By Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times

Qur’anic Foundations: A World Sustained by God’s Will

In Islamic theology, the conviction that nothing occurs except by God’s will permeates scripture and daily language. Muslims often say “Inshallah” (if God wills) when speaking of future plans, instinctively acknowledging that every outcome depends on Allah thequran.love. The Qur’an repeatedly underscores this worldview of absolute divine agency. It portrays Allah not as a distant clockmaker but as the intimate, moment-to-moment sustainer of all reality. For example, it declares: “Indeed, God holds the heavens and the earth, lest they cease. And if they should vanish, no one could hold them back after Him.” In another verse, after the Prophet cast a handful of sand in battle, God reminds the believers: “You did not throw when you threw, but God threw,” a striking affirmation that even ostensibly human actions are in truth effectuated by God. Dozens of such verses drive home three core themes:

• No Independent Causality: Created things have no autonomous power. Every effect flows directly from Allah. “The outcome of every affair is with God” (Qur’an 31:22).
• Continuous Divine Action: The cosmos is perpetually sustained and renewed by God’s command. “Every day He is engaged in an affair” (Qur’an 55:29) – meaning creation is an ongoing act, not a one-time event.
• Absolute Sovereignty: From a leaf falling to a heart beating, each event manifests God’s will. Nothing in the heavens or earth occurs outside His decree and knowledge.

This Qur’anic worldview lays the groundwork for what later theologians would call occasionalism. In essence, the sacred text leaves no room for “nature” to operate on autopilot. Instead, nature is a theater of divine will, a system of signs (ayat) pointing beyond themselves to God. Al-Ghazali, the great 11th-century scholar, took these scriptural ideas to their logical conclusion: since God is omniscient (all-knowing) and omnipotent (all-powerful), nothing can happen independently of His knowledge or power. If something had its own causal power, how would that square with God’s all-encompassing knowledge and control? Al-Ghazali’s doctrine of Occasionalism is essentially the metaphysics of “Inshallah.” It is an attempt to rigorously explain reality as the Qur’an depicts it – utterly contingent on God at every moment.

Al-Ghazali’s Occasionalism: God, the Only True Cause

Occasionalism in Islamic philosophy is the view that God alone is the true cause behind all events, while what we call “causes” in nature are merely occasions for God’s action thequran.love. Al-Ghazali articulated this doctrine in his landmark work Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers) as a direct response to philosophers who believed in inherent causality in things. In Ghazali’s analysis, to say fire burns cotton or bread nourishes is shorthand for saying that God causes burning when cotton meets flame, and God gives nourishment through bread. The entities themselves have no independent efficacy. He argued that allowing natural causation as an autonomous force would compromise two fundamental attributes of God: omnipotence and omniscience thequran.love thequran.love. If “fire” could burn on its own, independent of God, then God’s power over that event would not be total, nor His knowledge of it meaningfully active – a notion utterly inadmissible in Islamic theology thequran.love. Thus, Al-Ghazali insists every link in the causal chain is forged by God anew. When a billiard ball strikes another, it is not transferring momentum by its own nature; rather, God recreates the motion of the second ball at the moment of impact thequran.love thequran.love. When our arm moves, it is not our mind pushing it directly, but God producing that motion as we intend itthequran.love thequran.love. In Ghazali’s oft-cited illustration, fire does not inherently set cotton ablaze – Allah causes the cotton to combust at the moment of contact thequran.love.

This view was developed within the Ash‘arite school of theology and was aimed at maximizing the glory and freedom of God. It safeguards miracles – since there are no “natural laws” binding God, He can make anything happen without constraint thequran.love thequran.love. It also emphasizes a radical dependence of creation on the Creator: as the Qur’an’s famous Ayat al-Kursi (Verse of the Throne) says, God “sustains the heavens and the earth, and their preservation does not tire Him” thequran.love. Al-Ghazali takes this to mean that at each instant every atom and every soul persists only because God is actively keeping it in being thequran.love thequran.love. This is sometimes called continuous creation. One medieval Ash‘ari analogy likens the world to a ball of light that must be re-lit at every moment – if the supply (the divine will) stopped even for a second, reality would vanish thequran.love thequran.love. In modern terms, we might say the cosmos is running on God’s “electricity” at all times, not on battery power. Ghazali thoroughly intertwines metaphysics with theology: “The world is like a grand theater where God is the only actor, and what we call ‘characters’ (creatures) are merely costumes or instruments through which the sole Actor works.” thequran.love. By eliminating secondary causes, this view exalts God’s role as the immediate sustainer of every moment of existence thequran.love.

