Presented by Claude for Zia H Shah MD

Abstract

This essay reads two verses of the Qur’an — Sūrat al-Ṭūr 52:35–36 — through the lens of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated philosophical encounters: the 1948 BBC Third Programme radio debate between Bertrand Russell and the Jesuit historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston. Copleston argued for God from the contingency of the world, a line of reasoning whose deepest roots lie in Qur’anic rhetoric, whose formal architecture was built by the Muslim philosophers Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) and al-Fārābī, and which passed into the Latin West through Aquinas’s Third Way and Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason. Russell answered by declaring the concept of necessary being meaningless, denying that the universe requires any explanation, and famously concluding, “I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all.” I argue that Russell’s refusal is intellectually magnificent and existentially honest, but that it is not thereby correct: the entire scientific enterprise, and indeed the whole edifice of human rationality, proceeds by the logic of cause and effect, so that to declare the universe a brute fact is to saw off the branch on which reason itself sits. Q 52:35–36 anticipates this exact confrontation with startling economy, laying out an exhaustive disjunction — were they created by nothing, did they create themselves, did they create the heavens and the earth? — that leaves only one rational residue: a Creator. Drawing on the five classical mufassirūn (al-Ṭabarī, al-Zamakhsharī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, al-Qurṭubī, and Ibn Kathīr), the hadith of Jubayr ibn Muṭ’im, and modern cosmology and philosophy of religion, I offer an interdisciplinary commentary in the non-polemical, interfaith register of thequran.love, treating the convergence of scripture, reason, and science as resonance rather than proof.

I. Prologue: A Debate That Never Ended

On the evening of January 28, 1948, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Third Programme broadcast a discussion “on the existence of God” between two men who could hardly have been better matched. On one side sat Bertrand Russell — grandson of a British Prime Minister, co-author with Alfred North Whitehead of Principia Mathematica, discoverer of the paradox that bears his name, founder (with G. E. Moore and others) of the analytic tradition in philosophy, and, two years later, a Nobel laureate in Literature. If any human being of the twentieth century had earned the right to speak about logic, it was Russell. On the other side sat Father Frederick Charles Copleston, S.J., the Jesuit priest then at work on his monumental nine-volume History of Philosophy. The debate was later reprinted in Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian (1957) and has been anthologized many times since.

The two men agreed, at the outset, on the terms of their disagreement. “I presume,” Copleston began, “that we mean a supreme personal being — distinct from the world and creator of the world. Would you agree — provisionally at least — to accept this statement as the meaning of the term ‘God’?” Russell: “Yes, I accept this definition.” Russell further clarified that his position was not atheism but agnosticism: he would not claim that the non-existence of God could be proved. coplestoncopleston

Copleston then proposed to set aside the moral argument and put his main weight on “the metaphysical argument based on Leibniz’s argument from ‘Contingency.’” His statement of it was crisp: copleston

“First of all, I should say, we know that there are at least some beings in the world which do not contain in themselves the reason for their existence. For example, I depend on my parents, and now on the air, and on food, and so on… since objects or events exist, and since no object of experience contains within itself reason of its existence, this reason, the totality of objects, must have a reason external to itself… So, I should say, in order to explain existence, we must come to a being which contains within itself the reason for its own existence, that is to say, which cannot not exist.” copleston

This is the argument from contingency in its classical form. Its structure is roughly: (1) there exist contingent beings — beings that do not contain within themselves the reason for their own existence; (2) the totality of such beings is itself contingent; (3) a contingent totality requires a reason beyond itself; (4) an infinite regress of contingent reasons explains nothing; therefore (5) there exists a being whose essence is to exist, a necessary being — what the theistic traditions call God.

What follows in the debate is a masterclass in philosophical combat, and it turns on a single fault-line. Russell would not grant the first move. “The word ‘necessary,’” he insisted, “can only be applied significantly to propositions… I could only admit a necessary being if there were a being whose existence it is self-contradictory to deny.” For Russell, “necessary” is a predicate of analytic propositions (“irrational animals are animals”), not of things. To call a being necessary was, he thought, to smuggle the discredited ontological argument back in through the side door — to claim there is a being whose essence involves existence, which he held to be impossible, since “existence… quite definitely is not a predicate.” coplestoncopleston

