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Chapter 5 of 512 min read
الجواب الإسلامي: كون مخلوق ومُدبَّر
The philosophical arguments developed in the preceding chapters — the inadequacy of chance, the explanatory limits of impersonal natural laws, and the positive case for a First Cause that is personal, timeless, and enormously powerful — bring the inquiry to a threshold. The arguments establish that the universe requires a cause of a very particular character. What they do not yet establish is that this cause is the God of Islamic monotheism — the Allah of the Quran, who is not merely a First Cause but the All-Knowing, All-Hearing, All-Seeing, infinitely merciful, perfectly just God who created humanity for a purpose and revealed His guidance through His prophets. This final chapter is devoted to the positive Islamic answer: what Islam teaches about the Creator’s relationship to His creation, and how this teaching coheres with and extends beyond what philosophy alone can establish.
A critical feature of the Islamic understanding of Allah’s relationship to the universe distinguishes it sharply from the philosophical position known as deism. Deism holds that God created the universe but has subsequently withdrawn from it, leaving it to operate according to the natural laws He established at creation. The universe, on this view, is like a machine wound up by its maker and left to run. Allah, in the Islamic understanding, is nothing like this. He did not merely initiate the universe and then step back; He continuously sustains it in existence at every moment. The universe depends on Him not only for its origin but for its continued existence from instant to instant.
This understanding is expressed with extraordinary philosophical precision in the Throne Verse of the Quran, Ayat al-Kursi (Surah al-Baqarah, 2:255): “Allah — there is no deity except Him, the Ever-Living, the Sustainer of existence. Neither drowsiness overtakes Him nor sleep. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. Who is it that can intercede with Him except by His permission? He knows what is before them and what will be after them, and they encompass not a thing of His knowledge except for what He wills. His Throne extends over the heavens and the earth, and their preservation tires Him not. And He is the Most High, the Most Great.”
The phrase “their preservation tires Him not” — referring to the preservation of the heavens and the earth — indicates that the ongoing sustenance of the universe is an act of Allah’s continuous will and power. The universe does not sustain itself; it is sustained by its Creator at every moment. This is the Islamic concept of qiyam — the universe’s standing in existence is an ongoing act of the One who holds it in being. Remove that sustaining act, and existence would collapse into nothing.
This teaching has profound philosophical implications. It means that natural laws — the regularities that science studies — are not self-subsistent features of reality but expressions of Allah’s consistent and orderly maintenance of His creation. The laws of physics are reliable not because they are independent of God but precisely because God maintains them with unfailing consistency. Allah’s nature is such that He maintains His creation in an orderly and rational way, and this consistency is what makes scientific inquiry possible. As the Quran states: “You will never find in the way of Allah any change, and you will never find in the way of Allah any alteration” (35:43) — the reliability of natural order is a reflection of the consistency of the Creator’s sustaining will.
In Arabic, the word ayah means both a verse of the Quran and a sign. This dual meaning is not a linguistic coincidence but a profound theological statement: the universe itself is a form of divine speech, signs that point to their Author. The Quran repeatedly calls upon human beings to reflect on the natural world as evidence for Allah’s existence, power, and wisdom. “Verily, in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of night and day, there are signs for those of understanding — those who remember Allah while standing, sitting, or lying on their sides and give thought to the creation of the heavens and the earth, saying: Our Lord, You did not create this without purpose. Exalted are You — then protect us from the punishment of the fire.” (3:190-191)
This is a remarkable passage. It calls for contemplation of the physical universe as a religious act — as a form of dhikr, remembrance of Allah. The response to the contemplation of nature is not merely intellectual acknowledgment but worship: “Our Lord, You did not create this without purpose.” The scientist who studies the laws of nature and marvels at their elegance and precision is, from the Quranic perspective, encountering signs of Allah’s wisdom and power, whether or not she recognizes them as such. The Islamic tradition encourages precisely this kind of contemplation, not as an alternative to rational inquiry but as its fulfillment.
The signs in the universe point to specific divine attributes. The vastness and power of the cosmos — galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars, clusters of galaxies stretching across hundreds of millions of light years, a universe of approximately 93 billion light years across — points to the limitless power of the Creator: “With power did We construct the heaven. Verily, We are able to extend the vastness of space” (51:47). The extraordinary precision of physical laws and constants — the fine-tuning discussed in earlier chapters — points to the wisdom and intentionality of the Creator. The emergence of life and consciousness from matter — the fact that the universe produced beings capable of wondering about their origin — points to a Creator who intended to be known. The universal human experience of moral consciousness — the sense that some things genuinely matter, that justice is real, that love and cruelty are genuinely different — points to a Creator who is Himself the source of moral reality.
Eugene Wigner’s famous observation about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics — the fact that abstract mathematical structures developed by human minds for purely logical reasons turn out to describe the deep structure of physical reality with extraordinary precision — is deeply puzzling on the hypothesis of an impersonal, purposeless universe. It is not puzzling at all on the Islamic account.
Allah created both the physical universe and human minds. He endowed human minds with rational capacities, including the capacity for mathematical reasoning. He structured the physical universe according to principles that are, at their deepest level, mathematical in character. The correspondence between human mathematics and physical reality is therefore not a mysterious coincidence but a consequence of the fact that both come from the same source. The Creator designed human minds to be capable of understanding His creation; He structured His creation to be intelligible to human minds. The pursuit of mathematics and physics is, from this perspective, the human mind’s attempt to read the script in which Allah wrote the universe.
