Epigraph
لَّا تُدْرِكُهُ الْأَبْصَارُ وَهُوَ يُدْرِكُ الْأَبْصَارَ ۖ وَهُوَ اللَّطِيفُ الْخَبِيرُ
Eyes cannot reach Him but He reaches the eyes. And He is the incomprehensible, the All-Aware. (Al Quran 6:103)
By Zia H Shah MD
Abstract
Every moment, at every water surface on Earth, one of the most philosophically momentous events in nature occurs without fanfare: a photon of light strikes the boundary between air and water, and no law of physics determines whether it will be reflected back or refracted through. The equations of quantum electrodynamics yield only a probability — roughly 4% reflected, 96% transmitted for light striking perpendicularly — but which fate befalls any individual photon is left radically open by the physical laws themselves. This singular phenomenon, first articulated with philosophical clarity by Richard Feynman in his QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), concentrates a vast metaphysical question into a concrete, everyday physical event: if natural law does not decide, who — or what — does?
This article argues that the photon at the water surface is not merely a curiosity of quantum physics but an emblem of a deeper truth that connects two seemingly opposed worldviews across nine centuries of philosophy. Strong determinism — the thesis that prior physical states plus laws of nature necessitate every subsequent event — and Al-Ghazali’s Occasionalism — the doctrine that God alone is the true cause of every event, with natural objects possessing no independent causal power — converge in a remarkable way once quantum mechanics is admitted into the picture. From the perspective of an atheist or agnostic who denies God’s existence, the photon’s fate appears to be irreducibly random. From the perspective of the devout Muslim, it is an instance of continuous divine causation. Both read the same physical event; neither can empirically refute the other.
The convergence is not accidental. God, as described in the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Unitarian Christianity, is transcendent — beyond the reach of human senses, empirical instruments, and scientific methodology. Quran 6:103 declares this with lapidary precision: “No vision can encompass Him, yet He encompasses all vision; He is the Subtle (al-Laṭīf), the All-Aware (al-Khabīr).” A God who transcends all empirical detection would, by definition, be indistinguishable from the absence of God to any purely empirical methodology. The photon’s unexplained fate is thus, for the devout Muslim like this author, not a random quantum event but God’s will expressed in the language of nature — and for the thoughtful agnostic, it is a genuine causal gap in the physical description of the world, a gap that makes occasionalism at least as rationally defensible as pure materialism.
The present article examines Dr. Zia H Shah’s contemporary writings synthesizing Ghazali and quantum physics; the history and structure of strong determinism; the theological depth of Ghazali’s occasionalism and its Ash’ari foundations; the convergence of both frameworks through quantum indeterminacy; a scientific, philosophical, and theological commentary on Quran 6:103; and the scholarly lineage connecting Islamic, Western, and modern scientific thought on causation and divine action.
I. The Photon at the Water Surface: Nature’s Parable for a Philosophical Divide
1.1 What happens at the surface
Imagine sunlight striking the surface of a still lake. The photons composing that beam encounter the boundary between two media — air and water — and each faces a binary outcome: reflection back into the air, or refraction into the water. Classical optics, codified in the Fresnel equations, predicts the statistical distribution of outcomes with extraordinary precision. For light striking perpendicularly, approximately 4% of photons are reflected and 96% are transmitted and refracted. As the angle of incidence increases, the reflection fraction rises, reaching 100% at the critical angle for total internal reflection.
These probabilities are determined by the laws of physics. But here the laws stop.
Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics and the architect of quantum electrodynamics, stated the position bluntly in QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985): “We cannot predict which of the two cases will occur. We can only calculate the probability.” A single photon arrives at the water surface, and the equations of the most powerful physical theory ever devised yield only a probability distribution, not a verdict. There is no additional physical information — no hidden property of the photon, no undetected fluctuation in the field — that determines the outcome. As Feynman wrote: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics,” and this particular mystery — the undetermined fate of a single photon — is the quantum puzzle in its purest, most accessible form.
This is not a matter of ignorance or measurement limitations. Bell’s theorem, confirmed by Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger in a series of experiments culminating in the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, rules out the existence of local hidden variables that might secretly predetermine these outcomes. The universe, at this foundational level, does not decide photon fates in advance through any local physical mechanism.
1.2 The question the photon asks
The photon at the water surface thus poses a question that natural science, by its own methodology, cannot answer: what determines the individual outcome? Three answers have been advanced:
The materialist answer: Pure chance. Quantum randomness is brute, uncaused, and fundamental. The universe is not fully deterministic at the quantum level, and individual quantum events simply happen without any determining cause whatsoever. This is consistent with atheism and with the standard Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
The determinist’s answer: Hidden order. The apparent randomness reflects our ignorance rather than genuine indeterminacy. Some version of determinism — perhaps Bohmian mechanics, perhaps superdeterminism — governs the outcome, and if we had complete knowledge, we could predict it. The photon’s fate is fixed; we simply cannot know it.
The occasionalist’s answer: Divine will. The laws of physics determine the range of possibilities and their probabilities, but God determines the actual outcome of each individual event in accordance with His wisdom and will. The 4% that are reflected are reflected because God wills it; the 96% that are transmitted are transmitted because God wills it. Natural law describes the “habit” of divine action in the aggregate; individual events are divine acts. This is Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism, made vivid by quantum mechanics.
Of these three answers, only the third is empirically refutable — but the empirical refutation would require detecting a deviation from the quantum probability distributions, and occasionalism predicts no such deviation. God, on this view, is the cause that sustains the statistical regularity of nature by willing each individual event in accordance with that regularity. He governs the photon without disturbing the physics.
1.3 Why this matters philosophically
The photon example is superior to many other arguments for occasionalism because it is concrete, scientifically precise, and philosophically clean. It does not require positing miraculous interruptions of natural law. It does not invoke complexity or improbability arguments that are difficult to quantify. It simply observes that at the most fundamental level of physical reality, natural law itself leaves individual outcomes undetermined — and asks what, if anything, fills that gap. As Al-Ghazali argued nine centuries before quantum mechanics was discovered: the connection between cause and effect “is not a necessity.” He intuited philosophically what quantum mechanics has now established empirically: the world at its most basic level is not a closed causal system.
This is the foundation upon which everything that follows is built.
