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Part One · Chapter Seventy-Six — Kalām Proofs Against Corporealism; Transition to Part II
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On the Negation of Corporealism According to the Opinion of the Mutakallimūn. The methods and arguments of the mutakallimūn for negating corporealism are very weak — weaker than their proofs for unity — because the negation of corporeality in their view is a necessary corollary of the principal doctrine of unity: a body is not one. As for one who negates corporeality on the ground that every body is necessarily composed of matter and form, and then demonstrates the impossibility of composition with respect to God's essence — that person is not in my view a mutakallim, nor is that argument built on the principles of the mutakallimūn; rather it is a sound demonstration built on belief in matter and form.
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Method One: they said if God were a body, the meaning and true nature of divinity could not but either subsist in the totality of the atoms of that body — that is, in each individual atom — or subsist in one single atom of that body's atoms. If it subsisted in one atom, what benefit would the remaining parts serve, and what would be the meaning of this body's existence? And if it subsisted in each and every part of that body's parts, these would be many divinities, not one God.
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Method Two — held by them to be of great weight — is the impossibility of resemblance: God does not resemble any of His creatures; if He were a body, He would resemble bodies. They expatiate at length on this, saying: if we say 'a body unlike bodies,' you have contradicted yourself — for every body resembles every body in respect of corporeality, bodies differ from one another only in other meanings, that is, in accidents; it also follows necessarily, in their view, that He would have created His equal.
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This proof is defective in two ways. First: a disputant could say 'I do not concede absence of resemblance — what demonstration can you offer that it is not permissible for God to resemble any of His creatures in any respect?' — unless you rely here on the text of a prophetic book, that is, the text that negates resemblance in anything, in which case the negation of corporeality would be accepted on authority, not proven by reason.
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A second difficulty is more serious. It has been established and clarified by those who have philosophized and thoroughly investigated the views of the philosophers that 'body' is predicated of the celestial spheres and of these sublunary material bodies only equivocally — for their matter is not the same matter, nor is their form the same form; indeed, 'matter' and 'form' are also predicated of sublunary things and of the spheres only equivocally. If this is said of the sphere, how much more may the corporealist say of God: 'He is a being of extension, but His essence, true nature, and substance resemble none of the bodies of creatures — and 'body' is predicated of Him and them only equivocally.'
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Method Three: they said if God were a body He would be finite — and this is correct; and if finite, He would have a determinate magnitude and a fixed determinate shape — and this inference too is correct. They then said: as a body, any magnitude and any shape is such that God could conceivably be greater than that magnitude or smaller, or of a shape contrary to that shape; therefore the specification of Him to some particular magnitude and some particular shape requires a specifier.
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Reflect, O reader who desires to seek truth and who has cast aside passion, habit, and the inclination toward what you are accustomed to revere — and do not deceive yourself about the condition of these thinkers and what has happened to them and from them. For they are like one who has fled from the embers into the fire — they annulled the stable nature of existence and altered the natural constitution of the heavens and earth, claiming that by those premises the world's createdness can be demonstrated. But they did not demonstrate the world's createdness; instead they ruined for us the proofs of God's existence, unity, and incorporeality.
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Since we have now concluded the full extent of their discourse, let us proceed to the presentation of the philosophical premises and their demonstrations of God's existence, unity, and impossibility of corporeality — granting the philosophers the eternity of the world even as we do not ourselves believe it. Thereafter I shall lay out our own path, the one to which soundness of inquiry has led us, for completing the demonstration of these three aims; and after that I shall return to engaging with the philosophers on what they say regarding the eternity of the world — with the help of the Almighty.
Here is completed this first part of The Guide of the Perplexed. It is followed by the second part, which begins with the premises that are needed.