attributes must be due either to its corporeality, to something inhering in corporeality, to something serving as its substrate, or to something that neither inheres in it nor serves as its substrate.

This last category must be either a body or corporeal, or neither a body nor corporeal. All these categories except the last are ruled out by the argument previously presented in establishing the first approach to the question of the temporal origination of the world.”

[Ibn Taymiyyah’s Commentary]

I say:

This is the doctrine that all bodies are alike and that distinguishing some of them from others by particular attributes requires a determiner. The doctrine that all bodies are alike is utterly unsound. Al-Rāzī himself has demonstrated its falsity in more than one place.

The argument to which he refers establishes only that a body’s occupying a particular spatial location is not necessary, but contingent. Even assuming that this is established concerning spatial occupancy, the same does not necessarily follow concerning all other attributes.

The proof he presented is invalid, for he said:

“If its being distinguished in this way is necessary,” then either this necessity is due to the very