In this chapter, Maimonides mounts his strongest attack agains the notion that God has attributes.

I do not merely declare that he who affirms attributes of God has not sufficient knowledge concerning the Creator, admits some association with God, or conceives Him to be different from what He is: but I say that he unconsciously loses his belief in God.

This is because the error is not one of degree but of kind; it’s not like the error one makes if one describes an ordinary object by one attribute (correctly) but does not know its other attributes. Instead, it is like one who ascribes a category to the wrong kind of subject, e.g.

he … who says that taste belongs to the category of quantity has not, according to my opinion, an incorrect notion of taste, but is entirely ignorant of its nature, for he does not know to what object the term “taste” is to be applied

Maimonides’ examples get even more inventive. Suppose that someone did not know what an elephant was, and another person

who is either misled or misleading, tells him it is an animal with one leg, three wings, lives in the depth of the sea, has a transparent body: its face is wide like that of a man, has the same form and shape, speaks like a man, flies sometimes in the air, and sometimes swims like a fish. I should not say, that he described the elephant incorrectly, or that he has an insufficient knowledge of the elephant, but I would say that the thing thus described is an invention and fiction, and that in reality there exists nothing like it: it is a non-existing being, called by the name of a really existing being … like the griffin [or] the centaur.

A God partially described by a set of positive attributes is “a mere fiction and invention”.

If such a simple, absolutely existing essence were said to have attributes, as has been contended, and were combined with extraneous elements, it would in no way be an existing thing, as has been proved by us; and when we say that that essence, which is called “God,” is a substance with many properties by which it can be described, we apply that name to an object which does not at all exist.