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Chapter 4 of 511 min read
الحجة الكونية على وجود الله
Having demonstrated the philosophical inadequacy of both chance and impersonal natural laws as ultimate explanations for the universe, Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris turns to the positive case. The question is not merely what governs the universe — as if the three options were equally supported by evidence and argument and the choice among them were arbitrary — but which of the three candidate answers best explains what we actually observe. And here the cosmological arguments for the existence of God, refined over centuries of Islamic and Western philosophical tradition and newly energized by discoveries in twentieth-century cosmology, provide a powerful and carefully reasoned case.
The argument Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris finds most compelling is the Kalam Cosmological Argument, so called because of its development within the kalam (Islamic theological) tradition, though its roots go back to earlier philosophical predecessors. In its contemporary formulation, developed and defended by philosophers including William Lane Craig, the argument runs as follows:
This is a formally valid argument: if both premises are true, the conclusion follows necessarily. The philosophical work lies in defending the premises and then drawing out the implications of the conclusion. Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris engages with both tasks with characteristic thoroughness.
The first premise might seem so obvious as to require no defense: the principle that things that come into existence do so because of causes is the foundational assumption of all scientific and ordinary reasoning. When we find an effect, we look for its cause. When something new appears in our experience, we assume it appeared for a reason. This is not merely a psychological habit; it is a rational principle — the principle of sufficient reason, articulated by Leibniz and implicit in all rational inquiry — that things have explanations, that existence has causes.
Quantum mechanics has sometimes been invoked as a counterexample: at the quantum level, events occur without deterministic causes — a radioactive atom decays at a specific time, but quantum theory can predict only the probability of decay within a time interval, not the specific moment. Does this not show that some things begin to exist without causes? Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris, following the mainstream of philosophy of physics, responds that quantum indeterminism does not violate the principle that things have causes; it shows that at the quantum level, causes do not deterministically produce specific effects. The radioactive atom decays within a causal framework — governed by quantum laws, the initial state of the atom, and its physical context — even if those causes do not determine the exact moment of decay. A genuinely uncaused event — one with no causal connection whatsoever to anything in reality — is different from a probabilistically caused event, and quantum mechanics posits the latter, not the former.
More fundamentally, to deny the first premise of the Kalam argument is to undermine all rational inquiry. If things can begin to exist without causes, then we have no basis for the scientific enterprise of seeking causes for phenomena. The chemist who discovers a new compound must assume it was produced by chemical processes; the physician who diagnoses a disease assumes it has a cause; the physicist who detects a new particle assumes it was produced by physical processes. The principle that effects have causes is not a dispensable assumption but the foundation of all inquiry. Abandoning it to avoid the conclusion of the cosmological argument is a case of letting the desired conclusion determine the premises rather than vice versa.
The second premise is more contested, and it is here that Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris engages most substantively with contemporary cosmology and mathematics. He offers two distinct lines of support: philosophical arguments against an actually infinite past and empirical evidence from cosmology for a beginning.
The philosophical argument: the impossibility of an actually infinite past. Can the universe have existed for an infinite time in the past — an actually infinite series of past events stretching back without beginning? Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris, following the kalam tradition and the mathematical analysis of the German mathematician David Hilbert, argues that an actually infinite series of past events is impossible. Hilbert demonstrated this through what has become known as “Hilbert’s Hotel”: a thought experiment that reveals the paradoxes generated by treating actual infinities as realizable quantities. In Hilbert’s Hotel, an infinite hotel with infinitely many rooms is completely full. A new guest arrives. The manager accommodates him by moving the guest in room 1 to room 2, the guest in room 2 to room 3, and so on, freeing room 1 for the new guest. But now the hotel has the same number of guests as before plus one more — which contradicts the assumption that it was already infinite. More paradoxes follow: if all guests in odd-numbered rooms check out, the hotel has lost infinitely many guests but still has infinitely many guests remaining; the infinity minus the infinity of odd-numbered rooms equals the infinity of even-numbered rooms; but infinity minus infinity can also equal any other number, depending on which infinite subset is removed. These paradoxes show that actual infinities, while mathematically describable as abstract objects, cannot be realized as actual series of events in the physical world.
If an actually infinite past is impossible, then the universe must have had a beginning — a first moment beyond which there was no prior moment in the universe’s history. This is a philosophical argument, but it is reinforced by the empirical evidence.
The empirical argument: Big Bang cosmology. The discovery of the Big Bang in the twentieth century provides empirical evidence that the universe had a definite beginning in time. The observational evidence for the Big Bang is overwhelming: the expansion of the universe discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929; the cosmic microwave background radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1965, which is precisely the pattern expected if the universe began in an extremely hot, dense state; the relative abundances of light elements (hydrogen, helium, deuterium) produced in Big Bang nucleosynthesis; and the large-scale structure of the universe consistent with a Big Bang origin. Running the expansion backward in time, the universe converges on a state of infinite density approximately 13.8 billion years ago — the moment physicists call the Big Bang singularity, or more precisely the Planck epoch, beyond which our current physics cannot describe what came before.
