This is illustrated by the following: at most, the opponent can say, “If He were outside the world, He would be a body or would be spatially confined. That is ruled out, so He cannot be outside the world.”

The premises of the argument by which they deny this contain obscurities and ambiguities evident to anyone who examines the matter. These very obscurities and ambiguities have led many people to place confidence in those premises. Their confidence rests on uncritically following those who proposed them, not on their own rational certainty. Thus, they forbid ordinary people to follow the messengers in what they have reported about Allah’s attributes, claiming that reason contradicts those reports, despite the certainty that the messengers speak only the truth. Yet they themselves uncritically follow their leaders in opposing those reports through premises they claim to be rational. Their followers have reached no rational certainty concerning these premises; they merely follow their leaders in accepting them.

Hence, when they examine these premises thoroughly, are challenged about them, and are shown the grounds for rejecting them, you find them resorting to sheer ignorance. Either they refer the answer to someone who is dead and gone—who, upon scrutiny, proves even more deeply mired than they in doubt and confusion—or they abandon the proper conduct of debate and disputation and adopt the behavior of the unjust and foolish. Or they imagine that this is disbelief contrary to religion. Yet their own position contradicts the Book and the Messenger, follows a path other than that of the believers, and asserts what none of the Companions, the Successors, or the other leading scholars of the Muslims ever said.

Another point that clarifies this matter is that those who deny the attributes do not have a single argument for which there is agreement among them on