Simply grasping the meaning of “existence” is, in their estimation, so self-evident that it needs no formal definition; yet that is not the point of inquiry. What must be examined are its divisions. The very division of existence into necessary and contingent, substance and accident, cause and effect, eternal and originated, is itself narrower than the bare term “existence.” Merely knowing that a universal notion can be split, while remaining ignorant of the actual divisions, does not constitute some lofty science beyond the mere idea of existence.

Even when those divisions are learned, none of them yields knowledge of a reality that is immune to change and transformation, for almost all of them belong to this world, and everything here is subject to alteration. They possess no proof at all that the universe has always been—and will always remain—just as it is. Every argument they advance for the perpetuity of the agent, agency, time, motion, and their concomitants proves only the eternity and continuity of the species, not the eternity or permanence of any particular entity. To insist that such proofs apply to this very cosmos, or to something within it, is sheer ignorance, based solely on an absence of knowledge of any reality beyond this world—yet lack of knowledge is not knowledge of non-existence.

For this reason they hold no faith in the unseen of which the Prophets spoke: they believe neither in God, nor in His angels, nor in His scriptures, nor in His messengers, nor in the resurrection after death. Should they say, “We affirm an intelligible realm—an immaterial reality beyond the sensible world—and that is the unseen,” such a claim, though echoed by certain theologians and philosophers, is nothing but error and misguidance. On close examination, all those so-called intelligibles turn out to be conceptual constructs in the mind, devoid of any external reality, whereas the Messengers reported things that exist outside the mind—things whose mode of being is more perfect and more magnificent than anything we witness in this life. How vast, then, is the distance between the two!

Because they actually denied what the Messengers reported, yet felt compelled to reconcile their own views with professing belief in the Messengers—being dazzled by the Prophets’ extraordinary standing—they said, “The Messengers only intended …”