II. Dr. Zia H Shah’s Case for a Quantum-Age Occasionalism
2.1 The fifteen-article project
Dr. Zia H Shah MD, a physician in Upstate New York and Chief Editor of The Muslim Times, published fifteen articles in 2025 at The Glorious Quran and Science (thequran.love/category/occasionalism/), constituting the most sustained contemporary attempt to synthesize Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism with modern physics for a general Muslim and interfaith audience.
The series opens with “Ghazali’s Occasionalism, The Miracle of Light and the Crown Verse of the Quran” (February 25, 2025), which introduces the core doctrine through Ayat al-Kursi (Quran 2:255) and notes that while the majority of Western academic philosophers endorse some form of determinism, quantum mechanics since the 1920s has steadily undermined the foundations of classical determinism. The miracle of light — the anomalous behavior of photons at boundaries, their superposition and entanglement — serves as the opening exhibit for a series of scientific phenomena that, Shah argues, make Ghazali’s position not merely defensible but scientifically resonant.
“Does Al-Ghazali’s Occasionalism Naturally Follow From the Quranic Omniscience and Omnipotence of God?” (March 2, 2025) makes the deductive theological argument: if God is truly omniscient and omnipotent, then any real causal power in natural objects would constitute an independent source of action competing with God’s will — which is theologically incoherent in strict monotheism. The Muslim shahada — “There is no god but God” — is thus not merely a political or cultic declaration but a metaphysical one: there is no cause but God.
2.2 Quantum mechanics as theological evidence
Three articles form the scientific core. “Quantum Entanglement, Ghazali’s Occasionalism, and God’s Continuous Sustenance of the Universe” (March 5, 2025) connects the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics to Ghazali’s denial of inherent causality. The experiments of Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger, which definitively confirmed violations of Bell inequalities, demonstrated that no local hidden variable determines individual quantum outcomes — a result Shah reads as “a striking parallel to al-Ghazali’s occasionalist contention that natural causation is ultimately an illusion.” Particles separated by arbitrary distances manifest correlated behaviors that cannot be explained by any physical information passing between them; to Shah, this points toward a sustaining divine causation that operates outside ordinary space-time.
“Quantum Mechanics and Al-Ghazali’s Occasionalism: A Philosophical and Scientific Argument” (March 11, 2025) extends this to quantum tunneling and wave function collapse. A particle “tunneling” through an energy barrier it classically cannot surmount does so at an undetermined moment and at an undetermined rate for any individual particle — only the statistical distribution is specified by law. Wave function collapse, on the Copenhagen interpretation, represents the transition from quantum possibility to classical actuality, and that transition is not governed by any known physical mechanism. Both phenomena fit the occasionalist pattern: natural law defines the envelope; something outside physical law actualizes the individual event.
“The Nobel in Physics 2022 Also Goes to Al Ghazali” (March 26, 2025) draws on Karen Harding’s 1993 paper “Causality Then and Now: Al Ghazali and Quantum Theory,” which maps the structural parallels between Ghazali’s philosophical critique of necessary causation and Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation. Harding identifies a “remarkable resemblance” between Ghazali’s argument that we observe only conjunction not connection, and Bohr’s insistence that quantum mechanics describes only the outcomes of measurements, not an underlying physical reality.
2.3 Quranic and scriptural foundations
“The Glorious Quran Endorses Al Ghazali’s Occasionalism” (March 26, 2025) catalogs the Quranic verses that, Shah argues, express the occasionalist metaphysic throughout: Q 35:41 (God holds the heavens and earth so they do not vanish), Q 6:95 (God causes seeds to sprout), Q 55:29 (“Every day He is upon some task”), and Q 67:1–2 (God who created life and death). These verses describe God as not merely an initial creator but as the active, continuous sustainer of every natural process at every moment.
“Occasionalism in al-Ghazali’s Thought and the Quranic Emphasis on Divine Causality” (May 7, 2025) uses the Battle of Badr (624 CE) as the primary proof-text, where Quran 8:17 declares: “It was not you who threw when you threw, but it was God who threw.” Military victory is attributed entirely to divine causation, the human act of throwing reduced to the occasion for God’s act. Shah concludes: “Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism is nothing other than the philosophical articulation of this Quranic faith: La ilaha illa’Llah — there is no deity, and no cause, except God.”
“From the Expression Inshallah to Al Ghazali’s Occasionalism” (March 7, 2025) traces the everyday Muslim expression Inshallah (if God wills) as the cultural-linguistic crystallization of radical occasionalism. Every Muslim who says Inshallah before a future action is implicitly affirming that God, not natural law alone, determines whether the event will come to pass. Shah draws a philosophical parallel: David Hume independently argued that we observe only “constant conjunction” between events, never a “necessary connexion” — the same epistemological modesty that Ghazali articulated four centuries earlier, though Hume arrived at skepticism while Ghazali arrived at theism.
2.4 Cosmology, simulation, and the First Cause
“Al-Ghazali’s Occasionalism and the Modern Understanding of the Universe” (May 13, 2025) argues that Big Bang cosmology vindicates Ghazali’s opposition to the eternal-universe thesis of the falasifa. The universe had a beginning, is radically contingent, and exists within a framework it did not create. Shah writes: “The universe is like a grand theater where God is the only actor.”
“From Simulated Universes to Occasionalist Metaphysics” (May 13, 2025) draws a parallel between Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument and occasionalism: both posit a reality entirely governed by an external intelligence. The laws of nature in an occasionalist universe are “like the software of a simulation” — stable, consistent, discoverable by science, but not self-sustaining. David Chalmers’ remark captures the convergence: “God said ‘Let there be bits!’ And there were bits.”
“Determinism, First Cause, and Al-Ghazali’s Occasionalism” (November 7, 2025) constructs the full argument: if the universe is deterministic, it requires a First Cause; if it has a First Cause, that cause must continuously sustain it (as Thomas Aquinas recognized: “if God’s support were withdrawn, the universe would lapse back into nothingness”); and continuous sustenance is precisely what occasionalism describes. The reflective agnostic who grants determinism a First Cause has already taken the decisive step toward occasionalism.
III. Strong Determinism: The Clockwork Universe and Its Fractures
3.1 The classical thesis
Strong (or hard) determinism holds that every event — every movement of every particle, every thought in every human mind, every photon that strikes a water surface — is the inevitable, necessary consequence of prior states of the universe plus the laws of nature. No event could have been other than it is, given the complete initial conditions and all intervening physical processes. The thesis was given its canonical formulation by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814:
“An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed… for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past could be present before its eyes.”
