Unlike the sea’s being cleft into twelve distinct corridors, each one towering like a great mountain; the staff’s turning into a living serpent; the descent of manna and quail; the bursting of twelve springs from solid rock; water gushing from between fingers; food and drink multiplying until they suffice for many times the number they would normally feed; or a tree being uprooted and then returning to its place firmly rooted—events such as these do not arise, in their very kind, from any customary cause. They are true breaches of the natural order, as opposed to occurrences that are unusual only in degree, not in essence.

This very category of happenings they categorically deny can exist in the world, whether by psychic powers or by anything else. Yet knowledge—whether gained through direct witnessing or through sound, trustworthy reports—of the occurrence of such events lays bare the untenability of their premise. The few marvels for which they can cite causes belong not to the realm of supernatural signs, but to the sphere of ordinary phenomena. Thus, they end up denying miracles altogether, and this is their corrupt foundational principle, whose falsity is proven by many arguments.

Ibn Sīnā attempted a middle path: he sought to reconcile their faulty doctrines with belief in a limited range of marvels, subsuming both saintly karāmāt and prophetic muʿjizāt under that rubric. Sorcery, to be sure, is among ordinary matters—like the causes that bring about illness or death—though some of it does contravene habit and nature. Yet it is known to occur through devils and is invariably accompanied by tokens of falsehood and depravity; it therefore bears no resemblance to the karāmāt of the righteous, much less to prophetic miracles. A full discussion of this lies elsewhere. What concerns us here is simply to expose the unsoundness of those who regard miracles as nothing more than psychic forces.