Critics like Ibn Rushd (Averroes) objected that such occasionalism makes the world unintelligible and undermines science thequran.love thequran.love. After all, if anything is possible at any moment (so long as God wills it), why should nature be consistent enough to study? In practice, however, Al-Ghazali did not deny the appearance of stable causal patterns – he acknowledged that God’s habits are regular, which is why we can learn how to plant crops or set bones thequran.love. But crucially, these natural laws are descriptive, not prescriptive thequran.love. They describe God’s customary way of acting, not an autonomous machinery. Ghazali’s stance is a theological “critical realism”: science can discover how events regularly unfold, but the ultimate why lies in God’s will thequran.love thequran.love. Thus, Muslims were still encouraged to investigate nature (indeed, Ghazali himself studied medicine and astronomy), but with the humility that those natural laws rest on God’s constant underpinning. This nuanced view allowed Islamic theology to maintain both the rational study of nature and its complete dependence on God.

Convergence with Modern Science and Philosophy

Centuries after Al-Ghazali, the questions he grappled with – about causality, determinism, and contingency – resurfaced in modern science and philosophy. Remarkably, many cutting-edge discoveries and ideas in the 20th and 21st centuries echo the occasionalist intuition that what we see as “cause and effect” might be a surface illusion, and that a deeper agency or law underpins phenomena. Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism, once dismissed by some as a medieval peculiarity, is finding striking resonance with contemporary science, from quantum physics to cosmology and even simulation theory. While science and theology use different methodologies, when their insights are placed side by side, a cohesive picture emerges: a universe that is empirically lawful yet metaphysically contingent, consistent in its observable patterns yet ultimately reliant on an external Sustainer. Below, we explore several domains where modern thought and Ghazali’s doctrine meet on common ground.

Quantum Mechanics: The Collapse of Causality and Nonlocality

Perhaps the most dramatic convergence occurs in quantum mechanics, which has upended classical assumptions about causation and determinism. In classical physics (Newton’s universe), causes lead to effects in a rigid, predictable way – a paradigm not unlike the Aristotelian causality Ghazali critiqued thequran.love. But quantum experiments have shown that at the fundamental level, nature is probabilistic and sometimes seemingly “acyclical.” Events do not always follow from prior states in any necessary way. A prime example is radioactive decay: we cannot predict exactly when a given atom will decay; there is no hidden clockwork forcing it to happen at a set time thequran.love. Similarly, in the famous double-slit experiment, individual electrons land at random spots on a screen even though a clear interference pattern emerges in aggregate. Physicists have had to accept that uncertainty and indeterminacy are built into physical law. As one explanation succinctly puts it, if you fire photons at a half-silvered mirror, about 95% pass through and 5% reflect – but no one can predict which particular photon will do what. There is no deterministic cause deciding each photon’s fate; only a statistical distribution is fixed.

This quantum indeterminacy is a scientific fact that resonates with Ghazali’s principle that no secondary cause necessitates its effect. The chain of cause and effect has a looseness at the joints. Al-Ghazali had argued that observing A followed by B does not prove A inherently produces B – God could always will a different outcome thequran.love. Quantum physics illustrates this vividly: the same initial condition can lead to multiple outcomes, and nothing in “A” dictates which occurs. As scholars have noted, “since quantum mechanics doesn’t specify why one outcome happens instead of another in a single event, it doesn’t rule out that a divine will is selecting outcomes”thequran.lovethequran.love. Physics calls such events “random,” but an occasionalist could say “random” is simply how divine choice appears to those ignorant of God’s willthequran.lovethequran.love. This idea isn’t provable by science (which, by design, brackets out supernatural explanations), but it is fully compatible with the scientific datathequran.lovethequran.love. In other words, quantum theory has reopened a conceptual space for thinking about divine discretion in nature. As long as physical laws provide only probabilities, one can imagine God deciding each quantum outcome within those boundsthequran.lovethequran.love. Some theologians like John Polkinghorne and Robert John Russell have indeed proposed that God might “guide” indeterminate quantum events to influence the course of nature without breaking any laws – a thesis often called “quantum divine action.” An occasionalist would go even further: God determines every event, down to every quantum collapse, as part of His continuous creationthequran.lovethequran.love.

