The Rational Belief in God: Why the Qur'an Says a Creator Is a Logical Necessity

Consider anything that exists, and ultimately consider the universe itself. How did it come to be? Logically, the possibilities are exhausted by three answers.

First: it came from nothing, with no cause at all. The difficulty is that nothing is not a thing with potential. It has no properties, no laws, no energy, no capacity. To say the universe emerged from nothing is not to name a process but to decline to name one. It is worth being precise, because physicists sometimes appear to say otherwise: when Lawrence Krauss writes about a universe from nothing, the "nothing" in question is a quantum vacuum with fields, energy and laws governing its behaviour. Philosophers including David Albert, reviewing that work in the New York Times in 2012, pointed out that this is emphatically not nothing. Something with structure and laws is a something, and it needs an account of its own.

Second: it created itself. This is worse, because it is not merely unexplained but self-contradictory. For a thing to bring itself into existence it would have to exist already, in order to do the bringing, and not exist yet, in order to need it. A thing cannot precede itself.

That leaves the third: it was brought into being by something else. And this is where the argument becomes interesting, because that something must either itself be caused — in which case the question repeats — or be uncaused. Follow the chain and either it terminates in something uncaused, or it does not terminate at all. The next two sections examine both branches.

The contingency argument, developed by Ibn Sina among the Muslim philosophers and set out in modern form by the Sapience Institute in the essay "Divine Link: Dependency and God's Existence", approaches the same conclusion from a different direction — and, importantly, without needing the universe to have a beginning in time.

Look at anything at all. It is dependent: it exists because of conditions it did not supply. A chair depends on wood, a carpenter, and the physics that holds its atoms together. Your existence depends on oxygen, on a chain of ancestors, on a star that formed the carbon in your body. Even the fundamental particles are dependent in the relevant sense: they have specific masses, charges and behaviours that they did not confer on themselves and that could, so far as logic goes, have been otherwise.

Now gather everything dependent into one collection — call it the universe, or the totality of physical reality. Does the collection escape dependency by being large? It does not. A hundred dependent things are a hundred dependent things; assembling them changes the size of the set, not its nature. A row of train carriages, however long, does not move itself: something that is not a carriage is required.

So the totality of dependent existence requires a ground that is not dependent — something necessary rather than contingent, self-sufficient rather than sustained, explaining itself rather than requiring explanation. The Qur'an has a name for exactly this attribute: al-Samad, in the chapter Muslims recite most often — "Allah, the Eternal Refuge" or the Self-Sufficient upon whom all depend (Qur'an 112:2).

The natural objection is to refuse the terminus: why can the chain of causes not simply extend backwards forever, with no first member? This is the question the kalam cosmological argument addresses, refined by Muslim theologians — al-Ghazali's treatment in The Incoherence of the Philosophers is the classical statement — and still argued in contemporary philosophy. Its structure is short: whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore the universe has a cause.

The philosophical case against an infinite past turns on the difference between the potentially infinite and the actually infinite. A series that grows without limit is unproblematic; a completed infinity of past events is not, because such a series would have to have been traversed to arrive at now. Imagine a line of dominoes extending infinitely into the past, each falling because the one before it fell. Every domino's fall waits on a prior fall, and there is no first. Nothing in the chain ever gets started, yet the present moment has plainly arrived. Al-Ghazali's version makes the same point about days: if an infinite number of days had to elapse before today, today would never come.

Modern cosmology is often brought in here, and it should be brought in carefully. The standard model has the observable universe expanding from an extremely hot, dense early state around 13. 8 billion years ago, and the Borde–Guth–Vilenkin theorem (2003) shows that any universe with an average expansion rate greater than zero cannot be extended infinitely into the past. That is a real result and it constrains a large class of models. It is not a proof of a beginning of all physical reality, and cosmologists continue to propose models that attempt to get around it. The honest position is that the philosophical argument stands on its own and the science is consistent with it rather than settling it.

Either way, the chain must terminate in something that did not begin, has no cause, and is not part of the dependent order: eternal, uncaused, and the origin of everything else.

The arguments so far establish that a necessary being exists. Fine-tuning speaks to what that being is like — whether the cause is a blind principle or something that chooses.

Physics has established that the universe's fundamental constants sit within narrow ranges compatible with a structured cosmos. The strength of gravity relative to electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force that determines whether hydrogen fuses into anything at all, the cosmological constant, and the extraordinarily low entropy of the initial state: alter several of these even slightly and there are no stars, no carbon, no chemistry. Physicists who are not remotely religious — Martin Rees in Just Six Numbers, Paul Davies in The Goldilocks Enigma — describe the situation in exactly these terms. The fact of the fine-tuning is not in dispute; its explanation is.

The Qur'an invites precisely this kind of looking: "He who created seven heavens in layers. You do not see in the creation of the Most Merciful any inconsistency. So return your vision to the sky: do you see any breaks? Then return your vision twice again. Your vision will return to you humbled while it is fatigued" (Qur'an 67:3–4). And: "Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of night and day are signs for those of understanding" (Qur'an 3:190).