Copleston pressed. Even if we cannot intuit God’s essence, surely the question “Does a cause of the world exist?” is meaningful; most people would understand it. Russell conceded the question had meaning but denied that any answer naming God as cause could be a meaningful existence-statement. The two circled the concept of “sufficient reason.” Copleston: an adequate explanation “must ultimately be a total explanation, to which nothing further can be added.” Russell delivered the first of his decisive strokes: “Then I can only say that you’re looking for something which can’t be got, and which one ought not to expect to get.” coplestoncopleston

Then came the exchange that has echoed through seventy-eight years of philosophy of religion:

Copleston: But are you going to say that we can’t, or we shouldn’t even raise the question of the existence of the whole of this sorry scheme of things — of the whole universe? Russell: Yes, I don’t think there’s any meaning in it at all. I think the word “universe” is a handy word in some connections, but I don’t think it stands for anything that has a meaning. copleston

And, a few turns later, when Copleston asked whether Russell agreed with Sartre that the universe is “gratuitous”:

Russell: Well, the word “gratuitous” suggests that it might be something else; I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all. Philosophyintrocourse

Here is the brute-fact universe in seven words. Russell never used the term “brute fact” in the broadcast, but that is precisely his position: the universe simply is, and the demand for an explanation of it is a category mistake. He drove the point home with an analogy that has become nearly as famous as the thesis it defends:

“I can illustrate what seems to me your fallacy. Every man who exists has a mother, and it seems to me your argument is that therefore the human race must have a mother, but obviously the human race hasn’t a mother — that’s a different logical sphere.” thedailyhatch

This is the charge of the fallacy of composition: what is true of each part (having a cause, having a mother) need not be true of the whole. Copleston’s rejoinder was sharp — he denied any parity, since he was not arguing that the series has a phenomenal cause but that the whole series of contingent things, being contingent, requires a transcendent cause. And he made the move that is the true heart of this essay. When Russell said the concept of cause derives only from our observation of particular things, so that “I see no reason whatsoever to suppose that the total has any cause whatsoever,” Copleston answered: thedailyhatch

“I cannot see how science could be conducted on any other assumption than that of order and intelligibility in nature. The physicist presupposes, at least tacitly, that there is some sense in investigating nature and looking for the causes of events, just as the detective presupposes that there is some sense in looking for the cause of a murder.” thedailyhatch

Russell’s reply was to narrow the scientist’s commitment as far as it would go: “a physicist looks for causes; that does not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere. A man may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere.” And then the closing exchange, which for our purposes is the whole debate in miniature: thedailyhatch

Copleston: But your general point then, Lord Russell, is that it’s illegitimate even to ask the question of the cause of the world? Russell: Yes, that’s my position. Copleston: If it’s a question that for you has no meaning, it’s of course very difficult to discuss it, isn’t it? Russell: Yes, it is very difficult. What do you say — shall we pass on to some other issue? University of Cincinnati

And they passed on, to religious experience. But the question did not pass. It has never passed. Elsewhere Copleston compared Russell’s refusal to playing chess against an opponent who declines to move his pieces. There is something breathtaking in Russell’s stubbornness — a kind of ascetic intellectual courage in refusing to be moved by an argument he cannot feel the force of. But breathtaking is not the same as correct. My thesis is that in refusing even to ask the question, Russell did not merely decline one particular argument; he quietly withdrew the warrant on which all inquiry — his own logicism included — depends.

II. The Text: Q 52:35–36

The two verses sit near the center of Sūrat al-Ṭūr (“The Mount”), the fifty-second chapter of the Qur’an, a Meccan sūra of forty-nine verses that opens with a series of oaths and closes by commanding the Prophet to “wait patiently for the command of your Lord.”

Arabic:

أَمْ خُلِقُوا۟ مِنْ غَيْرِ شَىْءٍ أَمْ هُمُ ٱلْخَٰلِقُونَ ﴿٣٥﴾ أَمْ خَلَقُوا۟ ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضَ ۚ بَل لَّا يُوقِنُونَ ﴿٣٦﴾

Transliteration:

Am khuliqū min ghayri shay’in am humu l-khāliqūn (35) Am khalaqū l-samāwāti wa-l-arḍa bal lā yūqinūn (36)

The particle am (“or”) that opens each clause is the hinge of the entire passage. It introduces a rapid succession of alternative questions — a rhetorical device the Arabic rhetoricians treat under the hamzat al-taswiya and the cascade of am-questions — each posing a possible explanation and each, by its very framing, exposing that possibility as absurd.

