As for the assertion, “Examination extracts the intelligible from the sensible”: if this means something intelligible that exists in the mind, then what exists in the mind is not the very thing that exists in external reality. If, however, it means that a sensible object existing in external reality contains something intelligible that is not in the mind, this is false. A particular human being contains only what is particular: this individual’s body, soul, and attributes. All of this is particular, determinate, and individual—not universal or unrestricted.

What he mentions in conjunction with affirming mutually separate beings—intellects and souls—that are neither within the world nor outside it constitutes no proof. Rather, this very argument, along with others, refutes them just as it refutes their counterparts. Indeed, their position is more manifestly unsound and less defensible than the positions of those who deny the attributes and Allah’s being above creation. How, then, can a position be supported by something weaker and further removed from the truth? It is well known that rational people generally, whether adherents of religious traditions or otherwise, reject this claim of theirs.

As for his assertion that, in maintaining this, they were not advancing a position whose falsity is self-evident, that is not the case. Rather, those who affirm the attributes and maintain that two existing beings must either be separate from one another or co-located say that these people’s claims to the contrary are self-evidently false. Indeed, even the leading speculative theologians who deny that Allah is above creation claim to know self-evidently that a contingent being is either a body or something subsisting in a body. As for the entities posited by these would-be philosophers