without rejecting them or finding them beyond the grasp of their imagination and conception. Those who deny the attributes and believe that these attributes of His being are absent did not reach that belief because imagination and conception reject them. Rather, they believed that an entity possessing such attributes is a body, and that the Creator is not a body, so they denied them.

It is well known that the proposition that the Creator is not a body is not known through innate disposition or self-evident knowledge, nor through premises closely aligned with innate disposition or plainly evident to it. Rather, it rests on premises involving obscurity and lengthy reasoning. These premises are neither evident nor universally accepted by rational people. Indeed, each group of rational thinkers demonstrates that some of the premises by which its opponents denied this are invalid—self-evidently so upon reflection and the abandonment of blind imitation. Many groups of speculative theologians challenge all of this and say:

“Rather, conclusive rational proofs establish the opposite of this conclusion: a self-subsisting existent can only be a body, and whatever is not a body can only be nonexistent.”

It is well known that this is closer to innate disposition and reason than the former position.

If those who deny the attributes say, “This is the judgment of imagination and conception,” then they have agreed that conception and imagination affirm the Maker in accordance with the position of those who affirm that He is a body, not those who deny it. If, by the deniers’ own admission, conception and imagination affirm Him in this way, how can these attributes be denied of Him in the judgment of conception