Laplace’s Demon, as this hypothetical intellect is known, could predict every photon’s fate at every water surface for the entire history of the universe — if strong determinism is true.
The philosophical pedigree runs from pre-Socratic necessitarianism through Spinoza’s radical claim that “in nature there is nothing contingent” (Ethics I, Prop. 29) to Baron d’Holbach’s materialist manifesto (1770): “The actions of man are never free; they are always the necessary consequence of his temperament, of the received ideas, and of the notions, either true or erroneous, that he has formed to himself of happiness.” In the twentieth century, hard determinism found its scientific home in the equations of classical mechanics: if you know the complete state of a physical system and the forces acting on it, you can, in principle, compute its entire future trajectory with arbitrary precision.
3.2 Strong determinism and its relationship to theism
Before quantum mechanics, the strong determinist faced an interesting internal tension with respect to theism. A Laplacian universe has no room for God to act — all future states are already fixed by initial conditions plus laws, leaving no causal opening for divine intervention. This is why Enlightenment determinism and atheism tended to travel together. Yet some theists attempted to locate God within this framework as the First Cause who set the initial conditions and established the laws — a “God of the beginning” who wound the clockwork and stepped back. This deistic position preserves a role for God while conceding that no ongoing divine action is needed or possible. But it is far removed from the active, providential God of Abraham and Muhammad.
3.3 Quantum mechanics breaks the clock
The deterministic framework shattered in the 1920s with the development of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (1927) demonstrated that position and momentum cannot be simultaneously determined — not as a limitation of measurement technology, but as an intrinsic feature of reality. Laplace’s Demon requires exact knowledge of all positions and momenta; the uncertainty principle denies that such knowledge is even theoretically possible.
But the deeper blow came from the behavior of individual quantum events. The photon at the water surface is the paradigmatic case. The Schrödinger equation evolves the photon’s wave function deterministically — the probabilities are determined by the laws — but the actualization of one outcome (reflection or refraction) from those probabilities is not governed by any known physical mechanism. This is the “measurement problem”: quantum mechanics tells us the probability distribution for outcomes but is silent on what causes any individual outcome to occur.
Bell’s Theorem (1964) and its experimental confirmation (culminating in the 2022 Nobel experiments) went further, ruling out any local hidden-variable theory that might restore determinism at the individual-event level. The universe, at the quantum scale, does not contain any local physical information that predetermines which photon is reflected and which is transmitted. If there are hidden variables, they must be nonlocal — which raises deep questions about causation, information, and the nature of space-time.
Three responses have emerged within physics:
Many-Worlds (Everett, 1957): The universe deterministically evolves according to the Schrödinger equation, but every quantum measurement branches reality into parallel worlds. The photon is both reflected and refracted — in different branches of the universal wave function. Randomness is an illusion of the branch-bound observer; from the “God’s-eye view,” everything is determined. This interpretation saves determinism but at the cost of positing an infinite proliferation of parallel universes for which there is no direct empirical evidence.
Bohmian Mechanics: Particles have definite positions at all times, guided by a deterministic “pilot wave” described by a universal wave function. Bell himself considered Bohm’s mechanics significant: “Bohm showed explicitly how parameters could indeed be introduced into nonrelativistic wave mechanics, with the help of which the indeterministic description could be transformed into a deterministic one.” However, the theory is intrinsically nonlocal — the pilot wave for any particle is instantaneously affected by what happens to all other particles anywhere in the universe. This nonlocality does not permit faster-than-light signaling, but it reintroduces a kind of global interconnectedness reminiscent of occasionalist continuous divine action.
Superdeterminism: The experimenter’s “choice” of what to measure is itself predetermined and correlated with the measured system, closing Bell’s loophole. This requires, as Bell noted, “absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will” — a position that most physicists find philosophically untenable, as it makes scientific inference itself problematic.
The honest conclusion from this survey is that strong determinism in its classical form has been empirically undermined. Quantum mechanics may be consistent with some form of determinism (Many-Worlds, Bohm), but it is not consistent with the simple, intuitive Laplacian picture where local physical information determines every individual outcome. The photon at the water surface remains undetermined by local physical law — and that is established science, not metaphysical speculation.
IV. Al-Ghazali’s Occasionalism: The Theology of the Only True Cause
4.1 The philosopher and his context
Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali (1058–1111 CE), known in the West as Algazel, was born in Tus (modern Iran) and educated at the Nizamiyya madrasa in Nishapur under the great theologian al-Juwayni. Appointed by the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk to head the prestigious Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad at age thirty-four, he was at the pinnacle of Islamic intellectual life when he underwent a profound spiritual crisis in 1095, resulting in eleven years of wandering, mystical practice, and eventually the composition of his masterwork, Ihya ‘Ulum al-Din (The Revival of the Religious Sciences).
Between his mastery of Aristotelian philosophy and his mystical turn, Ghazali produced Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers, c. 1095), the most philosophically rigorous critique of the falasifa — the Islamic Aristotelians, particularly Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina (Avicenna). The Tahafut systematically demonstrated what Ghazali saw as the internal contradictions of Aristotelian philosophy as applied to Islamic theology, targeting twenty positions on which the philosophers erred and three on which they had committed unbelief (kufr). Among the most consequential of these was the seventeenth discussion, on causation — the foundation of his occasionalism.
4.2 Discussion Seventeen of the Incoherence
Ghazali opens Discussion Seventeen with a statement that anticipates the quantum-mechanical situation by nine centuries:
“The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary, according to us. But with any two things, where ‘this’ is not ‘that’ and ‘that’ is not ‘this,’ and where neither the affirmation of the one entails the affirmation of the other nor the negation of the one entails negation of the other, it is not a necessity of the existence of the one that the other should exist.”
The argument is logical: cause and effect are ontologically distinct entities. No logical analysis of the cause reveals the effect; no logical analysis of the effect reveals the cause. Therefore no logical necessity links them. Whatever connection they have must come from outside — from God’s will, expressed in the consistent pattern of His creation.
