This sort of thinking possibly stems from the premise "Impossible is Nothing." Kinda like those Adidas ads you've come across when you're walking along Orchard Road, like the one below:
I like Muhammad Ali; that is why I chose him over David Beckham although both posters have the words "Impossible is Nothing." :p
To put the term 'impossible' in its proper place, we have to understand what we mean when we say something is impossible. In this respect, I like Jim Pryor's exposition in http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/courses/intro/notes/necessity.html on the subject matter:
"The word "possible" in English has many different meanings. If someone comes up to you on the street and says "It's possible that I was born on the moon," you'll most naturally take him to be making some sort of (crazy) claim about what it's reasonable for him to believe really is the case. You'd be understanding his claim as "For all I know, I was born on the moon." This is a use of "possible" to express claims about evidence and knowledge. It's called an epistemic sense of possibility.
But there is another thing the guy might have meant. He might have meant, "Look, I know I was born on the Planet Earth. But things could have gone differently. I could have been born on the moon--if for instance mankind had colonized the moon in the 1800s." Here he's using "possible" not in the sense of "for all I know..." but rather in a metaphysical sense. He's not talking about what he knows. He's talking about what could have happened, if the world or history had been different in certain ways. We call claims of this latter sort claims about logical or metaphysical possibility...
It's important to be clear about what this bottom category, "metaphysically impossible," means. What it means is that that is not a way the world could have been. Let's try to come up with some things that would be examples of this.
Would it have been possible for the world to contain 3-sided squares? What would such a world be like? That doesn't really seem to be a possible way for the world to be, does it?
Nor does it seem to be possible for it to be raining and not raining in the same place at the same time. Nor does it seem to be possible for a person to exist and fail to be one and the same person as himself. There are no possible situations in which things of those sort take place. They all seem to be metaphysically impossible.
Now, so far, the examples we're coming up with of things that are metaphysically impossible all seem to have something to do with logic or definitions or math. That raises an interesting question: If something is metaphysically impossible, will that always be because it involves some contradiction or going against some definition?"
According to his classification possibly derived from the Logical Positivist school of thought, possibilities and impossibilities are classified as follows:
1. Necessarily true.
2. True, but could have been false.
3. False, but could have been true.
4. Necessarily false.
Perhaps the following diagrams would help enlighten further what 'impossible' might mean:
Things that are necessarily true are, for instance, all triangles are three-sided figures; we cannot imagine any other way in which this is false. There are things that can be true or false, for instance, the Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and to ascertain this we require proofs. Or we can call this metaphysically possible; despite the arguments against Darwin's Theory of Evolution, it is still possible to imagine a world in which Darwin's theory might work under God's will, but it is not in this physical world that exists. This we shall classify as Physical Impossibility or Scientific Impossibility.
BUT
There are things that are downright impossible, or metaphysically impossible, like squaring a circle or married bachelors.
HOWEVER
We need to be careful with reasoning like this because the criterion for truth according to the Logical Positivists is restricted to reason (aql) whereas as Muslims, in our Tauhidic approach towards knowledge we accept Revelation first as the foundational criterion for truth, yet we do not deny reason as a valid but secondary source of knowledge. In other words, the meanings encompassed in the Holy Qur'an is the primary criterion separating truth from falsehood! Therefore, metaphysical impossibility should be extended towards what is established in the Holy Quran as an impossibility.
Speaking of possible and impossible worlds, while the Logical Positivists get lost in their philosophizing such that the end objective of such efforts is forgotten (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/impossible-worlds/) the Mutakallimun solved this problem of impossibilities quite some time ago in their expositions on the Attributes of God (Sifat 20), as seen in http://www.al-azim.com/masjid/infoislam/tauhid/mustahil.htm (pardon my English language readers since this link is in the Malay Language. But if you're interested perhaps you may want to read up on the works of Ash'ari and Maturidi on this subject matter).
Pryor adds that:
"If it's metaphysically necessary that a thing have certain properties, then we say that those properties are essential properties of that thing, and that they are part of the thing's nature or essence. So for instance, oddness is one of the essential properties of the number 3. Some philosophers would argue that being made of wood is one of the essential properties of this table. If they're right--if it is an essential property of the table--then there would be no possible situation in which the table exists, but it's made of plastic. (There may be possible situations in which some other table exists in the same location, and is made of plastic. But if being made of wood is essential to this table, then the plastic table would have to be a different table. It couldn't be one and the same table as this table.) Those properties which are not essential, we call accidental properties. For instance, being 3 feet tall is only an accidental property of the table (we could saw part of its legs off to make it shorter)."
In other words, there are what we call the essences of things (mahiyyah) or in more philosophical terms, quiddity,and there are things we call accidents (arad). Essences define the whatness of things; without it you can no longer call the thing a thing. For instance, without the act of sitting, there is no chair. This is what Al-Attas defines as the limits of truth; you can form an unlimited description of a chair but ultimately the essential property of a chair is that the act of sitting exists. Therefore when we deal with metaphysical impossibilities, we deal with situations where a thing loses its essential properties such that we can no longer conceive the thing to be the same. For instance, bachelors are in essence unmarried people. To say 'married bachelors' is paradoxical because once a bachelor is married he can no longer be called a bachelor. The same way Allah has Essences and Attributes; once you conceive Him in ways other than this as categorically defined in the 20 Sifat Mustahil, you are no longer conceiving Him properly in your mind; that flawed idea of God in your mind is no longer God in truth and reality.
Can Allah create a rock so heavy even He Himself cannot lift? This is metaphysically impossible, because it violates at least one of the 20 Attributes derived from the Holy Quran and rigorous reasoning. Can Allah have a son? This is metaphysically impossible as well.
But can Allah create the universe through evolution? Well that's physically impossible, yet metaphysically possible given the proofs furnished against the theory.
So is impossible nothing? Well if we contemplate further on what the poster meant, Muhammad Ali probably meant psychologically impossible but physically possible, for instance, it is your mind that is actually stopping you from doing the things that is actually physically possible. Yet if we take this statement out of context it can be very misleading, as if NOTHING is impossible. Truth is, some things are impossible, as demonstrated above.
According to Al-Attas, language is the instrument of reasoning of man. Therefore it is incumbent for us to know what meaning is intended by our speakers. A linguistic approach towards issues is key to a proper understanding of any subject matter.
Wallahu 'Alam
