Presented by Gemini

Abstract

This essay asks one of the oldest and most disorienting questions in the philosophy of religion: how does God see, hear, and act? Human beings have a persistent temptation to fashion God in their own image — most famously rendered in Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where the Creator reaches toward Adam as a muscular, white-bearded old man. The Glorious Qur’ān moves in the opposite direction. Its governing principle, stated in Sūrat al-Shūrā 42:11, is that “there is nothing like unto Him,” and only then that “He is the Hearing, the Seeing.” Perfect perception is affirmed; bodily organs are denied. God hears without an ear and sees without a pupil or light.

From this anchor the essay develops four movements. First, it argues that divine knowledge reaches to the smallest quantum detail of an expanding universe of perhaps two trillion galaxies and roughly nine million living species — a knowledge so intimate that it includes what Thomas Nagel famously called the irreducibly first-person fact of “what it is like to be a bat,” and the hidden thoughts a person conceals even from themselves. Second, it presents al-Ghazālī’s occasionalism as expounded by Dr. Zia H. Shah — the doctrine that created things have no causal power of their own and that God is the sole, continuously acting cause — and shows why such moment-by-moment action logically requires complete prior knowledge of every situation. Third, it expounds Shah’s Four Books of God thesis, grounded in Qur’ān 13:38–39 and the “Mother of the Book” (Umm al-Kitāb), reading the Qur’ān, the cosmos, the self, and history as four scriptures answering to one Author in the age of quantum physics. Fourth, it turns to light: every photon that reflects or refracts at a surface is, on this reading, not compelled by an autonomous “law of nature” but enacted by God at each occasion — a claim that quantum indeterminacy renders newly defensible. A thematic epilogue, anchored in Qur’ān 6:103, gathers these threads into a single conclusion: that every detail of physics, whether quantum mechanical or relativistic, is a clue toward the Omniscience and Omnipotence of the One whom vision cannot grasp but who grasps all vision. Throughout, every Qur’ānic verse is presented in Arabic together with six popular English translations.

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