Do you not see that whenever you explicitly tell people at large what you maintain—that He is neither within the world nor outside it—they reject and repudiate it? This is why the more astute proponents of this position counsel one another to conceal and hide it. Yet, on the matter in question, the early generations and the leading scholars expressed themselves openly in public and private gatherings.

The same was true before our revealed Law. The Torah contains teachings of this kind similar to those in the Quran. Moses, peace be upon him, conveyed them openly to all the Children of Israel, as did the prophets after him. The Children of Israel did not reject them, nor did the prophets instruct them to abandon what they had understood from them. If conception and imagination rejected these teachings among ordinary people, there would necessarily have been many among them whose conception and imagination rejected them. If this were true among the learned, the same would follow. Since no one among either ordinary people or the learned rejected them on the grounds that his conception and imagination could not grasp them, the falsity of his claim is clear. Those who deny these teachings claim instead that reasoning demonstrates their negation.

The forty-second argument:

Everyone, whether they affirm the attributes or deny them, agrees that the meanings you have attributed to your opponent are precisely those that are apparent to people at large and that they understand from these texts,