Epigraph

God: there is no god but Him, the Ever Living, the Ever Watchful. Neither slumber nor sleep overtakes Him. All that is in the heavens and in the earth belongs to Him. Who is there that can intercede with Him except by His leave? He knows what is before them and what is behind them, but they do not comprehend any of His knowledge except what He wills. His throne extends over the heavens and the earth; it does not weary Him to preserve them both. He is the Most High, the Tremendous. (The Crown Verse of the Quran 2:255)

Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times

Creation and Sovereignty

In Islamic theology, Allah is recognized as the sole Creator and Sustainer of the universe, exercising absolute authority over all creation. This belief underscores that every aspect of existence is meticulously maintained by His will and command.

The Qur’an emphasizes Allah’s role as the originator of the heavens and the earth, asserting His dominion over all that exists. In Surah Al-A’raf (7:54), it is stated:

“Indeed, your Lord is Allah, who created the heavens and the earth in six days and then established Himself above the Throne. He covers the night with the day, chasing it rapidly; and [He created] the sun, the moon, and the stars, subjected by His command. Unquestionably, His is the creation and the command; blessed is Allah, Lord of the worlds.” Islam Awakened

This verse highlights that all elements of the cosmos operate under Allah’s directive, reflecting His supreme authority and control.

Continuous Maintenance

Allah’s sustenance of the universe is not a singular act but an ongoing process. Surah Al-Baqarah (2:255), known as Ayat al-Kursi, articulates this continuous guardianship:

“Allah! There is no god ˹worthy of worship˺ except Him, the Ever-Living, All-Sustaining. Neither drowsiness nor sleep overtakes Him. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth…” Quran

This passage conveys that Allah’s vigilance over creation is perpetual and unceasing, ensuring the stability and order of the universe.

Provision for All Creatures

Islamic teachings affirm that Allah provides sustenance to every living being. The Qur’an declares:

“There is no creature on earth whose sustenance is not undertaken by Allah.” en.alukah.net

This assurance encompasses all forms of life, signifying that Allah’s benevolence and provision are universal and all-encompassing.

Divine Will and Order

The concept of Tewafuq in Islam refers to the harmonious alignment and correlation observed in the universe, indicating a deliberate and purposeful design by Allah. This principle suggests that the intricate order and coherence in creation are manifestations of divine will, leaving no room for randomness or chance. Wikipedia

Conclusion

The Islamic perspective portrays Allah as the omnipotent Sustainer, whose continuous will and command uphold the existence and functionality of the universe. This belief fosters a sense of reliance, gratitude, and responsibility among believers, acknowledging that every facet of life is under divine care and supervision.

Ghazali’s Occasionalism

Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, an influential 11th-century Islamic theologian and philosopher, is renowned for his articulation of occasionalism—a metaphysical doctrine positing that all events are directly caused by God’s will, with no intrinsic causal power residing in created entities. This perspective challenges the notion of natural causality, asserting that what we perceive as cause-and-effect relationships are merely sequences orchestrated by divine intervention.

Al-Ghazali’s Critique of Philosophers

In his seminal work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-Falāsifa), al-Ghazali critiques the deterministic views of contemporary Islamic philosophers influenced by Aristotelian and Neoplatonic thought, such as Avicenna and al-Farabi. These philosophers advocated for a universe governed by inherent causal laws, suggesting that events unfold due to the essential properties of objects. Al-Ghazali contended that this perspective undermines God’s omnipotence and sovereignty.

The Doctrine of Occasionalism

Central to al-Ghazali’s occasionalism is the belief that God is the sole causal agent in the universe. He argued that attributing causal efficacy to created entities detracts from divine omnipotence. For instance, when fire comes into contact with cotton, the cotton burns not because of any inherent property of the fire, but because God directly causes the combustion at that moment. This viewpoint emphasizes that all events occur due to God’s immediate will, and the apparent regularities in nature are manifestations of His consistent governance.

Philosophical Implications

Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism has profound implications for understanding causality and the nature of reality. By denying intrinsic causal powers to created things, he posits a universe where predictability and natural laws are contingent upon God’s continuous will. This challenges the foundation of empirical observation and scientific inquiry, as the consistency observed in natural phenomena is not due to the objects themselves but to God’s habitual practice.

