they claim. Yet a thing’s awareness of itself is not conditional upon its being immaterial, nor does its mere immateriality entail knowledge of itself. For if an immaterial entity is assumed not to be alive, it would have no awareness, let alone know that it has knowledge.

If it is said, “Every immaterial entity is alive,” the reply is: This must be established by evidence, for it is not self-evident.

Moreover, every living being has awareness, whether it is said to be immaterial or not. The human body perceives many things, despite being a body that is not separate from matter in their terminology.

As for his objection to their claim that things owe their existence to His knowledge of them—namely, that this entails their being known to Him before they exist, so that they are established in His knowledge and are things within His knowledge, which entails that His knowledge has a positive reality and that there is multiplicity within it—this objection is well-founded.

Likewise, if they define knowledge as not being absent from things, such non-absence is possible only once those things actually exist. It follows that He knows them after they actually exist, and that this knowledge differs from His knowledge of them before their existence, since His knowledge before their existence causes their existence, unlike His knowledge after they exist.

The same applies to his statement: “Just as His effect is distinct from His essence, knowledge of that effect is distinct from knowledge of His essence.”

This conclusion necessarily follows, for they denied that knowledge has a positive reality only because this would entail multiplicity and change in knowledge, since knowledge of one thing differs from knowledge of another.