Tahafut_al-Tahafut-transl-Engl-van-den-Bergh

they wish. It is right, as Aristotle says, that a man should adduce the
arguments of his adversaries as he brings forward his own; that is, he
should exert himself to find the arguments of his opponents in the same
way as he exerts himself to find the arguments of his own school of
thought, and he should accept the same kind of arguments from them as
he accepts when he has found the arguments himself.’
We say: The objection that the First Principle, if it can think only its own
essence, must be ignorant of everything it has created would be only a
valid inference if the way it thinks its essence were to exclude all existents
absolutely. But the philosophers mean only that the manner in which it
thinks its own essence includes the existents in their noblest mode of
existence, and that it is the intellect which is the cause of the existents;
and that it is not an intellect because it thinks the existents, in so far as
they are the cause of its thinking, as is the case with our intellect. The
meaning of their words, that it does not think the existents which are under
it, is that it does not think them in the way we think them, but that it thinks
them in a way no other thinking existent can think them, for if another
existent could think them in the way it thinks them, it would participate in
the knowledge of God, and God is far too exalted for this . This is a quality
which is peculiar to God, and for this reason certain theologians concluded
that God, besides the seven qualities which they attribute to Him, has yet
another which is peculiar to Him. Therefore His knowledge can be
described neither as universal nor as individual, for both the universal and
the individual are effects of existents, and the knowledge of both universal
and individual is transitory. We shall explain this still better when we
discuss the question whether God knows individuals or does not know
them, as the philosophers mostly assert when they pose this problem, and
we shall explain that the whole problem is absurd in relation to Gods This
problem as a whole is based on two necessary points. First, if God
thought existents in such a way that they should be the cause of His
knowledge, His intellect would necessarily be transitory and the superior
would be brought into being through the inferior. Secondly, if His essence
did not contain the intelligibles of all things and their order, there would
exist a supreme intellect which would not perceive the forms of existents
in their order and proportion. And since these two cases are absurd, it
follows that when this principle thinks its own essence, these existents
exist in it in a nobler mode than that in which they exist by themselves.
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