Debates and Legacy

Al-Ghazali’s ideas sparked significant debate among scholars and philosophers. Critics, such as the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), argued that occasionalism negates the possibility of human knowledge about the natural world, as it renders causality arbitrary and inscrutable. Despite such criticisms, al-Ghazali’s occasionalism profoundly influenced Islamic theology and philosophy, reinforcing a worldview centered on divine omnipotence and the contingency of creation.

In summary, al-Ghazali’s occasionalism presents a theological framework wherein God is the exclusive cause of all events, challenging the notion of inherent causality in created entities and emphasizing the direct and continual involvement of the divine in the unfolding of the universe.

Determinism in Physics and Philosophy

Almost three fourth of the academic philosophers in the West believe in determinism. What is determinism? According to Encyclopedia Britannica:

Determinism, in philosophy and science, the thesis that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable. Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.

Determinism in this sense is usually understood to be incompatible with free will, or the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe. Philosophers and scientists who deny the existence of free will on this basis are known as ‘hard’ determinists.

All atheist physicists and philosophers live their life as if they have free will and try to convince others of their ideas as if others had free will also but then choose to insist on their unshakeable belief in determinism.

The advent of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century introduced inherent uncertainties at the subatomic level, challenging the deterministic framework of classical physics. While many physicists, like Albert Einstein, maintained a belief in an underlying deterministic reality, famously stating, “God does not play dice with the universe,” others accepted the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics.

The Miracle of Light

The Qur’an describes Allah as Manifest as well as Transcendent and Hidden at the same time, in the verse quoted in the beginning of this article. It is in this duality that the relationship of religion and science is to be understood. If Laplace had been right in predicting the future accurately, not only there would have been no Personal God but also no ‘free will’ for mankind. But something beautiful yet commonplace, namely, each and every ray of light, defies the tall claims of Laplace.

The scientific conflict between particle and wave models of light has permeated the history of science for several centuries. The issue dates back to at least Newton. His careful investigations into the properties of light in the 1660s led to his discovery that white light consists of a mixture of colors. He struggled with a formulation of the nature of light, ultimately asserting in Opticks (1704) that light consists of a stream of ‘corpuscles,’ or particles. The wave model explains certain observed phenomena but the photoelectric phenomena are best explained by ‘corpuscle’ nature of light. If you have ever held a metal wire over a gas flame, you have borne witness to one of the great secrets of the universe. As the wire gets hotter, it begins to glow, to give off light. And the color of that light changes with temperature. A cooler wire gives off a reddish glow, while the hottest wires shine with a blue-white brilliance. What you are watching, as any high school physics student can tell you, is the transformation of one kind of energy (heat) into another (light). As the brighter. That’s because if there is more heat energy available, more light energy can be given off.

Why does the color of that light change with temperature? Throughout the nineteenth century, that deceptively simple question baffled the best minds of classical physics. As the wire gets hotter and hotter, the atoms within it move more rapidly. Maybe that causes the color (the wavelength) of the light to change? Well, that’s true, but there’s more to it. Every time classical physicists used their understanding of matter and energy to try to predict exactly which wavelengths of light should be given off by a hot wire, they got it wrong. At high temperatures, those classical predictions were dramatically wrong. Something didn’t make sense.

Max Planck, a German physicist, found a way to solve the problem. Physicists had always assumed that light, being a wave, could be emitted from an object at any wavelength and in any amount. Planck realized that for this phenomenon the particulate nature as suggested by Newton was the key. He proposed that light could only be released in little packets containing a precise amount of energy. He called these packets or ‘corpuscles’ of Newton as ‘quanta.’ All of a sudden, everything fell into place.

It was known that when some solids were struck by light, they emitted electrons. This phenomenon is called the photoelectric effect. Albert Einstein offered the best explanation of the photoelectric effect in a brilliant paper that eventually won him his Nobel Prize. He seized on the dual nature of light. Light was not only a waveform but is composed of individual quanta later called photons. This understanding of the dual nature of light was needed to explain some of the phenomena that had been observed in the study of light. The wave theory of light did not explain the photoelectric effect but conceptualizing the light to be also particle, beautifully solved this riddle.

