Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD

Abstract:
Within the Islamic worldview, God (Allah) created the universe bil-Ḥaqq – “with truth,” purpose, and immutable law thequran.love. The Qur’an repeatedly emphasizes that the cosmos is not a haphazard accident or a futile plaything, but a creation imbued with order, justice, and wisdom thequran.love. This essay explores how Islamic scripture portrays the Creator as fashioning the heavens and earth according to fixed laws of nature and precise measure, which can be understood as mathematical order. Numerous Quranic verses affirm that every aspect of creation was made with exact calculation and balance, reflecting divine knowledge in quantitative terms. Modern scientists have marveled at the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in describing the physical world – an uncanny success that Islam interprets as a sign of the Creator’s design rather than mere coincidence. We delve into Quranic references about God’s use of law and number in creation, discuss the philosophical meaning of mathematics’ effectiveness in science, and show how the harmony between mathematics and nature points to a purposeful cosmos. In doing so, we find that, from an Islamic perspective, the laws of physics and the language of mathematics both stem from the same divine truth, solving the mystery of why mathematics works “miraculously” well. In summary, the Islamic framework asserts that God created the universe not only by natural laws but also by the principles of mathematics – a concept that transforms the “unreasonable” effectiveness of mathematics into a profoundly reasonable sign of divine wisdom.

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