declare it forbidden, so that all beliefs and actions become equivalent. This is disbelief and heresy.

The response to these people rests on two main points:

First: this position is inherently impossible and untenable, as reason establishes.

Second: even if it were rationally possible, revelation has not sanctioned it. Rather, it contradicts revelation, and its conflict with the scriptural texts and scholarly consensus can be demonstrated.

The first point can be established in several ways:

First, as explained above, every instance of knowledge, belief, or judgment must have an object that is known, believed, or judged, to which the belief conforms and corresponds, whether or not that belief contributes to bringing its object into existence. Consider beliefs concerning action that affect their objects, such as the belief that eating this bread satisfies hunger, or that consuming this poison kills. Although such a belief contributes, for example, to bringing about the act of eating, it must have an object established independently of it: namely, that eating that bread possesses the quality in question.

Although the act of eating does not exist before it occurs, its substrate—the bread—and the eater both exist. If the bread does not possess the property of satisfying hunger when eaten, and the eater does not possess the property of becoming sated upon eating it, then the belief would not be correct, but rather