Another quantum phenomenon is entanglement, described by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance.” Entangled particles exhibit coordinated behavior with no known physical connection. Measure one particle here, and its partner (which could be on the other side of the world) is instantly found to have a complementary state. This violates the principle of local realism (the idea that objects have their own properties and no influence travels faster than light)thequran.lovethequran.love. After decades of tests, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics honored experiments by Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger that proved nature is not locally real – no local cause can fully explain the correlations observedthequran.lovethequran.love. In scientific terms, there are no “hidden variables” in each particle that predetermine the joint outcome; and no signal passes between them at measurementthequran.lovethequran.love. From a classical view, it is as if when we check particle A, particle B “just happens” to have the matching value, with nothing in the intervening space causing itthequran.lovethequran.love. This is a breathtaking result: the universe allows coordinated events with no observable causal link.

Philosophically, entanglement bears an uncanny resemblance to Ghazali’s vision. In occasionalism, when fire touches cotton and the cotton burns, it is not because the fire physically caused it but because God caused both the touching and the burning togetherthequran.lovethequran.love. In entanglement, when particle A is measured and particle B “magically” reflects that, one could likewise say the outcomes were coordinated by a hidden unity beyond spacetime. In fact, some physicists favor interpretations like Bohm’s pilot-wave or a single holistic wavefunction precisely to restore a kind of underlying unity to these disparate eventsthequran.lovethequran.love. An occasionalist can naturally add: that underlying unity is the will of one Creator. It’s hard not to hear echoes of Ghazali when scientists report that entangled particles “do not have independent properties determined ahead of time”thequran.love. Al-Ghazali said as much of all things: creatures have no fixed powers or natures independent of God’s continual bestowalthequran.lovethequran.love. One science writer noted that entangled particles seem to “transcend space” as a single systemthequran.love. Ghazali taught that the cosmos is a single system held in the single hand of God, not a bunch of billiard balls bumping independentlythequran.lovethequran.love. The nonlocal unity of entanglement thus provides a striking parallel to the occasionalist idea that all events are unified by originating in one divine actthequran.lovethequran.love. It is as if physics has discovered that “separate” things are secretly connected – a notion a theist might comfortably attribute to “God’s private wiring behind the scenes”thequran.lovethequran.love.

To be clear, quantum mechanics does not and cannot prove God’s action – it remains agnostic and can only describe the phenomena. But these phenomena have “undermined the idea of self-sufficient local causation” on which a strict materialism was builtthequran.lovethequran.love. They invite us to think in terms of contingency and deeper causes, much as Ghazali did. As one summary puts it: “Reality does not run on deterministic laws, but on contingent events willed by God, moment by moment”thequran.love. That could easily be mistaken for a theologian’s statement, but it was written in context of quantum findings. In fact, multiple researchers have explicitly drawn the parallel: Karen Harding in a 1993 paper observed that both the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics and Ghazali’s occasionalism see objects as having “no inherent properties and no independent existence” apart from measurement or God’s actthequran.lovethequran.love. When even scientists concede that “mystery is woven into the fabric of the cosmos” at the quantum levelthequran.lovethequran.love, Al-Ghazali would smile and remind us that this is what the Qur’an taught – that reality is ultimately ghaib, unseen, and only Allah’s constant grace “upholds the heavens and the earth”thequran.lovethequran.love.

