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

But if one should say to us: ‘Certainly, you have refuted
their theory, but what do you say yourself? Do you affirm that
from one thing two different things can in any way proceed?
In that case you offend reason. Or will you say that in the
First Principle there is plurality? In that case you abandon
the doctrine of God’s unity. Or will you say that there is no
plurality in the world? In that case you contradict the
evidence of the senses. Or will you say that plurality occurs
through intermediates? In that case you are forced to
acknowledge the theory of your opponents. We answer: ‘We
have not made a deep inquiry in this book; our aimwhich we
have attained-was only to disturb the claims of our
opponents. To this we may add that the claim that the thesis
that two proceed from one is an affront to reason, and the
claim that the attribution of eternal attributes to the First
Principle contradicts the doctrine of God’s unityboth these
claims, we say, are vain and possess no proof. The
impossibility that two should proceed from one is not known
in the way the impossibility of one single person’s being in
two places is known in short, it is known neither by intuitive
necessity nor by deduction. What is the objection against
saying: ‘The First Principle is provided with knowledge,
power, will; He acts as He wants, He judges as He wants,
He creates the dissimilar and the similar as He Hants and in
the way He wants?’The impossibility of this is known neither
by immediate necessity nor by deduction. But the prophets
have brought us this truth, justifying it through their miracles,
and we must accept it. To inquire, however, how God’s act
proceeds from Him through His Will is vain and an illusory
pursuit. Those who have sought to represent and
understand this have arrived as a result of their inquiry at a
first effect from which as a possible existent there proceeds
a sphere, and from which, so far as it knows itself, there
proceeds the soul of the sphere. But this is nonsense and is
by no means an appropriate explanation. Let us therefore
accept the principles of these things from the prophets, and
let us believe in this, since the intellect does not regard it as
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