to Come. That is better and best in outcome.”
{59}
[al-Nisā’ 59]

All this applies if someone claims necessary rational knowledge of the contrary of what those people have claimed. How much more so, then, when he has not mentioned anyone who has made such a claim! No one would claim it unless he opposed his own associates and fell into outright sophistry, denial, and falsehood. Undoubtedly, the door to lying and fabrication is not closed: someone’s beliefs and assumptions, or his desires and aims, or both, may lead him to make such a claim.

If he says, “By saying that sound reason does not reject it, I mean that it does not know it to be impossible,” then, even if this is known, it does not undermine his opponent’s position. For if his opponent says, “I know by necessity that it is impossible for a being to exist neither within the world nor outside it, whereas you do not know that a case entailing the possibility of this is impossible,” then not knowing the impossibility of something that entails its possibility does not undermine knowing it to be impossible.

For if we know that something is impossible, and the possibility of something else entails its possibility, while that entailment is not known to be impossible, our lack of knowledge that what entails this possibility is impossible neither establishes that possibility nor prevents knowledge of its impossibility.

It has already been explained that, were he to say, “I do not know that to be impossible,” this would not constitute an answer. How, then, if he says, as a means of establishing possibility, “I know this division to be impossible”? Not knowing this division to be impossible would not entail not knowing that exclusion from both alternatives is impossible, since the one is not the other, even if