Refuting Anthropomorphism: Divine Attributes, Scriptural Language and Likeness

Read-only question overview. Answers and scoring remain inside authenticated learner attempts.

• What is the main rational issue in rejecting tashbīh and tajsīm?
• Why does the passage use several apparently synonymous denials?
• Which distinction between jawhar and jism is used here?
• What follows if the parts of a composite Necessary Existent are each independent and perfect?
• If the imagined constituent parts lack perfection, what problem arises?
• What question arises when one bodily shape is actual rather than another?
• Which supposition invites the objection of combining opposites?
• Why are knowledge and power treated differently from bodily shapes?
• What is the warning about “weak arguments” primarily directed against?
• What extra premise is required for a corporealist inference from Qur’an 20:5?
• What interpretive caution applies to “bal yadāhu mabsūṭatān”?
• What unstated premise underlies the claim that two existents must touch or be separated spatially?
• Which error is meant by applying rules of the sensible to the non-sensible?
• How does the presented account of tafwīḍ relate the text to transcendence?
• What is essential for a sound taʾwīl?
• What distinction is drawn between the safer and more judicious approaches?
• If likeness means identical essential reality, what follows from “He resembles nothing”?
• Which test of likeness is indicated by “one can take the place of the other”?
• What follows from created human knowledge and eternal divine knowledge?
• What does “Zayd is like ʿAmr in jurisprudence” establish?
• What principle does the wheat exchange example illustrate?
• How should “in every respect relevant to likeness” be understood?
• What problem is posed by two putative beings sharing every possible determination?
• What is the appropriate methodological response to apparent conflict between attribute-texts and transcendence?
• Which inference best exemplifies the rejected “mere imagining”?
• How can absolute denial of divine likeness coexist with restricted linguistic comparisons?
• Using the same word of a human and God automatically establishes the same creaturely mode.
• In this discussion tafwīḍ and sound taʾwīl both aim to require divine corporeality.
• To understand a claim of likeness it may be necessary to ask “in what respect?”
• Rejecting corporeality does not logically require rejecting divine knowledge and power.