Einstein proposed that the energy to eject a single electron from the plate came from a single quantum of light. That’s why a more intense light (more quanta) just ejects more electrons. But the energy in each of those packets, the quantum wallop if you will, is determined by the wavelength, the color, of the light. With one stroke of genius, Einstein had shown that Planck’s quanta were not just theoretical constructs. Light really could behave as if it were made of a stream of particles, today known as photons. This won him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.

“All of this might have been sensible and comforting were it not for the fact that light was already known to behave as if it were a wave! So many experiments already had shown that light could be diffracted, that light had a frequency and a wavelength, that light spread out like a wave on the surface of a pond. Could all those experiments be wrong? No, they were not. All of those experiments were right. Light was both a particle and a wave. It was both a continuous stream and a shower of discrete quantum packets. And that nonsensical result was just the beginning.

Classical physics had prepared everyone to think of physical events as governed by fixed laws, but the quantum Newtonian certainty. An object as simple as a mirror can show us why. A household mirror reflects about ninety-five percent of light hitting it. The other five percent passes right through. As long as we think of light as a Wave, a continuous stream of energy, it’s easy to visualize ninety-five percent reflection. But photons are indivisible – each individual photon must either be reflected or pass through the surface of the mirror. That means that for one hundred photons fired at the surface, ninety-five will bounce off but five will pass right through.

If we fire a series of one hundred photons at the mirror, can we tell in advance which will be the five that are going to pass through? Absolutely not. All photons of a particular wavelength are identical; there is nothing to distinguish one from the other. If we rig up an experiment in which we fire a single photon at our mirror, we cannot predict in advance what will happen, no matter how precise our knowledge of the system might be. Most of the time, that photon is going to come bouncing off; but one time out of twenty, on average, it’s going to go right through the mirror. There is nothing we can do, not even in principle, to figure out when that one chance in twenty is going to come up. It means that the outcome of each individual experiment is unpredictable in principle.”[i]

This is the limit of science or the limit of human knowledge that is implied among other human constraints in the Crown verse of the holy Quran:

God: there is no god but Him, the Ever Living, the Ever Watchful. Neither slumber nor sleep overtakes Him. All that is in the heavens and in the earth belongs to Him. Who is there that can intercede with Him except by His leave? He knows what is before them and what is behind them, but they do not comprehend any of His knowledge except what He wills. His throne extends over the heavens and the earth; it does not weary Him to preserve them both. He is the Most High, the Tremendous. (The Crown Verse of the Quran 2:255)

Any hopes that the strange uncertainty of quantum behavior would be confined to light were quickly destroyed when it became clear that the quantum theory had to be applied to explain the behavior of electrons also. Their behavior in any individual encounter, just like the photon fired at the mirror, cannot be predicted, not even in principle. The photoelectric effect was leading the physics community to quantum mechanics.

Just as the invention of the telescope dramatically broadened exploration of the Cosmos, so too the invention of the microscope opened the intricate world of the cell. The analysis of the frequencies of light emitted and absorbed by atoms was a principal impetus for the development of quantum mechanics. What had begun as a tiny loose end, a strange little problem in the relationship between heat and light, now is understood to mean that nothing is quite the way it had once seemed. The unfolding of quantum mechanics was, and still is, a drama of high suspense, as Heisenberg himself wrote:

“I remember discussions with Bohr (in 1927) which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair, and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighboring park, I repeated to myself again and again the question: ‘Can nature possibly be absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?’”[ii]

One hundred years after the discovery of the quantum, we can say that the answer is yes, that is exactly what nature is like. Just because science can explain so many unknowns doesn’t mean that it can explain everything, or that it can vanquish the unknowable. At its very core, in the midst of the ultimate constituents of matter and energy, the predictable causality that once formed the heart of classical physics breaks down. Deep down, nature is unknowable as the Transcendent God is Unknowable. This may be where the finite meets the Infinite, and by the very nature of the meeting point, it is hidden in mystery and awe, an enigma or a riddle never to be solved.