Cosmology: A Universe with a Beginning and Sustained Existence

Modern cosmology has also vindicated key aspects of the Islamic occasionalist perspective. Cosmological discoveries in the 20th century (notably the Big Bang theory) established that the universe had a temporal beginning. Time and space themselves emerged from an initial singularity. This overturned the old Aristotelian notion of an eternal, self-existing universe – a notion that medieval Muslim philosophers like Avicenna held and which Al-Ghazali vehemently argued against. Ghazali insisted that the world was created in time by God’s decree, a view for which he was ridiculed by some of his contemporaries. Yet today, the dominant scientific model affirms a cosmic beginning roughly 13.8 billion years agothequran.love. Science cannot declare ex nihilo creation, but it does suggest that the laws of physics break down at the start of time, beyond which a cause is needed. To a believer, this aligns neatly with the Qur’anic assertion of a created origin: “He (Allah) is the First and the Last” (57:3) and “the heavens and earth were joined, then We clove them asunder” (21:30). It also resonates with Ghazali’s triumph over philosophers on the question of the universe’s past eternitythequran.love. In this sense, modern cosmology removed a major philosophical objection to occasionalism – the idea of an eternal, self-sustaining universe. Instead, the universe appears radically contingent, having come into being from nothing physical, which is exactly what an occasionalist would expect: creation is a gratuitous act of God.

Moreover, cosmology raises the question of what sustains the universe in existence after its inception. Physics can describe the expansion of space, the formation of galaxies, etc., given initial conditions – but it does not answer why there is something rather than nothing at each moment. Why doesn’t the universe collapse back into non-being? In theology, this is answered by God’s continuous conservation. The Qur’an’s verse of the Throne (2:255) explicitly states that preserving the cosmos does not fatigue Godthequran.love. Al-Ghazali interprets this as meaning that at every instant, God is actively holding the world upthequran.lovethequran.love. Interestingly, early modern philosophers in Europe like Malebranche (a French Cartesian thinker) came to a similar idea, calling God’s sustaining activity a “continued creation”thequran.lovethequran.love. Malebranche reasoned that if God must keep things existing, He might as well be re-creating them each moment – which is virtually Ghazali’s viewthequran.lovethequran.love. In physics, while we don’t talk of “continued creation,” we do observe that many features of the universe seem exquisitely fine-tuned to allow existence and life (forces balanced, constants set to just-right values). Such observations have led some scientists to posit multiverses or anthropic principles; but for a theist, they are suggestive of a sustaining intelligence keeping the cosmic story going in a stable, life-permitting way. The stability of natural “laws” is not seen as an argument against God, but as a sign of God’s rational habit in governing the cosmosthequran.lovethequran.love. In Ghazali’s terms, we live in a universe where fire usually burns cotton because God chooses consistency – yet He could do otherwise, and one day (as miracles or the end of the world) He will. The laws of physics are simply God’s customary practice (sunnatullah), which He maintains for our benefit and can suspend at willthequran.lovethequran.love. Modern cosmology doesn’t contradict this; if anything, by highlighting the contingency and precision of our universe, it reinforces the notion that the cosmos is not a brute fact but could have been otherwise – a key tenet of occasionalist thoughtthequran.lovethequran.love.

The Simulation Hypothesis: A Tech Metaphor for Divine Sustenance

One of the most intriguing bridges between contemporary thought and occasionalism comes from an unlikely place: computer science and the simulation hypothesis. This hypothesis, popularized by philosopher Nick Bostrom and by science fiction like The Matrix, proposes that perhaps our entire reality is a sophisticated computer simulation run by some higher intelligencethequran.lovethequran.love. While initially far-fetched sounding, serious arguments have been made that if civilizations can create realistic simulations, we might ourselves be in one. Interestingly, this idea has become a secular analog of the age-old religious conception of a world sustained by a higher powerthequran.lovethequran.love. Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism maps onto the simulation metaphor with astonishing precision, as writers have begun to note. Both envision a world that is non-autonomous and contingent – dependent on an external agent (God or the Simulator) at all timesthequran.lovethequran.love. Both assert that the internal entities have no intrinsic causality: just as a video game character cannot independently cause an explosion (it’s the code and processor doing it), a physical object cannot cause an effect on its own in occasionalism – it’s God “processing” each eventthequran.lovethequran.love. In a simulated universe, if the program stops, the world freezes or disappears; likewise, in occasionalism, were God to cease willing the world, it would instantly cease to existthequran.lovethequran.love. The simulation paradigm thus offers a modern visual model for the idea that “we live in a reality that is being actively calculated or rendered by an outside power”thequran.lovethequran.love.

