For it is built upon a host of unsound premises:

First: that no cause of contingent events exists save the motion of the heavenly spheres—one of the most baseless assumptions imaginable.

Second: their postulation of the many “intellects” and “souls” they claim to exist; this, too, is false.

Is the fountainhead of emanation the celestial soul or the Active Intellect?

Third: their assertion that the overflow of knowledge reaches human souls from the celestial soul. Even if we were to grant the rest of their premises, they themselves maintain that what pours forth upon souls comes only from the Active Intellect—the governor of everything beneath the lunar sphere—and that from it knowledge is diffused to the souls of human beings, prophets and others alike. According to them, nothing of the changing particulars is mirrored in the Active Intellect; it contains only a single universal reality. Yet, they claim, its effusion is continuous, so that whenever a soul is ready to receive something from it, the overflow occurs. That effusion, however, cannot be a particular, for no particulars reside in it. How, then, can they now say that the influx reaching souls originates in the celestial soul?

If it be said: they contend that particulars are known to the intellects in a universal manner and to the celestial souls in a particular manner—the answer is that knowledge of a universal, the common element shared by particulars, yields absolutely no knowledge of any particular whatsoever. A man’s understanding of the term “existence,” or of “body,” “animal,” “human being,” “whiteness,” or “blackness,” does not grant him the slightest awareness of a specific existent, body, animal, person, whiteness, or blackness. Were particulars grasped through universals, then anyone who understood the meaning of a thing would already know everything, for all entities are but particulars subsumed under that meaning.

This likewise exposes the unsoundness of Ibn Sīnā’s claim—echoed by those who follow him—that the Creator knows particulars only in a universal way, while not a mote’s weight in the heavens or on earth escapes His knowledge. To anyone who truly grasps the matter, this is an obvious contradiction: one who can conceive nothing but universals and is incapable of conceiving a determinate particular—whether absolutely or insofar as it is subject to change—has, in reality, failed to know anything that exists, in either respect; and his universal knowledge does not…