George Ellis’ Understanding of Quantum Mechanics And Light

The atheist physicist and philosophers, guided by their theology, choose to ignore the miracle of every photon and ray of light and dismiss the quantum physics as only suggesting a probabilistic reality and go their happy way back to their determinism. The agnostics and theists are guided by their personal experience of free will and of billions of others, take it as fundamental, and interpret quantum mechanics in that light.

To explain this let us meet George Francis Rayner Ellis. He was born on August 11, 1939, in Johannesburg, South Africa, is a distinguished cosmologist and mathematician renowned for his extensive contributions to the understanding of the universe’s large-scale structure. His work encompasses theoretical physics, cosmology, and the philosophy of science, positioning him as a leading figure in these fields.

Early Life and Education

Ellis’s academic journey began at the University of Cape Town, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics with distinction in 1960. He furthered his studies at St John’s College, Cambridge, obtaining a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and theoretical physics in 1964 under the supervision of Dennis W. Sciama. During his time at Cambridge, Ellis was actively involved in rowing, reflecting his diverse interests beyond academics. Wikipedia

Academic and Professional Career

After completing his doctorate, Ellis remained at Cambridge as a research fellow and later as a lecturer in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. In 1973, he co-authored the seminal work The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with Stephen Hawking, a publication that has become foundational in the field of cosmology. The following year, Ellis returned to South Africa, accepting a professorship in applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He served in this capacity until his retirement in 2005, after which he was appointed Professor Emeritus. Wikipedia

Research Contributions

Ellis’s research has significantly advanced the understanding of anisotropic cosmologies, inhomogeneous universes, and the philosophical implications of cosmology. His work often explores the intersection of science and philosophy, delving into topics such as the emergence of complexity and the functioning of the human mind. Ellis has also been an active participant in debates concerning the philosophy of science, particularly critiquing overly reductionist approaches in physics. thenew.institute

Advocacy and Honors

Beyond his scientific endeavors, Ellis has been a vocal advocate for social justice. During the apartheid era in South Africa, he opposed the regime’s policies and was involved in efforts to address social inequalities. In recognition of his contributions to science and society, Ellis was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2004, honoring his work that bridges science and spirituality. He has also received numerous other accolades, including the Star of South Africa Medal in 1999 and election as a Fellow of the British Royal Society in 2007. Wikipedia

Legacy

George Ellis’s multifaceted career has left an indelible mark on both the scientific community and broader society. His interdisciplinary approach, combining rigorous scientific inquiry with philosophical and ethical considerations, continues to inspire and influence contemporary discussions in cosmology and the philosophy of science.

Let us hear what he has to say about quantum physics and free will:

The biggest mystery of the quantum mechanics is the double slit experiment. So, now you got to spend ten minutes to understand it and then go back to a quote from George Ellis in the above video and I am paraphrasing a little: If you reduce the intensity of light source, so that you are shooting one photon at a time, scientists cannot, even in principle, detect as to where on the screen each photon will land.

Now, demystify the double slit experiment from one of the best quantum physics teachers, Prof. James Al Khalili:

It is ironic that the mystery of double slit experiment has not given atheist scientists and philosophers any degree of humility and a large majority among them, have continued to insist on their commitment to determinism.

Epilogue

The math and equations of quantum physics are science and there is consensus in that area. But, when it comes to interpretation of quantum mechanics or what reality they represent, there are at least eight different interpretations: Different interpretations of quantum mechanics.

In some sense these interpretations are like religion, each believer is happy in his or her theology.

Ghazali’s occasionalism had been losing ground since Averroes or Ibn Rushd in the Muslim Spain and since renaissance in the Western Europe, until 1920s when quantum mechanics began to develop. I hope and pray that with increasing knowledge, his occasionalism and God’s sovereignty will keep on rising even in the scientific arena.

---

References

[i] Kenneth R Miller. Finding Darwin’s God. Cliff Street Books (Harper Collins), paper back edition 2000, p. 199-200

[ii] David Pepper, Frank Webster and George Revill. Environmentalism: Critical Concepts. Routledge, 2003. Page 148.

Archives