Section

Once this has been established, our response to such people may be set out along several lines.

First, we say to them: “Your claim is made without knowledge; it is an assertion for which you possess no proof of its soundness.” This must be stated even before we pronounce their position definitively false, for they are first required to provide evidence attesting to the truth of what they maintain, and they have none whatsoever. In most cases they rely solely on mental conjecture, and what Avicenna and those of his ilk formulated contains nothing that shows their view corresponds to reality. The furthest they reach is to argue that the matter is merely conceivable or possible—though even that is invalid.

Furthermore, affirming the existence of psychic forces does not entail effects of this magnitude. There is no doubt that the miracles universally acknowledged by Muslims, Jews, and Christians are of a kind that everyone agrees cannot be produced by such forces, and the philosophers themselves concede this point. They accept as “miracles” only those phenomena they imagine can be referred back to psychic powers, such as causing rain to fall.