Aligned sentence by sentence
, ,
...the signs and proofs — and we received this, hastening to what accords with our inquiry;
,
As for His being One — His word: 'Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One' (Deut. 6:4);
,
and also His word: 'See now that I, I am He, and there is no god beside Me' (Deut. 32:39);
.
and His word: 'The Lord alone guided him, and there was no foreign god with Him' (Deut. 32:12).
, ,
As for His being Living — His word: 'For who of all flesh has heard the voice of the living God speaking from the midst of fire?' (Deut. 5:23);
.
and His word: 'But the Lord God is truth — He is the living God and the everlasting King' (Jer. 10:10).
, ,
As for His being Omnipotent — His word: 'I know that You can do all things and no purpose of Yours can be thwarted' (Job 42:2);
, .
and His word: 'Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory..., and the riches and the honor are before You...' (1 Chr. 29:11–12).
, , .
As for His being All-Knowing and Wise — His word: 'Wise of heart and mighty of strength' (Job 9:4), and His word: 'His understanding is unsearchable' (Is. 40:28).
.
As for nothing resembling Him and nothing resembling His acts — His word: 'There is none like You among the gods, O Lord, and there is nothing like Your works' (Ps. 86:8).
.
After hearing these six meanings from the books of the prophets, we set about establishing them by way of rational inquiry and found them to be so.
,
And we thereby gained the means to refute every objection that our opponents raise against us on any one of them;
, ,
for they pursue this from only two angles, no third: one is analogical reasoning from created beings,
.
and the other is taking every word we utter concerning His attributes — and every word inscribed in His books — as literal corporealisation rather than metaphor.
.
And once we are securely grounded in this knowledge, we will clarify all of that, with the power and strength of the Merciful One.
Aligned sentence by sentence
.
First I say: I found what indicates that He is One — after what I have already presented of the proofs — and I state it as follows.
,
Since the Maker of bodies is not of their genus, and since bodies are many, He must be One;
.
for if He were more than one, number would apply to Him and He would fall under the definition of bodies.
, , .
Furthermore: the intellect rules only what is indispensable regarding the meaning of the Maker — and the One is what is indispensable; whatever goes beyond that is dispensable and unnecessary.
,
Furthermore: the One Maker is established by the first proof — which is the proof from created-in-time-ness —
, .
whereas anything beyond that would require a second proof other than that proof to establish it — and there is no path to any proof that does not proceed from the angle of created-in-time-ness at all.
. . , , ,
Section 2. After these three proofs that He is One, I say: every argument that negates there being two is an argument for the One;
.
and you have already encountered what I presented earlier of our refutation of the adherents of this school.
,
I say here as well: I found that when these people are asked, 'Why do you trace all existing things back to only two principles, and do not claim that each species among them has its own distinct principle?' —
, .
they say: we see that however many their types, they all gather into benefit and harm and there is no third between the two — and so we trace them back to two.
, , ,
I examined this argument and found that an opponent can counter them by saying: we find that all benefit and harm gathered together resolve into the five senses,
, , ,
— some of which are perceived through sight, some through hearing, and likewise through the other three — so you have no stronger claim to gather them