yet without power is no different from affirming a mover who has no motion, a speaker bereft of speech, a willing agent without will, or one who prays yet performs no prayer. It is the absurdity of assigning the active participle while denying the very act that necessarily underlies it. Whoever affirms the predicate but rejects its necessary concomitant speaks nothing but falsehood.

In the same vein, the deniers of the divine attributes contend that affirming the attributes entails composition and corporeality. They argue this on two grounds: first, that in their technical usage a quality can exist only in a body, and a body—again by their definition—is something composite; and second, that to affirm knowledge, power, and similar attributes is to affirm a plurality of realities, which, in their view, constitutes composition.