III. Six Renderings into English

Because no translation can carry the full weight of the Arabic — as one Qur’an portal notes, invoking the Italian proverb traduttore, traditore, “the translator is a traitor” — it is worth setting six of the most widely used English versions side by side. Each captures a slightly different facet of the verses’ meaning.

Sahih International:

“Or were they created by nothing, or were they the creators [of themselves]? Or did they create the heavens and the earth? Rather, they are not certain.” quranvquranv

Yusuf Ali:

“Were they created of nothing, or were they themselves the creators? Or did they create the heavens and the earth? Nay, they have no firm belief.” quranvquranv

Pickthall (Marmaduke Pickthall):

“Or were they created out of naught? Or are they the creators? Or did they create the heavens and the earth? Nay, but they are sure of nothing!” quranvquranv

Muhammad Asad:

“[Or do they deny the existence of God?] Have they themselves been created without anything [that might have caused their creation]? or were they, perchance, their own creators? [And] have they created the heavens and the earth? Nay, but they have no certainty of anything!” quranvquranv

Abdel Haleem:

“Or were they created out of nothing? Or are they the creators? Or did they create the heavens and the earth? No! They have no faith.”

Mustafa Khattab (The Clear Quran):

“Or were they created by nothing, or are they ˹their own˺ creators? Or did they create the heavens and the earth? In fact, they have no firm belief ˹in Allah˺.” quranvquranv

For completeness, two further classic renderings are worth noting: Shakir (“Or were they created without there being anything, or are they the creators? Or did they create the heavens and the earth? Nay! they have no certainty”) and Arberry (“Or were they created out of nothing? Or are they the creators? Or did they create the heavens and earth? Nay, but they have not sure faith”). Across all of them the logical skeleton is identical: a set of exhaustive alternatives, each impossible, converging on a single conclusion left unspoken because it is the only one left standing. quranv + 3

IV. The Moment Faith Settled in a Heart

Before turning to the philosophical anatomy of the verses, we should pause on the single most striking piece of testimony to their power — a testimony that comes not from a philosopher but from an idolater who had come to Medina on business.

Jubayr ibn Muṭ’im ibn ‘Adī was a Qurashī notable who came to the Prophet after the Battle of Badr to negotiate the ransom of prisoners; at the time he was still a polytheist. He reports that he heard the Prophet reciting Sūrat al-Ṭūr in the Maghrib (sunset) prayer, and when the Prophet reached these verses — am khuliqū min ghayri shay’in am humu l-khāliqūn / am khalaqū l-samāwāti wa-l-arḍa bal lā yūqinūn and the verse after — something happened to him. The report is recorded in both of the two most authoritative Sunni hadith collections (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim), and the Encyclopedia of Translated Prophetic Hadiths renders his words: “it was as if my heart was about to take flight.” In the version preserved at Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 4023 (in the Book of Military Expeditions, Kitāb al-Maghāzī), he says the moment came “at a time when belief was first planted in my heart.” Hearing these verses was, by his own account, among the reasons he later embraced Islam.

The detail matters because it tells us what kind of speech these verses are. They are not a syllogism read off a lecture slide; they are a hammer-blow to the heart delivered through the ear. The logical force and the existential force are one and the same. Jubayr, a man of the Arabic language at its most refined, could not answer the questions — and could not un-hear them.

V. The Logical Architecture of Verse 35

Read as an argument, verse 35 poses an exhaustive disjunction about the origin of contingent beings — here, human beings, who are invited to reason first from their own existence (anfus, “the selves”) and then, in verse 36, from the cosmos (āfāq, “the horizons”). The classical commentators identify the possibilities with precision.

The great early exegete Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1373) states the logic in its barest form. Glossing “Or were they created by nothing? Or were they themselves the creators?” he writes: “Allah asks them, were they created without a maker or did they create themselves? Neither is true. Allah is the One Who created them and brought them into existence after they were nothing.” And on the sequel: it “makes no sense for a created thing to have no creator, nor can a thing that will cease to exist [have the power to] create. There must be a Creator of them, and that is God, the One.” Quran.com

We can lay the trilemma out formally. For any contingent being that undeniably exists, there are exactly three candidate explanations of its coming-to-be:

1. It was created from nothing / by nothing (min ghayri shay’) — that is, it sprang into being with no cause and no creator at all, by sheer chance or brute happenstance.
2. It created itself (am humu l-khāliqūn) — it is its own cause, bringing itself into existence.
3. It created the heavens and the earth (am khalaqū l-samāwāti wa-l-arḍa) — it is not merely self-caused but is in fact the Creator of all reality, the Necessary Being itself.

