These philosophers who deny the resurrection of bodies and the origination of the celestial spheres mostly maintain that miracles and saintly wonders are nothing but psychic forces: either a power of perception and knowledge, or a power of motion and action. Perception, they say, is the soul’s faculty by which it acquires knowledge; accordingly, everything the messengers reported and commanded, they claim, was obtained through this inner faculty—without any angels, living and articulate beings, descending upon them with revelation; without there being divine speech that God uttered outside their own minds; and without a Lord who created the universe by His power and will, able to alter the upper realms and transform the earth and the heavens.
Anyone who grasps the reality of their doctrine and the reality of what the messengers brought will realize how thoroughly the two stand in opposition. It is like the response given by one of our distinguished shaykhs, well-versed in the gulf between philosophers and prophets, when he was asked about that difference: “the red sword.”
In truth, they believe neither in God, nor in His Books, nor in His angels, nor in His messengers, nor in the resurrection after death; their state is worse than that of the Jews and the Christians.
What concerns us here is that Ibn Sīnā and those who follow him built the foundation of their creed on the assertion that existence must have a Necessary Being, and that this Necessary must, by definition, be one. Yet by “one” they mean something devoid of attribute, measure, or act, lest they be forced to affirm for Him an attribute such as knowledge or power and thus, in their view, posit two Necessaries. In this they parallel the Muʿtazilites, who said that the defining characteristic of the Lord is that He is eternal, so He can possess no eternal attribute—lest there be two eternals in existence. Such phrasing is misleading, for someone might imagine that those who affirm the divine names and attributes posit two eternal gods, whereas they affirm only one God—there is no deity but He—and He is