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

I say:
‘Well, let the seeing then be superior and let the First see
and have knowledge of things!” But the philosophers deny
this, and say that its excellence does not consist in seeing
and knowing things, but in not being in need of sight and
knowledge and being the essence from which there
proceeds the universe in which the knowing and the seeing
beings exist. And in the same way it may be said that this
essence does not possess excellence because it has
knowledge itself, but because it is the principle of essences
which possess knowledge, and this is an excellence which is
peculiar to it.
The philosophers are therefore forced to deny also that
the First knows itself, for nothing proves such a knowledge
but will, and nothing proves will except the temporal
beginning of the world, and if this principle is destroyed, all
these things are destroyed which are accepted through the
speculation of the mind alone. For, they do not possess a
proof for any thing they affirm or deny concerning the
attributes of the First, but they make only such guesses and
conjectures as lawyers would despise in their suppositions.
However, no wonder that the intellect should be perplexed
about the divine attributes; one should wonder only at the
wonderful self-complacency of the philosophers, at their
satisfaction with their proofs and their belief that they know
those things through evident proofs, notwithstanding the
mistakes and the errors in them.
The most wonderful thing is the claim of the theologians that the
temporal becoming of the world implies that it has been willed by a will, for
we find that temporal things occur through nature, through will, and by
chance. x Those that occur through will are the products of art, and those
that occur through nature are natural things, and if temporal things
occurred only through will, will would have to be included in the definition
of the temporal, whereas it is well known that the definition of temporal
becoming is ‘existence succeeding non-existence’. If indeed the world had
come into being temporally, it would be more appropriate that it should
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