But the point is that His knowledge of Himself and His knowledge of His creatures necessarily entail one another: He cannot know Himself without knowing His creation, just as He cannot know His creation without knowing Himself.

Al-Rāzī may have been refuting the view that may be attributed to Ibn Sīnā and his followers: that His knowledge of Himself gives rise to His knowledge of His creation, with the former knowledge causing the latter, just as our knowledge of evidence gives rise to our judgment concerning what it indicates.

What he has mentioned demonstrates the falsity of their position. For if it is said that His knowledge that He is the cause of the effect gives rise to His knowledge of the effect, circularity necessarily follows, as al-Rāzī explained. He cannot know that He is the cause of the effect without knowing the effect, since, as al-Rāzī mentioned, knowledge of a relation requires knowledge of both its terms. You cannot know that this is the cause of that without knowing both this and that. Thus, if your knowledge of that were derived from your knowledge of this relation, circularity would follow.

We have already shown this to be unsound and have said that what is meant is that His knowledge of the one necessarily entails His knowledge of the other. That is, the one knowledge cannot exist without the other, even though neither is the cause of the other.

Likewise, His will cannot exist without His knowledge, nor His knowledge without His power; the same applies to all His mutually inseparable attributes. His essence cannot exist without His attributes, nor His attributes without His essence. Each necessarily entails the other. Thus, the existence of one may be used to infer the existence of all the others, provided one knows what they necessarily entail, without making one the cause of the other’s existence.

Our aim is to explain the evidence that Allah knows all things, and to explain the arguments mentioned by Ibn Sīnā and other philosophers and theologians that establish this,