Translations:Yirmi Üçüncü Lem'a/71/en
Exactly like this comparison, an atheist who subscribed to materialist thought, which is denial and pure brutishness, entered the universe, which is a splendid barracks of the Monarch of Pre-Eternity and Post-Eternity for His innumerable forces, and a well-ordered mosque of that Pre-Eternal All-Worshipped One. He imagined the immaterial laws of the ordering of the universe, which proceed from the Pre-Eternal Monarch’s wisdom, each to have material and physical existence; and supposed the theoretical laws of the sovereignty of dominicality, and the rules and ordinances of the Greater Shari‘a, the Shari‘a of Creation, which are immaterial and exist only as knowledge, each to have external, material and physical existence. But to set up in place of divine power those laws, which proceed from the divine attributes of knowledge and speech and only exist as knowledge, and to attribute creation to them; then to attach the name ‘nature’ to them, and to deem force, which is merely a manifestation of dominical power, to be an independent almighty possessor of power, is a thousand times more low-fallen ignorance than the ignorance in the comparison.