Loading...
Loading...
Chapter 1 of 513 min read
التساؤل وأهميته
There are questions that seem, on the surface, to belong purely to the domain of academic philosophy or theoretical physics — questions that civilized society has agreed to leave to specialists while ordinary life proceeds on its own terms. The question of what governs the universe is sometimes treated as one of these: interesting, perhaps, for those who enjoy abstract speculation, but without direct bearing on how we live, what we value, or what we owe to one another. Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris spent decades arguing, with characteristic philosophical precision, that this comfortable dismissal is a serious mistake. The question of what ultimately governs the universe is not a specialist luxury but a question whose answer — or whose assumed answer — shapes every aspect of human existence, whether or not those who live under its shadow have ever consciously entertained it.
The question admits of three general answers, and each of these answers, if pursued with intellectual consistency, leads to a radically different understanding of human life and its significance. The first answer is chance: the universe exists and has its particular character as a result of processes that are fundamentally random, undirected, and purposeless. The second answer is natural laws: the universe exists and operates according to impersonal mathematical structures — the laws of physics — which are themselves uncaused and self-sufficient. The third answer is God: the universe was created and is sustained by a personal, rational, and morally significant Being who endowed it with order, purpose, and intelligibility.
Each of these answers is not merely a metaphysical hypothesis to be evaluated in isolation from practical life. Each answer carries with it a whole worldview — a set of implications about what human beings are, what meaning is, whether purpose is real or merely projected, whether ethics is grounded in anything deeper than human preference, and whether the universe is ultimately the kind of place in which human aspirations for justice, love, and transcendence can be taken seriously.
If chance is the ultimate explanation for the universe — if existence is the product of processes that are genuinely random and without purpose — then the intellectual honest person must follow this conclusion where it leads. The universe has no inherent meaning, because meaning requires intention, and intention requires a mind, and chance by definition excludes mind as a fundamental feature of reality. Human consciousness, on this view, is an accident — a byproduct of blind physical processes that had no destination in mind. The emergence of rational minds capable of asking about meaning is itself a random event in a meaningless process, which means that the very capacities that generate the question about meaning are themselves the products of meaninglessness.
This has profound implications for ethics. If the universe is the product of chance, then there is no moral order written into the fabric of reality — no standard by which human actions can be genuinely evaluated as right or wrong, just or unjust, rather than merely as preferred or disliked by the creatures who evolved to have those preferences. Moral realism — the view that some things are genuinely and objectively right or wrong — becomes very difficult to sustain on a thoroughgoing chance-based worldview. The best that can be offered is some form of moral constructivism: we collectively agree to call certain things right and others wrong, we build social systems that enforce these agreements, and we call the result morality. But this is not morality in the classical sense; it is social coordination dressed in moral language.
And if ethics is merely social coordination, then justice — that deep human aspiration for a world in which wrongdoing is ultimately punished and righteousness ultimately vindicated — is a fantasy. The universe does not care. The powerful can oppress the weak; the wicked can die in comfort while the righteous suffer; entire peoples can be destroyed by regimes of organized cruelty; and the universe will make no ultimate accounting of any of it. This is not a reductio ad absurdum of the chance hypothesis; it may simply be true. But Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris insists that we must not pretend it is a comfortable truth, or a truth that has no consequences for how we understand human life.
The appeal to natural laws as the governing principle of the universe is more sophisticated and, in the contemporary intellectual landscape, more common than raw chance. The scientist or philosopher who holds this view accepts that the universe is not random — it is ordered, law-governed, mathematically precise. But the laws that govern it are impersonal: they have no mind, no intention, no concern for the creatures they govern. They simply are, eternally and necessarily, and the universe unfolds according to them.
