anything, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing. (11)’ [al-Shūrā: 11], and discouraged from asking this question, for three reasons:

First, understanding this matter does not lie within one, two, or even three steps of what is self-evident. You can see this from the approach taken by the theologians. They say that the proof that He is not a body is that every body has been shown to be temporally originated. When asked how one establishes that every body is temporally originated, they follow the approach we have mentioned: the temporal origination of accidents, and the principle that whatever cannot be free of temporally originated things is itself temporally originated. You have already seen from our discussion that this method is not demonstrative. Even if it were demonstrative, most ordinary people would not have the natural capacity to arrive at it.

Moreover, in saying that He—glory be to Him—[has] an essence and attributes additional to that essence, these people do more to establish that He is a body than to negate His corporeality by arguing that He is not temporally originated. This, then, is