The fire-and-cotton example remains the most famous illustration. Ghazali asks: why do we say fire causes burning? We have observed that whenever cotton contacts fire, burning occurs. But observation shows only conjunction — fire and burning appearing together — not causation, fire producing burning through its own nature. “Fire, which is an inanimate thing, has no action. How can one prove that it is an agent? The only argument is from the observation of the fact of burning at the time of contact with fire. But observation only shows that one is with the other, not that it is by it.” Ghazali declares the burning agent to be God, who creates the property of being-burned in the cotton whenever cotton contacts fire — not because fire compels Him, but because this is His habitual mode of acting.
He then deploys the thought experiment that anticipates quantum mechanical scenarios: “We admit the possibility of a contact between the two which will not result in burning, as in the case of a man who puts his hand in fire and is not burned.” This is miracles — not violations of laws of nature (there are, on this view, no laws of nature in the independent sense) but alterations in God’s habitual pattern of action. Every miracle is simply God willing differently on a particular occasion.
The photon at the water surface illustrates Ghazali’s argument with perfect precision. We observe that photons striking a water surface are, in 4% of cases, reflected and in 96% of cases, refracted. This is our “habit” of expectation. But no physical law — not Maxwell’s equations, not quantum electrodynamics — determines which particular photon is reflected. The observation shows conjunction: a photon striking water with a reflection or refraction. It does not show causation: the water surface producing reflection in any particular photon through its own causal power. The laws describe the average divine habit; each individual event is a fresh act of divine will.
4.3 The Ash’ari theological framework
Ghazali’s occasionalism is embedded in the Ash’arite school of kalam theology, founded by Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari (874–936 CE) as a response to both rationalist Mu’tazilism and anthropomorphic literalism. The school’s metaphysical foundation involves a distinctive Islamic atomism in which the world consists of indivisible atoms and their accidents (properties). Critically, accidents exist for only a single instant and must be “continually created anew by God.” Time itself is discrete — a sequence of atomic instants rather than a continuous flow. The entire qualitative fabric of the universe is recreated at each moment by direct divine action.
Five concepts structure this theology:
‘Āda (habit, custom): Natural regularity reflects God’s habitual mode of action, not independent causal law. What scientists call “the laws of nature” are, more precisely, descriptions of God’s habits — reliable precisely because God is rational, consistent, and faithful, but not binding on God in any way that would compromise His freedom.
Khalq (creation): God’s continuous creative activity at every instant. The Arabic root suggests active origination, not merely conservation — God does not merely keep existing things in being but actively recreates them at each moment.
Kasb (acquisition): The attempt to reconcile divine causation with human moral responsibility. God creates the human act; the human “acquires” it through intention and will. This preserves moral accountability within the occasionalist framework.
Continuous creation: God sustains the universe not by an initial act that launches a self-sustaining mechanism but by perpetual, moment-to-moment creative engagement. Remove God’s creative will for an instant, and existence lapses back into nothing.
Atomism: Space and time are discrete at the foundational level, with God directly governing the arrangement and properties of atoms at each atomic instant.
This framework has remarkable resonances with quantum field theory. The quantum vacuum is not empty space but a seething background of virtual particle creation and annihilation — a continuous churning at the Planck scale that bears structural resemblance to the Ash’ari universe of perpetual divine recreation. In quantum field theory, even “empty” space has a zero-point energy and can spontaneously generate particle-antiparticle pairs. In Ash’ari cosmology, even “existing” objects require continuous divine creative action to persist from one moment to the next.
4.4 “Habit” versus “necessity”: the critical distinction
Ghazali’s most important philosophical move is distinguishing between habitual and necessary causation. His critics — prominently Ibn Rushd — charged that denying necessary causation leads to skepticism: if fire need not burn cotton, how can we rely on any scientific inference? Ghazali’s response is elegant: “God has created within us knowledge that he will not bring about everything that is possible.” God’s habitual pattern of action is reliable because it reflects His wisdom and His covenant with creation. We can confidently predict that photons will be reflected at the 4% rate because God has established this as His habit — but no particular photon is compelled to be reflected or transmitted by anything other than God’s specific will in that instance.
This distinction maps precisely onto the quantum mechanical situation. Quantum mechanics is the description of God’s habitual pattern at the quantum scale — extraordinarily precise, universally valid, mathematically beautiful. But the individual photon event is not governed by that pattern in the sense of being necessitated by it. The law specifies the probability; God specifies the outcome.
4.5 Ghazali and his critics
Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126–1198) mounted the most famous rebuttal in Tahafut al-Tahafut. He charged that Ghazali used causal reasoning to deny causation — a self-refuting move — and insisted that things have real natures (tabi’a) that determine their effects. Without real natural causation, all science and all knowledge becomes impossible. Modern scholars like Frank Griffel have complicated this picture, arguing that Ghazali’s position is more nuanced than a simple denial of all secondary causation — he leaves open the possibility that natural things have genuine causal powers, but those powers are themselves entirely dependent on God’s sustaining action.
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1149–1209), himself a towering figure in Islamic theology and philosophy and one of the greatest commentators on the Quran, developed a sophisticated “conditional occasionalism” that acknowledges preceding conditions for divine creation without granting them independent causal efficacy. For al-Razi, God creates every possible being directly, but some can only be created in the presence of conditions that make them “creatable” — the conditions are not causes but prerequisites.
The modern rehabilitation of occasionalism owes much to Frank Griffel (Al-Ghazali’s Philosophical Theology, 2009), Richard Frank (Al-Ghazali and the Ash’arite School, 1994), and Jon McGinnis (2006), who together have shown that the tradition is philosophically richer and more internally consistent than its critics — from Ibn Rushd to contemporary secular philosophers — have acknowledged.
V. The Convergence: How Occasionalism and Determinism Meet in Quantum Reality
5.1 The structural isomorphism
Strong determinism and Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism share a precise logical architecture, which becomes visible when stated side by side:
| Feature | Strong Determinism | Al-Ghazali’s Occasionalism |
|---|---|---|
| Ultimate determining agent | Prior physical states + laws | God’s will |
| Status of secondary causes | Mere intermediate links in causal chain | Occasions for God’s action, not true causes |
| Explanation of regularity | Necessity of physical law | Rationality and habit of divine will |
| Individual event determination | Fully determined by physical antecedents | Determined by God’s specific will |
| Predictability | Perfect (Laplace’s Demon) | Perfect within God’s habitual pattern |
| Empirical prediction | Identical to what we observe | Identical to what we observe |
Both frameworks deny autonomous causal power to “secondary causes” — natural objects and processes. Determinism attributes determination to the prior physical state; occasionalism attributes it to God. Replace “the will of God” in Malebranche’s formulation with “the prior physical state plus laws of nature,” and you have essentially the same denial of independent causal agency in the natural object. Both frameworks explain observed regularity. Both are consistent with all known physical facts. Both face identical difficulties with human free will.
