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

I say
inadmissible and that to admit it is an affront to the necessity
of thought,’ we answer: what is the difference between you
and your adversaries, when they say to you, ‘We know by
the necessity of thought the impossibility of a theory which
affirms that one single being knows all the universals,
without this knowledge forming a plurality in its essence or
adding anything to it, and without this plurality of things
known implying a plurality in the knowledge’? For this is your
theory of God, which according to us and our science is
quite absurd. You, however, say there is no analogy
between eternal and temporal knowledge. Some of you
acknowledge the impossibility involved, and say that God
knows only Himself and that He is the knower, the
knowledge and the known, and that the three are one. One
might object: The unity of the knowledge, the knower, and
the known is clearly an impossibility, for to suppose the
Creator of the world ignorant of His own work is necessarily
absurd, and the Eternal-who is far too high to be reached by
your words and the words of any heretics-could, if He knows
only Himself, never know His work.
This amounts to saying that the theologians do not gratuitously and
without proof deny the admitted impossibility of a delay between the effect
and its cause, but base themselves on an argument which leads them to
believe in the temporal creation of the world, and that they therefore act in
the same way as the philosophers, who only deny the well-known
necessary plurality of knowledge and known, so far as it concerns their
unity in God, because of a demonstration which, according to them, leads
them to their theory about Him. And that this is still more true of those
philosophers who deny it to be necessary that God should know His
own work, affirming that He knows only Himself. This assertion belongs to
the class of assertions whose contrary is equally false., For there exists no
proof which refutes anything that is evidently true, and universally
acknowledged. Anything that can be refuted by a demonstrative proof is
only supposed to be true, not really true.] Therefore, if it is absolutely and
evidently true that knowledge and known form a plurality, both in the
41