This negation is offered without the slightest proof, nor is there any proof to support it. Yet the burden of evidence falls upon the one who denies just as surely as it falls upon the one who affirms. He even says, “There is no greater anomaly in your rejecting something whose rationale you have not yet discerned than there is in your accepting something before its proof has been placed in front of you.” Such talk resembles their denial of the jinn and the angels: they are obliged to furnish evidence for their negation, but they possess none. Instead, “they have denied what they cannot encompass in knowledge, and its interpretation has not yet come to them” (Qur’an 10:39). This point deserves careful notice, for the main pillar of their corrupt restriction is sheer, uninformed denial and rejection.

Furthermore, through direct observation, mass-transmitted reports, and conclusive proofs, we—together with many others—know with certainty that this restriction is false. In reality, countless events occur in this world that arise from living, rational beings other than human souls, other than elemental bodies, and other than the celestial spheres and their forces.

Ibn Sīnā himself, when discussing the affirmation of extraordinary phenomena on the principles of his fellow philosophers—those who claim that the Maker of the universe acts by the necessity of His own essence, devoid of power and will, and who deem the splitting of the heavens or any alteration in this world impossible—remarked that these philosophers, or at least many of them, reject numerous marvels that Ibn Sīnā and his peers accept. For the “theistic” philosophers among them acknowledge many matters that the naturalistic philosophers among them deny.

Thus, when he went on to mention the possibility of the wonders he affirms and set forth the evidence for them