The convergence becomes complete through the following argument:
Premise 1: Quantum mechanics shows that at the individual event level, physical law leaves outcomes undetermined (the photon at the water surface).
Premise 2: An agnostic who allows the possibility of God — a God who could act at the quantum level — must acknowledge that such action would be empirically indistinguishable from quantum randomness.
Conclusion: For the agnostic who grants God’s possible existence, strong determinism (as a description of empirical regularities) and occasionalism (as a description of the underlying metaphysical reality) describe the same physical universe from different epistemic standpoints.
The two frameworks are not competitors at the empirical level. They are two interpretations of the same data, distinguished only by whether one posits God as the ground of being.
5.2 The photon as the meeting point
The photon at the water surface is precisely where the two frameworks meet. In the determinist’s universe without God, the photon’s fate is either undetermined (Copenhagen), determined by the global wave function branching (Many-Worlds), or determined by a nonlocal hidden variable (Bohm). In the occasionalist’s universe, the photon’s fate is determined by God’s will, with quantum mechanics describing the statistical envelope within which God habitually operates. These two descriptions are empirically identical. No experiment can distinguish them.
This is not a limitation of current technology. It is a principled epistemological point, following directly from the nature of God as described in the Abrahamic traditions: a transcendent Being who cannot be perceived empirically, whose action is indistinguishable from the operation of natural processes. Quran 6:103 — “No vision can encompass Him” — is precisely what we would expect of a God who acts at the quantum level. God’s fingerprints are everywhere and nowhere; they are in every individual photon event and in no deviation from the statistical laws.
5.3 The Non-Interventionist Objective Divine Action framework
Contemporary theology of divine action has developed a formal framework that maps closely onto the quantum occasionalist position. Robert John Russell, founder of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, developed the concept of Non-Interventionist Objective Divine Action (NIODA) through the landmark CTNS/Vatican Observatory Divine Action Project (1988–2003).
Russell argues that if quantum indeterminism is ontologically real — if the Copenhagen interpretation correctly describes nature — then God can objectively determine individual quantum events (making divine action real, not merely subjective or metaphorical) without violating any physical law (making divine action non-interventionist). The laws of nature are not violated because they only specify probabilities; God actualizes specific outcomes within those probability distributions. The photon that is reflected when God wills it to be reflected is not violating any law of physics; the law says it has a 4% chance of being reflected, and it is. God’s action is “hidden” within the indeterminism that quantum mechanics itself acknowledges.
John Polkinghorne (1930–2021), Cambridge particle physicist and Anglican priest, raised important objections to the quantum NIODA framework: the measurement problem remains unsolved; deterministic interpretations like Bohm’s are empirically equivalent to Copenhagen; and God’s action could not be meaningfully selective if He acts at every quantum event. Polkinghorne preferred to locate divine action at the level of chaotic systems, where “active information” — non-energetic, not detectable by energy-conserving measurements — might influence macroscopic outcomes. But his broader point about the indistinguishability of divine action and natural process actually strengthens the convergence thesis: however God acts, the action is empirically invisible. This is exactly what Quran 6:103 declares.
Nancey Murphy advocates that God acts in all quantum events, with theological descriptions “supervening” on physical descriptions without being reducible to them — a position formally equivalent to Ghazali’s occasionalism.
Ian Barbour, recipient of the 1999 Templeton Prize, asked the question most directly: “If one adopts a Copenhagen interpretation asserting intrinsic indeterminism, one may ask if God is the ‘Great Determiner.’” This is precisely the occasionalist answer to the photon’s unanswered question.
5.4 Bell’s theorem and the death of local hidden variables
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics deserves special attention in this context. The prize was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for experiments testing Bell’s inequalities — mathematical expressions derived by physicist John Bell in 1964 that any theory of local hidden variables must satisfy. Their experiments conclusively showed that nature violates these inequalities. This means:
- No local physical information predetermines the outcome of quantum events like the reflection or refraction of photons.
- Whatever determines individual quantum outcomes (if anything does) must be either genuinely random (Copenhagen), nonlocal physical (Bohm), or nonphysical.
If one admits the possibility of God, option three — nonphysical determination by divine will — is not ruled out by any physical experiment. Bell’s theorem clears the ground of local physical hidden variables, leaving the field open for either brute randomness or divine will. The Muslim occasionalist takes the latter option; the atheist takes the former. Both interpretations are consistent with all experimental data.
Shah’s article “The Nobel in Physics 2022 Also Goes to Al Ghazali” captures this insight: the 2022 Nobel laureates inadvertently confirmed what Ghazali argued in 1095 — that the connection between what we call “cause” and what we call “effect” is not a physical necessity.
5.5 The Ash’ari quantum field: atomism meets the vacuum
The structural parallels between Ash’ari physics and modern quantum field theory extend beyond the general occasionalist framework into specific physical concepts. The Ash’ari doctrine that accidents (properties) exist for only a single instant and must be recreated anew parallels the quantum field-theoretic picture of the vacuum as a state of continuous virtual particle creation and annihilation. In quantum field theory, even “empty” space is not passive but perpetually active — seething with fluctuations that give the vacuum its characteristic energy. The Ash’ari universe of perpetual divine recreation corresponds structurally to the quantum field-theoretic universe of perpetual vacuum activity.
More precisely: quantum field theory describes every particle as an excitation of an underlying quantum field that pervades all space. The photon is not a self-subsisting entity but a fluctuation of the electromagnetic field. This “field-ontology” dissolves the classical notion of a particle as an independent, self-contained object — exactly as Ash’ari atomism dissolves the classical notion of a substance as an independent, self-sustaining entity. In both frameworks, what appears to be a stable object is in fact a pattern in something more fundamental: the quantum field (in quantum field theory) or God’s continuous creative action (in Ash’ari theology).