The argument's honest limit should be stated by its advocates rather than left to opponents. Fine-tuning is an inference to the best explanation, not a deduction. Precise calibration towards a specific outcome is what intelligent selection characteristically produces and what chance characteristically does not — but that is a judgement about likelihood, not a proof. It strengthens the case for a willing Creator; it does not carry the case alone, and anyone presenting it as mathematical certainty has overstated it.

Something often missed is that the reasoning itself yields attributes, without appealing to any scripture.

The cause of time cannot be inside time, so it is eternal — timeless in itself. The cause of space and matter cannot be spatial or material. The terminus of the dependency chain cannot itself be dependent, so it is necessary and self-sufficient. The source of all causal power is powerful. And there is an argument for will: if the cause were a mechanical condition eternally present, its effect would be eternally present too, since a sufficient cause that has always obtained produces an effect that has always obtained. A universe that began from an eternal cause therefore points to a cause that acts by choice rather than by necessity — that is, something with will.

There is also an argument for oneness. Two necessary beings would have to differ in something in order to be two; but a necessary being has no unrealised potential and no parts to differ in, and each would limit the other, which is incompatible with being unlimited.

Set that list beside the Qur'an's description: "Say: He is Allah, One. Allah, the Self-Sufficient. He neither begets nor is begotten, and there is none comparable to Him" (Qur'an 112). And: "He is the First and the Last, the Ascendant and the Intimate" (Qur'an 57:3). Reason arrives at one, eternal, uncaused, self-sufficient, powerful and willing; revelation states the same and adds what reason cannot reach on its own — that this being is merciful, that He speaks, and what He wants.

"Who created God?" This is the most common and it rests on a misreading of the premise. The claim is not that everything has a cause — a claim that would indeed be self-defeating — but that everything which begins to exist, or which is dependent, has a cause. God is by definition the being that does not begin and is not dependent, so the question asks what caused the uncaused. Note that every worldview terminates somewhere: the atheist alternative is an eternal or brute-fact universe. The question is not whether to stop, but whether the stopping point is coherent — and a contingent, changing, physical universe is a much stranger candidate for necessary existence than a timeless, immaterial, necessary being.

"Science will eventually explain it." Science describes the behaviour of what exists: it tells you how matter moves and how forces interact, in the language of laws that are themselves part of what needs explaining. "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and "why do the laws take this form?" are not questions a deeper physical law can answer, because any such law joins the set of things requiring explanation. This is not an appeal to gaps in current knowledge; it is a point about the kind of question being asked.

"The multiverse explains fine-tuning." It might, if it existed: enough universes with varied constants would make a life-permitting one unsurprising. Three problems. It is currently unobservable and untested, so accepting it on grounds of avoiding a designer is a philosophical preference rather than a scientific result. A multiverse-generating mechanism would itself be a physical system with specific properties and laws — contingent, and requiring the same explanation. And the dependency argument is untouched by the objection entirely: adding universes to the collection of dependent things enlarges the collection without making it independent.

"Quantum mechanics shows things happen without causes." Quantum events are probabilistic rather than uncaused. They occur within a structured vacuum, governed by laws, with determinate probability distributions — and the interpretation of quantum mechanics remains genuinely disputed among physicists, with fully deterministic interpretations still on the table. A radioactive decay whose timing is unpredictable is a long way from a universe with no cause.

Taken together, the reasoning reaches a definite conclusion. Nothing comes from nothing; nothing creates itself; a collection of dependent things cannot ground itself; an infinite regress cannot deliver the present; and the precise ordering of the universe points to a will rather than an accident. The terminus is a necessary, eternal, immaterial, powerful, willing being, one and not many.

It is worth being clear about the limits. This does not, by itself, get you to Islam. It gets you to theism — to the conclusion that a Creator exists and has roughly these attributes. What it does establish is that belief in God is not a retreat from reason; it is the position reason supports, and the burden of an alternative account falls on the person denying it.

The next question follows naturally, and the Qur'an poses it: if such a being exists and made us with the capacity to know Him, has He communicated? That is where the case turns from philosophy to evidence — to the Qur'an's own claims and to the life of the man who delivered it.

The Qur'anic passages are best read directly: 52:35–36, 21:30, 51:20–21, 3:190–191, 67:3–4, 112 and 57:3. They are short and they carry the whole structure of the argument.

For the modern Islamic presentation, Hamza Andreas Tzortzis's The Divine Reality: God, Islam and the Mirage of Atheism, and the Sapience Institute essays "Divine Certainty" and "Divine Link", both free at sapienceinstitute. org. For the classical formulation, al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers. For the fine-tuning data from non-religious physicists, Martin Rees's Just Six Numbers and Paul Davies's The Goldilocks Enigma. For the opposing case, Graham Oppy's Arguing About Gods is the most serious philosophical response and is worth reading alongside the rest.