This view preserves the intelligibility of the universe — it can be studied scientifically, its regularities can be discovered and exploited — but it does so at the cost of purpose and value. If natural laws are impersonal, then the order they produce is not intended order; it is mechanical order, as purposive as the spiral pattern of water draining from a bathtub. The fact that human minds can discover these laws and find them beautiful does not mean they were designed to be discovered or intended to be beautiful. It might mean, on this view, only that the minds that evolved in this particular universe are the kind of minds that find their governing laws intelligible — a tautology rather than a discovery.
Consciousness, on the impersonal-laws view, is an emergent property of sufficiently complex physical systems — a feature of matter arranged in certain ways, with no special status in the universe beyond its causal role. The person who suffers, who loves, who seeks justice, who asks about the meaning of her existence, is, at the fundamental level, a collection of particles obeying impersonal mathematical laws. Her inner life — her sense of meaning, her moral convictions, her love for her children — is real as a causal factor in how she acts, but it is not real in any way that the impersonal laws take account of. The universe does not distinguish between a person and a stone, except insofar as different physical laws apply to different physical configurations.
If God governs the universe — if a personal, rational, and morally significant Being created and sustains all of reality — then the picture changes entirely. Existence has purpose because it was intended. Order is intentional because it was designed. Human consciousness is not an accident but a creation — beings made in a way that allows them to understand and respond to their Creator. Meaning is not invented by human beings in the face of an indifferent cosmos but discovered: reality itself is meaningful, and the task of human existence is to align oneself with that meaning rather than to construct a substitute for it.
Ethics, on this view, is not social construction but discovery: the moral order is built into the fabric of reality by its Creator, and human beings have access to it through reason, through revelation, and through the moral intuitions that God placed within them. Justice is not a fantasy but a promise: the Being who governs the universe is just, and the accounts that are not settled in this world will be settled in the next. Human suffering is not the final word, because the universe is governed by One who is both all-powerful and all-merciful.
The stakes of this question, then, are as high as any question can be. It determines whether human life has objective meaning or merely subjective significance; whether ethics is grounded in reality or is ultimately arbitrary; whether justice is real or merely an aspiration that the universe itself does not share; whether prayer and worship are rational responses to a real relationship with the Creator or comforting illusions that serve evolutionary functions. These are not peripheral questions but central ones, and no honest engagement with them can begin without first taking seriously the question of what governs the universe.
The question has been asked, in various forms, across the full range of human intellectual history. Ancient Greek philosophy provides the first sustained Western attempts at a systematic answer. Heraclitus of Ephesus, in the sixth century BCE, proposed the logos — a rational principle of order that governs all things — as the underlying reality behind the apparent flux of experience. For Heraclitus, the world is not random but is governed by a deep rational structure that the philosopher can access through careful reflection. The Stoics later developed this into a full cosmology: the logos is the immanent rational principle of the universe, identified in their later writings with God, and the universe is thoroughly ordered by it.
Plato proposed a different answer: the visible world of matter and flux is governed by eternal, unchanging Forms or Ideas, which exist in a higher realm of reality and of which physical things are imperfect copies. The most important of these Forms is the Form of the Good, which functions as a kind of divine principle giving order and intelligibility to all of reality. In the Timaeus, Plato presents a creation account in which a divine craftsman — the Demiurge — fashions the physical world by imposing rational order on formless matter, guided by the eternal Forms. This is not the God of monotheism — the Demiurge works with pre-existing matter and does not create from nothing — but it is a sophisticated attempt to account for the order of the universe by appeal to a rational, purposive principle.
Aristotle rejected Plato’s Forms as a separate realm of reality but preserved the idea of an ordering principle in his concept of the Unmoved Mover. Every motion in the universe requires a mover; the chain of movers cannot regress infinitely; therefore there must be a first mover, which is itself unmoved. This Unmoved Mover is pure actuality, pure thought thinking itself, the ultimate cause of all motion and change in the universe — not by efficient causation (pushing or pulling things) but by final causation (being the ultimate object of desire and aspiration for all beings). Aristotle’s God is not personal in the sense that Islam understands — it does not create the universe, does not know individual human beings, and does not care about them — but it provides a philosophical anchor for the order of the universe in a rational, purposive principle.