VI. Commentary on Quran 6:103: The Verse That Predicts the Epistemological Situation
6.1 The text and its translations
Arabic: لَّا تُدْرِكُهُ الْأَبْصَارُ وَهُوَ يُدْرِكُ الْأَبْصَارَ ۖ وَهُوَ اللَّطِيفُ الْخَبِيرُ
Transliteration: Lā tudrikuhu al-abṣāru wa-huwa yudriku al-abṣāra wa-huwa al-Laṭīfu al-Khabīr
The verse’s translators reveal its layers through their choices:
- Sahih International: “Vision perceives Him not, but He perceives all vision; and He is the Subtle, the Acquainted.”
- Muhammad Asad: “No human vision can encompass Him, whereas He encompasses all human vision: for He alone is unfathomable, all-aware.”
- Yusuf Ali: “No vision can grasp Him, but His grasp is over all vision: He is above all comprehension, yet is acquainted with all things.”
- Abdel Haleem: “No vision can take Him in, but He takes in all vision: He is the All Subtle, the All Aware.”
Three Arabic terms bear the weight of the verse’s philosophical content. Al-abṣār (plural of baṣar) means “sights” or “visions” — the faculty of visual perception extended by implication to all forms of empirical observation and detection. Yudrik (from idrāk) means to “reach,” “grasp,” or “encompass” — a stronger term than mere seeing, implying comprehensive apprehension. Al-Laṭīf (the Subtle) derives from luṭf, signifying extreme subtlety, intangibility, and inscrutability — something that cannot be grasped because it operates at the finest, most penetrating level of reality. Al-Khabīr (the All-Aware) signals that God’s inscrutability is not ignorance or passivity but the opposite: a comprehensive awareness that misses nothing.
The verse thus declares a profound asymmetry: God is the subject who perceives everything; God is not the object that can be perceived. He knows every photon that strikes every water surface; no photon, no eye, no instrument reveals Him.
6.2 Classical tafsir
Ibn Kathir (d. 1373 CE) interprets the verse through the lens of the “Beatific Vision” debate — the question of whether believers will see God in the Hereafter. His commentary distinguishes between ru’yah (seeing) and idrāk (comprehensive grasping). The verse denies idrāk, not necessarily all seeing. He reports ‘Ā’ishah’s hadith: “Whoever claims that Muhammad saw his Lord has uttered a lie against Allah” — but explains her denial as a denial of comprehensive encompassment, not of all perception. He cites the Hadith of the Veil: “His Veil is the Light — and if He removes it, the Light of His Face would burn every created thing that His sight reaches.” God’s hiddenness is not the darkness of absence but the blinding luminosity of an excess of being.
Al-Ṭabarī (d. 923 CE) transmits Ibn ‘Abbās’s crucial distinction: idrāk means iḥāṭah (encompassment), not merely ru’yah (vision). To claim the verse denies all seeing of God would itself be theologically problematic — it would make God like the non-existent, which is no praise. The denial of encompassment, by contrast, is a genuine attribute of perfection: God cannot be grasped because He is infinite, unlimited, unbounded by any horizon of creaturely perception.
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1209 CE) — himself one of the great occasionalists — uses this verse as a central proof-text for divine transcendence (tanzīh) while maintaining that believers will see God in the Hereafter. His Asas al-Taqdīs (Foundation of Declaring God’s Transcendence) elaborates the epistemological implications: “The Sacred Being of Allah is beyond the all-surrounding, all-comprehending overview of even reason and conjecture. The Being and Attributes of Allah are limitless while human senses, reason and imagination are all limited. It is obvious that the limitless cannot fit into the limited.” This argument applies directly to the quantum-theological situation: a God who acts at the quantum level is infinitely beyond the resolution of any physical measuring instrument, which is itself a quantum system subject to the same limitations.
The Kashani Sufi commentary offers perhaps the most philosophically profound reading: “How can vision perceive Him when it cannot perceive its own soul, which is but a light from Him?” If the human subject cannot directly perceive its own consciousness — the most intimate datum of its existence — how could it perceive the Ground of all consciousness? This argument anticipates the “hard problem of consciousness” by several centuries and suggests that the mystery of subjective experience points toward the same transcendence that 6:103 declares.
Ma’arif ul-Quran (Mufti Muhammad Shafi, d. 1976) distills the verse’s philosophical teaching: the attributes of God are without limit; human perception, reason, and imagination are limited. The unlimited cannot be encompassed by the limited. This is not merely negative theology but a positive claim about the qualitative difference between Creator and creation — a difference that makes empirical observation of God not just difficult but categorically impossible.
6.3 Tanzih: the theology of radical transcendence
The verse is a cornerstone of tanzīh (تنزيه) — the Islamic doctrine of divine transcendence, which purifies the concept of God from all creaturely attributes, comparisons, and limitations. Quran 42:11 states the principle: laysa ka-mithlihi shay’ — “There is nothing whatsoever like unto Him.” This is the strongest possible assertion of divine uniqueness: not merely that God is greater than all creatures, but that no creaturely property, however refined, can be predicated of God without qualification.
Orthodox Sunni theology navigates between two extremes. Ta’ṭīl (divesting) removes all attributes from God, resulting in a featureless absolute that cannot be distinguished from non-being — the error attributed to the Jahmiyya. Tashbīh (likening) attributes creaturely qualities to God, resulting in anthropomorphism — the error of naive literalism. The orthodox position, articulated by al-Ash’ari and elaborated by al-Ghazali, affirms God’s attributes (knowledge, power, will, life, etc.) while insisting they are bilā kayf — “without asking how” — utterly unlike their creaturely analogues.
This theology has a precise implication for the quantum-theological discussion: a God who acts bilā kayf — in a manner categorically different from all creaturely causation — would act in a way that physical science cannot detect, measure, or characterize. His action would not show up as a deviation from physical law, not because He lacks power but because His mode of acting is not of the kind that physical law describes. He does not push particles; He wills outcomes within a structure of possibilities that physical law specifies. This is precisely the quantum occasionalist picture.
Al-Maturidi (853–944 CE), founder of the other major Sunni theological school, built his system on two pillars: tanzīh and ḥikmah (divine wisdom). The wisdom of God is expressed in the rational, consistent pattern of creation — what we call natural law. The transcendence of God means that this pattern is not a constraint on God but an expression of His wisdom. He could act differently on any occasion — as He does in miracles — but He ordinarily governs by consistent, discoverable patterns that allow human beings to live intelligibly in the world.