Consider how easily one can translate terms: The Simulator is analogous to God, the program or code corresponds to the divine will or laws (sunnah) that God usually follows, and the hardware sustaining the simulation is like God’s creative command “Be!” (kun fayakun) that continually keeps the world in beingthequran.lovethequran.love. In both cases, the world is a sort of virtual reality. From the inside perspective, things follow consistent rules (physics), but from the outside perspective, those rules are just choices of the Programmer – they could be altered at any time. In a simulation, miracles are mundane: the programmer can change any variable or suspend any rule (gravity, time, etc.) with a keystrokethequran.lovethequran.love. Similarly, in occasionalism, miracles are expected as perfectly possible events – God can at any moment override the usual course of nature without any contradiction, since natural “laws” have no binding power over Himthequran.lovethequran.love. What is a bug or a cheat code in a game is a karamah or a muʿjiza in theological terms. This point was made explicitly by Ghazali: “no limitation on divine power is justified, unless a state of affairs is logically inconsistent”, meaning if God wills, fire might not burn or people might survive without foodthequran.love. The simulation analogy makes that idea intuitive – a coder can easily suspend combustion or remove the need for eating in a simulation; so an Omnipotent God can do so in realitythequran.lovethequran.love.

This parallel has not gone unnoticed. Commentators have suggested that “if we inhabit a simulation, the role of the simulator mirrors the divine agent in occasionalism”thequran.lovethequran.love. Just as the simulation hypothesis forces nonreligious thinkers to consider a world where mind and information underlie matter, occasionalism asserts that a cosmic Mind underlies all physical events. In both frameworks, the world we experience is “not the ultimate reality but a dependent reality” sustained by an external will. This is why some have provocatively called simulation theory “a new kind of religion” or a bridge for skeptics to grasp the idea of God. If one can imagine that our high-tech descendants might create conscious simulations, it’s not such a leap to imagine that God created us in a kind of “divine simulation” – not literally running on a computer, of course, but ontologically similar, with God’s knowledge as the substrate and His command as the code. In Islamic terms, God said “Be” and the cosmos is – this kun fayakun command is like the single, high-level instruction that generates the entire program of reality.

In this view, God is “the Divine Programmer” and reality “His code,” suggesting that our consciousness is like a variable running within that code thequran.love. The metaphor is powerful because it speaks to a digital-age audience: just as Neo in The Matrix had to awaken to a higher reality, the Qur’an invites believers to “see beyond the veil” of cause and effect to the higher Reality sustaining it thequran.love thequran.love. The simulation analogy has proven “remarkably fruitful” as a teaching tool – it takes the mystery of occasionalism and gives it a sci-fi wrapper. It also underscores the contingency of the world: a simulated world has no existence on its own, only what the programmer continuously provides. In the same way, occasionalism says our universe is not a self-running watch but a story unfolding in real time by the will of God. As a recent essay concluded, “the simulation hypothesis as a metaphor underscores the contingency, fragility, and purpose-driven nature of the universe, themes that lie at the heart of religious worldviews” thequran.love thequran.love. It helps modern minds grasp why an ancient theologian would insist that the world is like a constantly rendered scene on God’s “screen,” rather than an independent reality.

Many Worlds and Multiple Possibilities: Divine Freedom Illustrated

Another intersection arises from interpretations of quantum mechanics that involve multiple universes, such as the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI). MWI posits that whenever a quantum event has multiple possible outcomes, all outcomes actually occur, each in its own branching universe. This results in an ever-splitting multiverse containing all possible histories. At first glance, this idea – a plethora of parallel worlds – seems very distant from Islamic theology. Yet, conceptually it highlights two themes that are central to occasionalism: the undermining of “necessary” causation and the existence of alternative outcomes. In classical thought, if cause A occurs, effect B must follow (barring interference). Ghazali rejected that necessity, saying God could cause B or not, as He wills. MWI similarly says from one state A, the evolution can produce multiple effect-outcomes (B and C and D in different branches) rather than one predetermined result. In both views, what happens is not the only thing that could have happened – reality has built-in flexibility. Ghazali would phrase it as “God could have decreed otherwise”; MWI says “the other outcome does happen, just not in this world.” The philosophical message is concordant: there is no single necessary course of events. This undermines the old determinism that troubled Ghazali’s sense of God’s freedom.

