He said:

We have explained at the beginning of this book that they have no demonstrative proof of this, and that those who do possess such proof are the scholars.

This is where the Christians went astray: they believed in a multiplicity of attributes and held that these were substances, subsisting not in something else but in themselves, like the essence. They held that two attributes were of this kind: knowledge and life.

They said that God is one in one respect and three in another. They meant that He is three insofar as He exists, lives, and knows, and one insofar as these together constitute a single thing.

There are thus three positions: the view that the attributes are identical with the essence, with no multiplicity involved; and the view that there is multiplicity, whose adherents fall into two groups—those who hold that this multiplicity subsists in itself, and those who hold that it subsists in something else. All of this is far removed from the intent of the revealed Law.

Since this is so, what ordinary people should know concerning these attributes is only what the revealed Law explicitly states: acknowledging their existence without