6.4 The scientific commentary: no instrument can detect God
Modern physics provides a precise formulation of the verse’s claim. The photon is the smallest quantum of the electromagnetic field — the fundamental particle by which all visual and instrumental detection operates. All telescopes, microscopes, particle detectors, radio telescopes, and gamma-ray observatories ultimately detect electromagnetic signals — photons. The verse that says “no vision can encompass Him” could be read, in the language of modern physics, as: no electromagnetic signal carries information about God; no photon mediates between God and any detector.
But the verse goes further. Not only does it deny that instruments can detect God; it affirms that God detects all instruments. God perceives all photons — including every photon that strikes every water surface, every photon that enters every eye, every photon that triggers every detector in every physics laboratory. He is the ground of the very physical processes by which we attempt to detect Him. This is the occasionalist reading: God is not an object within the electromagnetic field but the sustaining cause of the field itself. He cannot be observed because observation presupposes Him.
This is not obscurantism. It is a precise philosophical claim: the category of “what can be empirically detected” and the category of “what sustains empirical detection itself” are logically distinct. No self-sustaining system can account for its own ground. No physical experiment can test the conditions of possibility of physical experiment. Quran 6:103 locates God precisely in this second category — the ground, not the content, of empirical experience.
6.5 The philosophical commentary: epistemological divide
The verse illuminates the deepest philosophical divide between the atheist and the devout Muslim. Both agree on the data: no perceptible God, regular natural laws, no routine miraculous intervention. They differ on interpretation.
The atheist applies the principle that absence of empirical evidence is evidence of absence: if God cannot be detected, there is no reason to believe God exists. This is the strong empiricist position, associated with philosophers from Hume to Bertrand Russell (“The universe is just there, and that’s all”).
The Muslim reads the same empirical situation through the lens of 6:103 and understands it as a theological prediction rather than a refutation. God should not be visible to empirical instruments because God is not a creature within the physical order but the Creator who transcends it. The invisibility of God is not evidence against God but a necessary consequence of what God is. The photon at the water surface is not evidence against God; it is, for the Muslim, God’s will expressed at the quantum scale, hidden beneath a veil of statistical regularity that He Himself has established.
The next verse (6:104) provides the Quran’s own response to this epistemological situation: “Indeed, there have come to you insights (baṣā’ir) from your Lord. So whoever chooses to see, it is for their own good. But whoever chooses to be blind, it is to their own loss.” The Arabic word used — baṣā’ir (perceptions, insights) — is the plural of the same root as baṣar (vision) in 6:103. God’s visibility comes not through physical vision but through a different kind of perception: rational inference, moral experience, the awareness of contingency, and — for those who seek it — the inner light of faith. This is precisely the epistemological position of the Muslim who sees occasional-ism in the photon’s undetermined fate.
VII. The Scholarly Architecture
7.1 The great chain of influence
The intellectual tradition connecting Ghazali’s occasionalism to Western philosophy and thence to modern quantum theology is one of the most important in the history of ideas. The transmission pathway has been carefully reconstructed by scholars.
Harry Wolfson, in a landmark 1969 article in Speculum, traced the influence of Islamic kalam occasionalism on the 14th-century European philosopher Nicholas of Autrecourt, whose skeptical arguments about causation — long considered mysteriously ahead of their time — turn out to parallel Ghazali’s almost exactly. Wolfson identified the probable transmission route through Latin translations of Ghazali’s Maqāṣid al-Falāsifa (The Intentions of the Philosophers), which was widely read in medieval Europe.
Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), the French Cartesian philosopher, developed the most systematic Western occasionalism, arguing that God is “the only true cause” and that natural objects function as “occasional causes” — the language echoing Ghazali’s ‘ādah almost precisely. Malebranche’s three arguments — the necessary connection argument, the conservation-as-continuous-creation argument, and the knowledge argument — map closely onto Ghazali’s three centuries earlier. David Hume was, as his manuscripts reveal, “a studious and astute reader of Malebranche,” reading the Search After Truth carefully and incorporating Malebranche’s arguments in a secularized form in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739).
Thus the chain runs: Ghazali (1095) → medieval Latin translations → Nicholas of Autrecourt (1340s) → Malebranche (1674) → Hume (1739) → modern philosophy of causation. The key difference between Ghazali and Hume is that Ghazali’s critique of necessary causation served a theistic purpose (God is the real cause) while Hume’s led to skeptical agnosticism (we cannot identify any ultimate cause). Both noted that observation shows only conjunction, not necessity; they drew opposite metaphysical conclusions.
7.2 The quantum theology lineage
The modern theological engagement with quantum mechanics as a locus for divine action begins with William Pollard (Chance and Providence, 1958), a nuclear physicist and Episcopal priest who argued that quantum “chance” could be God’s providential guidance. The insight lay dormant for three decades before Robert John Russell systematized it into NIODA through the CTNS/Vatican Observatory project (1988–2003).
Russell’s engagement with the problem of quantum measurement is directly relevant to the photon at the water surface. He argues that wave function collapse — the actualization of one quantum outcome from a probability distribution — is precisely the “causal joint” where God acts. God does not force the photon to be reflected or transmitted; God wills the specific actualization of one of the quantum-mechanically specified possibilities. This action requires no violation of physical law and leaves no empirical fingerprint. It is, in the language of 6:103, perfectly hidden — yet perfectly effective.
John Polkinghorne raised important objections to this framework. The measurement problem is unresolved: we do not have a complete quantum theory of how wave function collapse occurs, so building a theology of divine action on this incomplete foundation is precarious. Furthermore, if Bohmian mechanics is correct, there is no genuine indeterminism, and the quantum “gap” for divine action disappears. These objections are serious, but they point toward the need for theological humility rather than the rejection of the quantum-occasionalist framework. If the ultimate interpretation of quantum mechanics restores determinism, the occasionalist falls back on the classical convergence argument: God is the First Cause who continuously sustains all secondary causes.
Ian Barbour and Nancey Murphy represent different emphases within the same broad framework. Murphy’s “divine action supervenes on natural processes” language — God acts at the quantum level, but His action cannot be reduced to any physical description — is formally equivalent to Ghazali’s ‘ādah: God acts through and with the natural order without being constrained by it.
