either dialectical or rhetorical. Such claims occur in the writings of these philosophical thinkers, such as al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, Muhammad ibn Yūsuf al-Āmirī,