—a scale by which it is weighed. By contrast, what the logician-philosophers have devised can neither lead to the truth nor separate truth from falsehood; it is certainly no balance by which one may tell the true from the false.
As for the dialectical theologians, whatever in their discourse accords with what the prophets brought is part of the prophetic legacy, whereas whatever contradicts it is a baseless innovation, condemned by both the Sacred Law and sound reason.
If it is said, “We treat demonstrations as relative—whatever a person discovers through its premises is, for him, demonstrative even if it is not so for someone else,” we reply: They do not in fact follow this principle. Anyone who takes that path will not find the materials of demonstration confined to certain specified matters, for many people know other things without recourse to those very materials. And if they say, “We will not specify any materials,” then one whole division of their logic collapses—and that is precisely what we seek to show.
Fourteenth Consideration: The unsoundness of their claim that the prophets’ knowledge is obtained through logical syllogism
Having imagined that their method is universal and embraces every avenue to human knowledge—though this is patently untrue—they overlooked the fact that people acquire abundant knowledge through sense-perception, through reason, and through truthful reports that cannot be reached by their procedures. Among such knowledge is what the prophets—peace be upon them—were taught. Nevertheless, they tried to force that revelation into their corrupt framework, claiming that the prophet possesses a power stronger than that of others in both knowledge and action—a power they sometimes call “the sacred faculty.” By this, they say, he secures the middle term without the aid of a teacher: once the two extremes of a proposition are before him, he apprehends through that sacred faculty the middle term that others would find difficult—or even impossible—to grasp without instruction, for the soul’s cognitive powers are without limit. Thus they maintained that the prophets’ reports about the unseen come only by means of logical syllogism—an assertion of extreme falsehood.
Logical syllogism, as has already been shown and as they themselves concede, yields only universal concepts, whereas the messengers informed us of concrete, particular realities—specific persons and events, past, present, and future. The Qur’an, for instance, recounts the story of Noah, the dialogues and circumstances that passed between him and his people, and likewise the histories of Hud and Salih.