the arguments they adduce for the perpetuity of the agent, agency, time, motion, and their concomitants establish only their beginninglessness and perpetuity in kind, not the beginninglessness or perpetuity of any particular thing. To assert categorically that those proofs establish this world or anything within it is sheer ignorance, with no basis beyond the lack of knowledge of anything existing other than this world. Yet the absence of knowledge is not knowledge of absence. Thus, these people have no faith in the unseen of which the prophets spoke: they believe neither in Allah, nor His angels, His Books, His messengers, nor resurrection after death.

If they say:

“We affirm the intellectual realm, or intelligible reality beyond what is perceptible to the senses, and that is the unseen,”

then this—even though some speculative theologians and philosophers have stated it—is error and misguidance. For, upon examination, the intelligible realities they affirm amount only to things postulated in the mind, not things existing in external reality. The messengers, by contrast, spoke of things that exist in external reality, whose existence is more perfect and greater than that of what we witness in this world.

What comparison can there be between the two? Since they denied what the messengers had conveyed, they said:

“The messengers intended to present the masses with imaginary representations, so that they might thereby benefit from the just order the messengers established for them.”

Some of them then say:

“The messengers knew, as we do, that these things do not exist.”

Others say:

“Rather, they did not know this; their perfection lay only in the practical faculty, not the theoretical.”