Furthermore, occasionalism holds that at any given moment, many outcomes are possible because God is not constrained by prior historythequran.love. Al-Ghazali famously argued it’s perfectly possible, if God wills, that fire does not burn or that a living person not die despite lethal injurythequran.lovethequran.love. These are not impossible, just unusual because God generally upholds consistency. MWI provides a vivid if extreme illustration of all possibilities realized: for every quantum event (and by extension every macroscopic situation, in some views), the universe splits such that every permissible outcome actually occurs in some branchthequran.lovethequran.love. It’s as if the multiverse “writes” every story that could be written. One might whimsically interpret this in theological terms: rather than God choosing one path each time, God creates every path in an extravagant display of creativitythequran.lovethequran.love. Of course, standard Islamic theology doesn’t claim multiple simultaneous universes. But the exercise of imagination here is instructive: it amplifies the concept of God’s creative freedom. If even physics entertains “all outcomes happen somewhere,” it underscores how absolutely unbound the divine will is in principle. Our world is just one manifestation; God could have made it otherwise – MWI drives home that point by suggesting other versions of events do exist elsewherethequran.lovethequran.love.

The multiverse idea also resonates with the notion that God’s knowledge encompasses all possibilities, not just the actualized ones. Islamic theology has long held that Allah knows not only what is, but what could be under any circumstances (even “counterfactual” scenarios). The idea of parallel worlds where each possible outcome occurs is like a dramatic picture of all possibilities laid out. It’s intriguing to note that some thinkers have mused: perhaps God, in His overflowing generosity, actualizes every morally sufficient story – though this is speculative theology, not doctrinethequran.lovethequran.love. What’s valuable here is how MWI helps reframe occasionalism in a contemporary idiom. It forces questions like: if there are many universes, does God will them all? If He does, then divine providence must extend across a vast configuration space of outcomesthequran.lovethequran.love. This is a new way to consider God’s will, but it’s not so far from Ghazali’s insistence that nothing is too “far” for God’s power. Even the existence of bizarre or seemingly “unideal” branches (where, say, evil triumphs in some timeline) can prompt reflections on the nature of divine wisdom and justice – issues theologians have long debated in the context of theodicy. Interestingly, some philosophers have used many-worlds to address the problem of evil by suggesting that every morally good choice and every horrendous outcome both occur in different branches, so creation as a whole realizes all potentials (this is a highly speculative idea). While such musings go beyond Ghazali, they show how the multiverse concept is stimulating new conversations about divine action and contingency.

In practical terms, MWI is usually taken as a metaphor in theological discussion rather than a literal truth to be adopted. It helps illustrate occasionalism’s core insight: “the world as we see it is just one of many ways it could be, and it exists each moment only by the specific choice of the Divine.” Even if one doubts the physics of Many Worlds, this takeaway is valuable. It reminds us that from an Islamic perspective, the course of history is contingent on God’s choice at every moment – He selects, from the range of what is possible, what actually happens. The multiverse dramatizes this by envisioning other histories playing out elsewhere. In the end, both MWI and occasionalism challenge a simplistic, linear notion of causality and highlight the primacy of some deeper principle (the wavefunction in physics, the will of God in theology) that underlies the myriad events. As one writer put it, “exploring MWI alongside al-Ghazali’s occasionalism invites us to imagine a reality where every flicker of possibility is acknowledged – either by existing in a parallel universe or by lying within the boundless power of the Divine.” It’s a powerful imaginative exercise that ultimately reinvigorates occasionalism, showing it not as a quaint relic but as a framework that can engage even the strangest implications of modern physics.

