Early Writings — Page 38
38 THE ones which are a muddle of both truth and falsehood, sufficient to attain salvation. Thirdly, you could have declared salvation to be dependent upon absolute truth (which is perfectly free of every kind of false- hood) and then claimed that rationality alone is the means to attain absolute truth and sufficient for salvation. In this case, to prove your claim, it would have been necessary for you to show an example of such a wise man who was absolutely free of error and you would have been required to present his writings containing such knowledge stemming from his own ideologies and ration- ality, and thus prove my inductive argument (which is the third kind of argument among the three categories of argumentation which we have presented in our previous paper) to be invalid. By this method, if you had successfully disproved my inductive argu- ment, and if I had failed to point out any flaw in the said piece of writing, certainly you would have largely clinched the argument against me. Regrettably, however, you did no such thing. You did say that there were thousands of writers but you did not mention the name of even one of them, nor did you present any examples of their writings on logical or theoretical matters. Now, from this discussion, what I mean to convey to you is that if you still hold any reservations regarding the reality of revelation, you should choose one of the above-mentioned three options so that it is clear what course you have chosen and then provide evidence to support your view. The reason for this is that while I have proved that there is a 'need' for revelation, you must, as per the rules of debate, prove my point to be invalid. And, as I have said, you only have three options, out of which you are bound to choose one. It should also be clear to your good self that my