Islamic and Christian medieval philosophy inherited these Greek arguments and transformed them in light of monotheistic revelation. The mutakallimun — the Islamic theologians of the kalam tradition — developed sophisticated cosmological arguments for the existence of Allah, most importantly the argument from huduth (temporal origination): everything that exists in time and space must have a cause; the universe exists in time and space; therefore the universe must have a cause that is itself outside time and space. This argument was developed with great logical rigor by scholars including al-Kindi, al-Ghazali, and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, and it provides the foundation for what contemporary philosophers call the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
Christian scholasticism, particularly in the work of Thomas Aquinas, produced the famous Five Ways: five arguments for the existence of God based on motion, efficient causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, and teleology (design). While Aquinas’s arguments have been subjected to intense philosophical criticism over the centuries, they represent one of the most sustained attempts in intellectual history to demonstrate rationally that the universe requires a governing principle beyond itself.
The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought the sharpest philosophical challenges to theistic accounts of the universe’s governance. David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) mounted a powerful attack on the design argument: we cannot know, Hume argued, that the universe was designed by analogy with human artifacts, because the universe is unique — we cannot observe it from the outside or compare it to other universes; and even if there is order in the universe, this does not establish that the order was produced by an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God rather than a committee of lesser deities, or an imperfect deity who made a first attempt. Hume also undermined the problem of induction: our confidence in natural laws rests on the assumption that the future will resemble the past, but this assumption itself cannot be rationally justified without circularity.
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) argued that the cosmological argument — the argument from the existence of the universe to a First Cause — inevitably falls into antinomies: one can argue with equal logical force both that the universe had a beginning and that it did not. Kant concluded that the existence of God cannot be proven by speculative reason and must instead be treated as a postulate of practical reason — a requirement of moral life — rather than a metaphysical fact about the structure of reality.
What Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris recognized, writing and lecturing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, was that developments in modern cosmology had transformed the philosophical landscape in ways that secular intellectuals were reluctant to acknowledge. The discovery of the Big Bang — the evidence that the universe had a definite beginning approximately 13.8 billion years ago — gave new empirical force to the cosmological argument. If the universe began, then the question of what caused it to begin is not merely a philosophical puzzle but an empirical one, and the answer cannot be found within the universe itself.
The discovery of the fine-tuning of the physical constants — the fact that the fundamental parameters of physics lie within extraordinarily narrow ranges compatible with the existence of complex matter, chemistry, and life — gave new empirical force to the design argument. This is not the naive design argument of the eighteenth century, which argued from the complexity of organisms to a divine designer; it is an argument from the structure of physical law itself, which is a much deeper level of the question.
These are the developments that make the question of what governs the universe newly urgent in the contemporary period, not merely as a philosophical abstraction but as a live question that modern science itself forces upon us. Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris approached these questions not as an apologist trying to defend a conclusion already reached on other grounds, but as a philosopher genuinely interested in following the argument where it leads — and he believed, with good reason, that the evidence and the arguments lead to the conclusion that the universe is governed by God.
It is important to understand that the Islamic position on this question, as Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris presents it, is not a position adopted in the absence of evidence or in defiance of reason. The Quran itself repeatedly invites reflection on the natural world as evidence for the existence and attributes of Allah. The Creator is not a hypothesis adopted to fill a gap in scientific knowledge — a God-of-the-gaps who retreats whenever science advances — but a rational explanation that the evidence positively supports.
The question of what governs the universe matters because the answer determines whether the universe is the kind of place in which human beings are at home — made by a Being who knows them, loves them, and calls them to account — or whether they are, as Bertrand Russell famously said, the accidental product of a stream of matter and energy that has no knowledge of them and no concern for their fate. Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris insisted that this question deserves the most careful, honest, and rigorous intellectual engagement, and that the person who assumes it has been settled — in either direction — without serious reflection has not yet begun to think about the most important question they can ask.