the Maker and those who affirm Him, in the form of specious arguments denying His existence or His action, entails still greater difficulties for them on their own assertions: that the world is eternal, necessarily existent in itself, and independent of a Maker; and that it is the effect of a necessitating cause. Reflect on this.

The underlying principle is that nothing is like Allah—not in His essence, His attributes, His acts, or what He brings about. Thus, whenever someone seeks to deny something rightly attributed to Him because it has no counterpart in the observable world, what he affirms without what he has denied is even further removed from what is observed. For example, he may affirm attributes without a real essence, or an essence without attributes, or both without any act subsisting in His own being; or he may affirm that this is inseparable from His essence. Or he may say that this perceptible world is itself eternal and necessarily existent in itself, or that it came into being by itself.

Every one of these positions of negation faces greater objections than those its proponent raises against the positions of those who affirm. There is no escape from these objections under any circumstances, for existence is witnessed and perceived by the senses. It must either be eternal and necessarily existent in itself, or have been brought into being by another, being contingent and dependent upon what is necessarily existent in itself.

Since the eternal and necessarily existent must be acknowledged, and since anyone who denies the Lord, the Maker, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, on the strength of some specious argument nevertheless remains subject to that very argument and to others still greater, it follows that all the specious arguments advanced by those who deny the Lord, His attributes, or His acts are false and contradictory arguments. For their validity would entail the negation of existence altogether, and whatever entails the negation of