Some physicists have proposed models that avoid the initial singularity: cyclic cosmologies (in which the Big Bang is one cycle in an eternal series of expansions and contractions), eternal inflation, Hartle-Hawking “no boundary” proposals, and others. Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris notes that even these models do not typically avoid the need for a beginning: the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem (2003) demonstrates that any universe in which the average expansion rate has been positive throughout its history must have a boundary in the past — a beginning, beyond which the spacetime description fails. This theorem is robust across a wide range of cosmological models, including most multiverse scenarios. The universe, on the best available evidence and theory, began.
The thermodynamic argument. A third line of support for premise two comes from thermodynamics. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy — the disorder of a closed system — always increases or remains constant over time. Our universe is currently in a relatively low-entropy state compared to the maximum entropy equilibrium state toward which it is heading. If the universe were infinitely old, it would already have reached maximum entropy — a featureless, maximally disordered state called heat death. The fact that the universe is not in heat death but still has vast entropy gradients — the structures of galaxies, stars, and living organisms — demonstrates that it has not been running for infinite time. It had a beginning, a starting state of very low entropy from which it has been evolving toward higher entropy ever since.
The argument establishes that the universe has a cause. But what kind of cause must it be? Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris, following a line of philosophical reasoning that goes back to the kalam theologians and has been rigorously developed in contemporary philosophy, draws out the implications of what the universe’s cause must be like.
The cause must be uncaused. If the cause of the universe itself had a cause, we could ask the same question of that cause, and we would face either an infinite regress of causes (which is impossible, for the reasons discussed above) or a termination point. The first cause must simply be — it must exist without being caused to exist. This means it is a necessary being: it does not exist contingently (it could not fail to exist) but necessarily (its existence is not dependent on anything outside itself).
The cause must be outside time and space. Time and space are features of the universe; they came into being with the universe in the Big Bang. The cause of the universe, therefore, must be timeless and spaceless — it must exist outside the temporal and spatial framework of the physical universe. This rules out all physical entities as candidates for the First Cause, since all physical entities are located in space and time.
The cause must be enormously powerful. To bring the entire physical universe — with all its matter, energy, space, and time — into existence from nothing requires a cause of extraordinary power. This is not a quantitative assessment — we cannot assign a precise number to the power required — but it is clear that the cause must be capable of producing physical reality from non-physical reality, which is a power of a wholly different order from any finite physical cause.
The cause must be personal. This is the most philosophically interesting and potentially controversial inference, and Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris develops it with particular care. The reasoning is as follows: the cause of the universe is timeless, spaceless, and immensely powerful. Given these properties, there are two conceivable types of entity that could have these properties: an abstract object (a mathematical structure, a Platonic form) or a personal being with mind and will. Abstract objects, however, do not stand in causal relations — the number seven does not cause anything to happen. Causal agency requires more than abstract necessary existence; it requires the capacity to act. And among agents, there are two types: mechanical causes (physical systems that produce their effects whenever the right conditions are present) and personal causes (agents with will who choose to act or not act based on reasons). If the First Cause were a mechanical cause, it would always produce its effect whenever conditions were met — but then, since the cause exists timelessly and eternally, why did it produce the universe at a specific time rather than always or never? The only coherent answer is that the First Cause is a personal agent who chose to create the universe at the moment He willed to do so. A timeless agent with a free will can choose to initiate a temporal effect without being compelled by antecedent conditions.
Immanuel Kant argued in the Critique of Pure Reason that the cosmological argument falls into an antinomy: we can argue with apparently equal force both that the universe had a beginning in time and that it did not. Kant used this antinomy to conclude that questions about the ultimate nature of reality — including whether the universe had a beginning — exceed the legitimate scope of speculative reason.
Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris notes that Kant’s objections were formulated before the empirical evidence for the Big Bang was available, and before the detailed philosophical analysis of the Hilbert’s Hotel paradoxes and related impossibility arguments for actual infinities. The antinomy Kant identified was, in his context, a genuine impasse; but the subsequent history of physics and mathematics has substantially advanced our understanding of why an actually infinite past is impossible, and the observational evidence for a cosmic beginning has provided empirical traction that purely philosophical argument alone could not provide. Kant’s conclusion that questions about cosmic origins exceed the scope of reason was premature — or at least, if speculative reason alone could not settle the question, the combination of philosophical argument and empirical evidence gives us considerably stronger grounds for a verdict.
The cosmological argument was not invented by Western philosophers; it was developed with great sophistication by Islamic theologians and philosophers of the classical period. Al-Kindi (ninth century CE), often regarded as the first Arab philosopher, formulated an argument for the existence of a First Cause based on the temporal origination of the universe. Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) developed the distinction between necessary and contingent existence that is fundamental to the cosmological argument: God is the Necessary Being, whose existence is required by the logical structure of reality; all other beings are contingent, meaning they could exist or not exist depending on external factors. Ibn Rushd (Averroes) engaged with Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover argument and developed his own version in an Islamic framework. Al-Ghazali, in his Tahafut al-Falasifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers), argued that the universe must have a beginning in time and a creator — a position he defended against the Aristotelian view of an eternal universe.
This rich intellectual tradition is the background against which Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris’s arguments should be understood. He is not importing a Western philosophical argument into an Islamic context; he is building on and extending a tradition of Islamic philosophical theology that predates the Western Scholastic engagement with these same questions by several centuries. The cosmological argument, in its Kalam form, is part of Islam’s own intellectual heritage — a heritage of rational engagement with the deepest questions of existence that Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris saw as a vital resource for contemporary Muslim thought.