and, in the end, no real will at all; hence they were forced to accept (1) that a contingent event could occur without being intended and (2) that an attribute could subsist without inhering in any subject—both of which any sound mind immediately sees to be self-evidently false.

His reply was that the impossibility they alleged in affirming the divine attributes is no impossibility at all; both revelation and reason testify to them. Should the opponent begin quibbling over the probative force of either scripture or intellect, he deems him a mere sophist or hair-splitting trickster. Exactly the same debate recurs over mercy and love, for his adversaries contest the decisive testimony of revelation and reason to those two attributes as well.

Next they are asked: “By what proof have you established that He is All-Knowing and All-Powerful?” Whatever evidences of scripture and reason they adduce for knowledge and power establish will in precisely the same way, and every objection they level against will can be leveled, with equal force, against knowledge and power.

If the discussion proceeds to the claim that affirming such meanings necessarily entails origination, composition, or dependence, the answer is what we have set forth elsewhere: none of this implies origination, nor a composition that would make Him need anything outside Himself.

They are further challenged with the very same specious doubts by which the outright negators would deny the divine Essence itself. Yet they remain obliged to affirm the existence of the Creator-Lord, an existence known by innate disposition, by rational necessity, by decisive intellectual proofs, by the consensus of nations, and by many other evidences. When, however, they go on to demand an existence of the same kind we are familiar with—or an existence whose mode of being they can comprehend—they find themselves compelled, at last, to concede the existence of a reality whose true nature resembles nothing we know.