This is not a metaphor. The Islamic tradition has a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between divine wisdom (hikmah) and the order of the universe. Allah’s names include al-Hakim (the Wise) and al-ʿAlim (the All-Knowing). His creation reflects His wisdom and knowledge — it is ordered, purposive, and intelligible, because its Creator is the source of order, purpose, and intelligibility. When physicists discover the mathematical beauty of the laws of nature — when they find, as Paul Dirac famously said, that “it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment”, and then find that beautiful equations do fit experiment — they are, without necessarily knowing it, encountering the wisdom of the Creator.
The Islamic account of a universe governed by Allah might seem to generate a tension with human freedom. If Allah governs everything, are human beings truly free? Are they genuinely responsible for their choices? This is the question of qadar — divine decree — and it has been one of the most intensely discussed topics in Islamic theology. Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris’s engagement with this question is important both philosophically and theologically.
The Islamic position rejects two extremes. Jabriyyah (hard determinism) holds that human beings are compelled by divine decree to do everything they do, and have no real freedom or responsibility. This position contradicts the Quran’s consistent emphasis on human responsibility, moral accountability, and the real significance of human choice. Qadariyyah (radical free will) holds that human beings are the sole authors of their own actions, which are entirely outside divine knowledge and governance. This position contradicts the Quran’s equally consistent emphasis on Allah’s comprehensive knowledge, power, and governance of all affairs.
The mainstream Islamic position, as formulated by the great theologians of Ahl us-Sunnah wal-Jamaʿah, holds that human beings genuinely choose and genuinely act — their choices are their own and they are responsible for them — while Allah’s knowledge, will, and power encompass all of reality, including human choices. This is admittedly a difficult concept, and Islamic theology acknowledges that the precise relationship between divine decree and human freedom exceeds full human comprehension. But the general framework is clear: Allah is not responsible for human wrongdoing (He did not compel it), and human beings are genuinely responsible for their choices (they made them freely). The universe is governed by Allah in a way that includes, rather than excludes, genuine human agency.
The problem of evil and suffering — often posed as an objection to theism — is addressed within this framework. If Allah governs the universe and He is both all-powerful and all-good, why does the world contain so much suffering, injustice, and natural disaster? The Islamic response is multi-layered. First, the worldly life is a test: “We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits, but give good tidings to the patient” (2:155). Second, human suffering and human agency are linked: much of what we call evil in the world is the product of human choices made in freedom, and a world of genuine human freedom necessarily includes the possibility of human wrongdoing. Third, Allah’s justice is perfect but not fully realized in this world: the akhirah — the final accounting before Allah — will set right every wrong that was not righted in this life. The apparent injustice of the world is not the final word, because the universe is governed by the most just of judges.
One of Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris’s consistent themes is that Islam does not require and has never required a conflict between science and faith. This might seem surprising given the widespread perception of religion-science conflict, but the perception is historically and philosophically confused. The supposed conflict between science and religion is largely a product of the specific history of European Christianity — the Galileo affair, the Church’s initial opposition to Darwinian evolution, and similar episodes. These episodes, important as they are for the history of European culture, do not define the relationship between science and Islam.
The Quran does not make claims that modern astronomy contradicts, because the Quran is not a textbook of astronomy. The Quran does not make claims that evolutionary biology contradicts, because the Quran does not provide a detailed mechanism of biological origins. What the Quran does provide is a theological framework for understanding the natural world: it is the creation of Allah, it is ordered by His wisdom, it reflects His power and knowledge, and its study is a form of engagement with His signs. This framework is not contradicted but confirmed by the scientific discovery that the universe is extraordinarily ordered, mathematically precise, and structured in ways that, as we have seen, are most naturally explained by a creative intelligence.
The great tradition of Islamic science — the astronomers, mathematicians, physicians, and natural philosophers of the classical Islamic civilization who made foundational contributions to virtually every field of human inquiry from the eighth through the thirteenth centuries — studied the natural world as an act of worship and service to the Muslim community. Al-Biruni, Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Sina, al-Khwarizmi, and hundreds of others pursued rigorous, empirical, mathematically sophisticated investigation of the natural world not despite their Islamic faith but as an expression of it. The Quran’s repeated injunctions to reflect on the signs of Allah in the natural world provided the theological motivation for scientific inquiry; the Islamic concept of the universe as an ordered creation of a rational Creator provided the philosophical framework that made the enterprise of science coherent.
Jaʼfar Sheikh Idris concludes his reflection on this question with an observation that is as much personal as philosophical. The arguments presented in this book are not weapons in a polemical contest. They are not deployed to embarrass secular thinkers or to compel assent by logic alone. They are an invitation — the same invitation that the Quran extends to all human beings in passages like 3:190-191: to look at the universe with open eyes and honest minds and to ask what it tells us about its origin and its governance.
The universe, as modern science has revealed it, is not a collection of brute facts without rhyme or reason. It is extraordinarily ordered, mathematically precise, fine-tuned to a degree that staggers the imagination, and structured in ways that enabled the emergence of beings capable of reflecting on all of this. The existence of rational, morally conscious, beauty-perceiving beings who can ask about the meaning of their existence is itself one of the most remarkable features of the universe — and it is a feature that points, with compelling force, to a Creator who intended to be known.
The Islamic answer to the question of what governs the universe is not a retreat to comfortable irrationalism. It is the most rationally satisfying, philosophically coherent, and empirically informed answer available. Allah — the Ever-Living, the Sustainer of existence, in Whose hand is all sovereignty, Who created the universe with wisdom and purpose and Who sustains it at every moment — is the best explanation we have for why there is something rather than nothing, why what there is has the extraordinary character it does, and why human beings stand in the universe as rational, morally conscious beings capable of recognizing all of this as His sign.