  Following in the Greek and Islamic traditions before him, Maimonides sets out to carefully investigate the workings of the world—including terrestrial, celestial, and purely metaphysical realities. Based on our consideration of divine “acts” above, we can see how even investigations into the workings of corporeal nature can be seen as having explicitly theological significance in a Maimonidean context. In this spirit, Maimonides can be seen as finding value in the cosmological argument at play in Aristotle and Averroes according to which the workings of the world give rise to a proof for the existence of God as a first mover (though, it might be noted, that Maimonides, along with al-Farabi, Avicenna—and, in a somewhat different sense, Averroes—credits God with being the cause not only of motion, but of existence as well). In this way, even studying the workings of nature can be seen in the service of theology—a point borne out further when we consider our above discussion of Maimonides and Averroes on God’s manifest role in the order of nature. In this regard, we might note that Maimonides goes so far as to describe divine actions at 2.32 as natural actions. Furthermore, in a context where God Himself cannot be known per se and where (as we have seen above) descriptions of God are best understood as describing not God, but the effects of God in the world (that is, the manifestation of God’s wisdom and goodness in the well-ordered design and workings of nature), a study of how the world works can be seen as a study of God's actions (and as such, as an attempt to better get to know God). As Maimonides makes clear, “There is…no way to apprehend Him except…through the things He has made…” (G 1.34, P 74).