Philosophical Echoes: Hume, Causality, and Critical Realism

Beyond physics, Ghazali’s ideas also anticipated philosophical developments. In the 18th century, David Hume famously argued that we never actually see causation – only sequences of events. We observe that B follows A regularly, but we do not perceive any necessary force that makes B have to follow A. Therefore, the necessity of causation is a habit of mind, not an empirical fact. This skeptical view rocked the Enlightenment’s faith in reason and was a stepping stone to Kant’s critical philosophy. Notably, Hume’s analysis is essentially a secular restatement of Ghazali’s point (though Hume arrived at it independently and with different aims). Ghazali had said centuries earlier that what we take as causal necessity is just the regularity of Allah’s habit – we assume tomorrow will be like today, but that assumption isn’t logically or empirically certain. The uniformity of nature is, for Ghazali, an act of God’s will, not a built-in guarantee. Hume stripped the issue of God and simply said the uniformity of nature cannot be rationally justified – we expect it only because that’s what we’re used to. He even used examples like a billiard ball’s motion or fire burning something, noting we only see conjunction, not an actual “power” transferring – language that almost mirrors Al-Ghazali’s fire-and-cotton examplethequran.lovethequran.love. Thus, one of Western philosophy’s great insights – the problematization of causality and induction – can be seen as converging with Ghazali’s insights from a different angle. Both underscore a kind of epistemic humility: the link between events is not as ironclad as we naively think. This humility is central to what Ian Barbour and other philosophers of science call “critical realism” – the view that our scientific laws are true models of how phenomena relate, but not necessarily the ultimate story of why those relations hold. Science describes the patterns; metaphysics (or theology) might seek the deeper cause. Ghazali would agree: he encouraged studying the patterns (the how of God’s habit) but never forgetting the deeper why (God’s will) thequran.love.

Another philosophical echo is found in the mind-body problem. Early modern thinkers struggled to explain how an immaterial mind could cause physical motion (like willing an arm to rise). Malebranche solved it by saying: the mind doesn’t cause the body – God does, on the occasion of the mind’s decision. This is basically applying occasionalism to the mental realm. Ghazali’s occasionalism was encompassing enough that, although his primary aim wasn’t to solve mind-body interaction (it was to defend miracles and omnipotence), it naturally implies the same solution: all causation, whether physical or mental, is God’s direct act. Thus, even a modern philosophical puzzle finds resolution under Ghazalian theology: the interface between soul and body is managed by God, the universal intermediary. This idea intriguingly resonates with some interpretations of quantum consciousness, where mind might influence outcomes (as hinted by Wigner’s interpretation). If one were to take that seriously, occasionalism already has a slot for a “mind” outside the system affecting it – except that mind is God’s mind in Ghazali’s model. These are speculative connections, but they illustrate how fertile the occasionalist model is for integration: it provides a ready framework to assimilate various phenomena (mental causation, quantum observer effects, etc.) by positing one fundamental cause behind all of them – the will of a unitary, conscious Being.

Finally, we should note that Occasionalism does not diminish the value or reality of secondary causes from a practical standpoint. Al-Ghazali maintained that creation is real and important – it’s just not independent. Modern science, too, operates on the assumption of consistency and has achieved extraordinary success doing so. Occasionalism can happily affirm that success: it sees scientific laws as accurate descriptions of God’s normal sustenance of the worldthequran.lovethequran.love. What it denies is that these laws have a life of their own. Interestingly, even scientists acknowledge there are limits to a purely reductionist, causality-only view. Complexity theory and chaos theory note that even classical systems can be unpredictable in practice; Gödel’s theorem and other results show limits to what can be known or determined. These hints of indeterminacy or limit align with the idea that the universe is not a closed, self-explaining system. Occasionalism, without undercutting science’s domain, simply says: the system is open to a higher reality. It’s a theological interpretation that complements the empirical picture. As a recent commentator put it, science and theology “can converge on a sense of wonder about a reality that is at once lawful and profoundly dependent on something deeper.” In this convergence, Al-Ghazali’s doctrine of constant divine involvement emerges not as an archaic quirk, but as perhaps the most coherent framework for uniting faith and reason in our understanding of the cosmos.

