…the heavens nor on the earth?’—in other words, concerning something that does not yet exist; for had it existed, He would have known it. His knowledge that a thing exists and that thing’s very existence are inseparable: the affirmation of one necessitates the affirmation of the other, and the negation of one necessitates the negation of the other. A detailed treatment of this appears elsewhere.

The purpose here is for a person to realize that these people, out of sheer ignorance and unbelief, make statements of the most extreme deviation, fleeing from a consequence for which they possess not the slightest proof of negation. Even if one supposed there were an objection that seemed to counter the affirmation of divine knowledge—how incomparable that would be with the proofs establishing His knowledge, and how far removed is the danger of denying His knowledge from what they imagine to be evidence for rejecting the attributes, or some of them, along with the perils they fear.

Refutation of their claim that the three matters mentioned in Sūrat al-Naḥl are demonstration, rhetoric, and dialectic:

The point at hand is that what they extract from the Qur’an and allege to match their own principles is not as they claim. Should it be said: ‘There is no doubt that what the Messenger brought of wisdom, fair exhortation, and debate contradicts the sayings of those philosophers far more than it contradicts the sayings of the Jews and Christians; nevertheless, the intent is that the three categories named in the Qur’an correspond to sound demonstration, sound rhetoric, and sound dialectic, even if they are not identical with what the Greeks described, for logic concerns itself with no particular subject matter—rather, these three are the genus to which those three belong,’—the reply is:

This too is false. For what they call “rhetoric” is any argument whose premises are commonly accepted, whether such acceptance amounts to mere opinion or to certainty. By contrast, exhortation (mawʿiẓa) in the Qur’an consists of commands and prohibitions, encouragement and deterrence, as in His words:

‘If only they had done what they were exhorted to do, it would have been better for them and more stabilizing; and then We would surely have granted them from Us a tremendous reward, and We would surely have guided them to a straight path.’

His phrase ‘what they were exhorted to do’ means: what they were commanded to do. And He said: ‘Allah exhorts you never to return to the like of it, if you are believers,’ meaning: He forbids you from that.

Moreover, the Qur’an does not say, ‘Invite to the way of your Lord with wisdom, fair exhortation, and argue with them,’ and that…