7.3 The internal Islamic debate revisited
Within the Islamic tradition, the occasionalism debate spans a rich spectrum that modern scholarship is only beginning to fully map.
Majid Fakhry (Islamic Occasionalism, 1958) provided the first systematic study in English, tracing the development from al-Ash’ari through al-Ghazali and noting the parallels with Western occasionalism. Frank Griffel (Al-Ghazali’s Philosophical Theology, 2009) has argued convincingly that Ghazali’s position is more nuanced than a simple denial of all secondary causation: he leaves room for natural objects to have genuine causal powers, provided these are understood as entirely dependent on God’s sustaining will. This is essentially the position of Thomas Aquinas in the Christian tradition — natural causes are real, but they derive their causal power from the First Cause in every instance of their operation.
The key contemporary development is the recognition that occasionalism and natural causation need not be opposites. As one scholar summarizes: “Ghazali’s critique targets the necessity of natural causation, not its reality. Natural objects can genuinely cause their effects, while God is the ground and sustainer of their causal power.” This “grounded occasionalism” is more philosophically robust than the simple denial of secondary causation and maps more precisely onto the quantum theological framework: quantum mechanics describes the causal structure of reality, while God is the ground of that structure at every level.
VIII. Epilogue: The Photon’s Unanswered Question and the Two Readings of Nature
The lake is still. Sunlight crosses the air, reaches the surface, and the photons arrive one by one. Each faces the same surface, the same angle, the same physical conditions. The laws of quantum electrodynamics — among the most precisely verified theories in the history of science — state that each photon has approximately a 4% chance of being reflected and a 96% chance of being refracted into the water below. The laws cannot say more. They have nothing more to say. The physical description is complete, and it ends in probability.
What happens next is the most profound question in the philosophy of nature.
For the atheist: The photon is reflected or refracted for no reason that any physical or metaphysical account can supply. The laws of nature have spoken their last word, and that last word is a probability. Individual quantum events are brute facts — causally unconditioned, metaphysically naked. The universe is not governed by purpose or intelligence but by the intrinsic probabilistic structure of the quantum fields. The photon’s fate is literally uncaused. The laws of nature do not decide; nothing decides; it simply happens. This is the honest, unflinching materialist position, and it is consistent with all known physical data.
For the agnostic: I do not know. The laws do not decide, and I see no other determining factor. Perhaps there is one — perhaps there is not. If I allow that God could exist and could act at the quantum level, then I must acknowledge that the photon’s fate could be divinely determined, and I would have absolutely no way of knowing. The science is silent on this question; it does not answer it and cannot. I suspend judgment.
For the devout Muslim: The laws of nature do not decide because the laws of nature were never meant to decide. They describe the envelope — the range of possibilities and their probabilities — that God has established as the framework of His habitual action. They are the description of God’s rational, consistent, beautiful way of governing creation. But the decision about this photon, at this moment, is God’s direct act of will, as is the decision about every photon at every surface at every moment throughout all of cosmic history. The 4% reflected and the 96% refracted are not random — they are God’s will expressed with magnificent consistency across billions of photons per second at every water surface on Earth. Al-Ghazali said it: “The agent of the burning is God.” The Muslim says it: the agent of the reflection — and the refraction — is God. The photon does not decide; physics does not decide; God decides. And He decides with such perfect, rational consistency that His decision appears, to those who do not know Him, as a “law of nature.”
This is the epistemological situation that Quran 6:103 described fourteen centuries before quantum mechanics was discovered: “No vision can encompass Him, yet He encompasses all vision. He is the Subtle, the All-Aware.” He is the Subtle — al-Laṭīf — the One who acts at the finest, most penetrating level of reality, below the resolution of any instrument, beneath the threshold of any physical detection. He is the All-Aware — al-Khabīr — the One to whom every photon’s fate is not probability but certainty, not chance but will.
The atheist and the agnostic looking at the lake see the photons reflecting and refracting according to quantum mechanical probabilities. There is no visible hand, no detectable signal, no empirical residue of divine action. Their experience is exactly what Quran 6:103 predicts: vision does not encompass Him. They are right that no empirical method reveals God. They would be wrong to conclude that His absence from the detector proves His non-existence, for He declared in His own Book that He transcends all detection — and they are finding exactly that.
The Muslim looking at the same lake sees Al-Ghazali’s universe made visible: not fire burning cotton by its own power, but God sustaining the photon’s trajectory through each quantum instant of its journey; not laws determining outcomes, but God determining outcomes through the frame of law; not physics governing the world from within, but God governing the world from beyond while expressing His governance in the language of physics. The Muslim sees, in the 4% that are reflected and the 96% that are refracted, the will of the One who holds the heavens and the earth so they do not vanish, who is upon some task every single day, who is al-Laṭīf al-Khabīr — too subtle to be grasped, too aware to miss anything.
Determinism and occasionalism describe the same universe. They are not competing scientific theories — they are competing metaphysical interpretations of the same physical reality. The determinist says: prior states plus laws determine outcomes. The occasionalist says: God determines outcomes through a structure He has established and sustains. Both interpretations are consistent with all known physics. Both are consistent with the photon at the water surface. Neither can be empirically refuted.
The only difference between them is God.
And whether God exists — whether the photon’s undetermined fate is a random fluctuation in the quantum vacuum or an act of the Living, the Self-Subsisting, who never sleeps and never slumbers — is a question that physics cannot answer and was never designed to answer. It is the question that Quran 6:104, the verse immediately following the declaration of divine invisibility, leaves to each reader: “Whoever chooses to see, it is for their own good. But whoever chooses to be blind, it is to their own loss.”
The photon strikes the water. The laws fall silent. And in that silence, between the equation and the outcome, between the probability and the event — there is either nothing, or there is God.
References and Further Reading
Primary Islamic Sources
- Al-Ghazali. Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), c. 1095. Trans. Michael Marmura. Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2000.
- Al-Ghazali. Iḥyā’ ‘Ulūm al-Dīn (The Revival of the Religious Sciences). 4 vols. Trans. Nabih Amin Faris. Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1962.
- Al-Ghazali. Al-Iqtiṣād fī al-I’tiqād (The Middle Path in Theology). Trans. Abdurrahman Unal. Clifton: Tughra Books
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