Conclusion: A Coherent Vision of a Contingent Universe

From the Qur’anic verses of omnipotence to the quantum laboratory, from medieval philosophical debates to the latest simulation speculations, a common theme unfolds: our universe, with all its regularities, is fundamentally contingent. Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism captures this theme in a robust theological vision: reality is ayb (a sign) that points beyond itself at every moment. It is a vision in which science and religion need not clash, because they are concerned with different levels of explanation – the proximate patterns and the ultimate cause. Modern science, especially physics, has increasingly shown that the intuitive, mechanistic causality we assumed is not the whole story: uncertainty, nonlocal connections, and the origin of existence itself all gesture toward deeper questions. Occasionalism answers those questions by positing a single, simple answer: God’s continuous creative will. This does not invalidate science – it gives science a richer metaphysical context. We can rejoice in discovering the equations of electromagnetism or evolution of stars, knowing that these are how God usually operates His cosmos. But we also remain open to the idea that nature’s laws have no existence apart from God’s command. They are, in a sense, the “customs of the King.” And just as a king can suspend his realm’s usual order for a wise reason, God can and has produced wonders that defy all expectations.

The coherence of occasionalism lies in its unification of all reality under one principle. It elegantly ties together God’s attributes (He is truly Almighty and All-Knowing of every detail) with the existence of the world (which is because He wills it), with the patterns in the world (which are how He wills it habitually), and with the marvels that occasionally pierce those patterns (which are special acts of His will). It also provides a meaningful framework for human life: our freedom and moral responsibility exist, but even they are gifts sustained by God. As the Ash‘arites explained with the doctrine of kasb (acquisition), we “acquire” our acts at the moment God creates them, allowing for moral accountability under divine sovereigntythequran.lovethequran.love. In an age of anxiety about randomness and drift in a cold cosmos, occasionalism refreshingly asserts that purpose and meaning flow into the world at each instant from a purposeful Creator. The world is not an accident; it’s a deliberate, ongoing act.

Importantly, this worldview finds unexpected allies in contemporary thought. Quantum physics shows a world not locked down by deterministic gears – a world open to choices at the foundational level. Cosmology shows a world that had a beginning and thus begs for a transcendent cause. Simulation theory shows how a complex world could depend entirely on an external intelligence, making the idea of continuous divine governance more conceivable in analogy. Even the multiverse concept, strange as it is, underscores the radical contingency of our particular history. Rather than undermining God, these ideas can illuminate classical doctrines in new light. It is as if science is catching up to the Quranic proclamation that “Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth” – the illuminator of existence – and “Allah holds the celestial bodies in place”, and “Not a leaf falls but He knows it.” The more we learn about the cosmos, the more it appears that being is not a given – it’s delicate, interconnected, and profoundly mysterious. Occasionalism articulates the logical endpoint of that realization: the cosmos is a dependent reality, signifying at every moment the presence of an absolute, independent Reality (al-Haqq).

In conclusion, Al-Ghazali’s doctrine of occasionalism offers perhaps the most coherent Islamic theological lens to view the modern universe. It harmonizes with the Qur’anic vision of God’s intimate omnipotence, it accommodates the empirical findings of science by interpreting them through the prism of contingency rather than brute necessity, and it engages contemporary philosophy by addressing perennial questions of causation and existence in a unifying way. Rather than seeing science and faith as foes, this approach sees them as operating at different strata of the grand tapestry of truth. Science maps the tapestry’s patterns; faith identifies the Weaver. Together, they invite us to marvel at a world that is intelligible and ordered, yet utterly dependent at every tick of time on the One who orders it. This brings both humility and solace: humility, in recognizing that our mastery of nature will always encounter an horizon of mystery; solace, in knowing that behind that mystery is a Merciful, Purposeful God. Al-Ghazali would urge modern seekers to grasp this “most trustworthy handhold” – a worldview in which every quark and every galaxy, every moment of joy and every sparrow’s fall, is held in the gentle, omnipotent hand of God. It is a worldview as radical today as it was in the 11th century, and one that continues to illuminate the path where science meets spirituality, where all existence is a continuous Inshallah (God willing).

Sources: Al-Qur’an; Al-Ghazali’s Tahafut al-Falasifah; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (entries on Occasionalism and Ghazali); Z. H. Shah, The Glorious Quran and Science series (2025) thequran.love thequran.love thequran.love, etc.