Each is dismissed by its own absurdity. Option (1) violates the most basic intuition of reason, that nothing comes from nothing without a cause. Option (2) is incoherent, since to create itself a thing would have to exist before it existed. Option (3) is manifestly false: no human being made the galaxies. What the verse never states — because it need not — is the only surviving possibility: these beings were created, from something, by Someone who is neither caused nor self-caused in the ordinary sense but is the uncaused ground of all else.

Interestingly, the greatest commentators noticed that the disjunction as stated has an implicit fourth member, deliberately suppressed. Yusuf Ali’s commentary records three alternative readings of the preposition min in min ghayri shay’: “(1) Were they created by nothing? Did they come into existence of themselves? Was it a mere chance that they came into being? (2) Were they created out of nothing? Was there not a wonderful seed, from which their material growth can be traced, as the handiwork of a wise and wonderful Creator? (3) Were they created for nothing, to no purpose?” The third reading turns the cosmological question into a teleological one — if you were made for a purpose, must you not seek it? — and shows how densely the Arabic compresses several arguments into a single clause.

Al-Rāzī’s Quadrilemma and the Language of Contingency

It is Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), the Ash’arī theologian-philosopher whose thirty-two-volume Mafātīḥ al-Ghayb (“Keys to the Unseen,” also called al-Tafsīr al-Kabīr) is the most philosophically ambitious commentary in the tradition, who develops the verse into a full logical division. (A note of caution: al-Rāzī died before completing the tafsīr, and this section may be the work of his continuators, al-Khū’ī or al-Qamūlī, though it reads as classic Rāzian rational exegesis.) Wikipedia

Al-Rāzī organizes his treatment of verse 35 into four masā’il (investigations). In the fourth he asks directly: “What is the point of mentioning the three matters in the verse?” and answers that “these are ordered/graded matters (umūr murattaba), each one of which [if affirmed] would preclude affirming [God’s] oneness and the resurrection.” He notes that the argument begins with the human being’s own self (bi-anfusihim): “the first creation is proof of the permissibility and possibility of the second creation” — that is, the fact of our having been created at all is simultaneously evidence for one God and for the reality of resurrection.

Crucially, al-Rāzī observes that the disjunction contains a suppressed first term. The truly primary question — “were they created at all?” — is left unstated “because its falsity is self-evidently obvious,” its denial being “a denial of a necessary truth.” He then recasts the whole verse in the technical vocabulary of the philosophers. On the reading that min ghayri shay’ means “without a Creator,” he writes:

“There is also a fine ordering (tartīb ḥasan): namely, that denying the Maker (nafī al-ṣāni’) can only take one of two forms — either by denying that the world is created, such that it would not be possible/contingent (mumkin) [at all]; or [by conceding] that it is contingent but claiming that the contingent has no need [of a cause], so that the contingent occurs without any determining cause (min ghayri mu’aththir) — and both of these are impossible (muḥāl).”

This is precisely the argument from contingency (imkān) rendered in the language of Avicenna: the mumkin (contingent being) cannot come to be min ghayri mu’aththir (without a determining cause), so the existence of contingent things traces necessarily to something that is not itself contingent. Al-Rāzī even mounts a defense of the causal principle itself, holding that “the possible existent requires a determiner (murajjiḥ) and a cause (mu’aththir)” is “a self-evident, primary premise, the denial of which involves the denial of that which is self-evident” — and warning that to deny it “would bar our way to proving the existence of the creator.” Seven centuries before the Russell–Copleston broadcast, al-Rāzī had already located the exact hinge on which that debate would turn: whether the contingent may be permitted to exist without a cause.

VI. “Nay, They Have No Certainty”: The Meaning of Bal Lā Yūqinūn

Verse 36 completes the movement — “Or did they create the heavens and the earth?” — and then, with the two words bal lā yūqinūn, changes register entirely. The particle bal (“nay, rather”) sweeps aside the preceding absurdities, and the verse diagnoses the real condition of the deniers: not a failure of evidence but a failure of yaqīn, of certainty.

Al-Rāzī offers three readings of the phrase. First, following al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144), the celebrated Mu’tazilī author of al-Kashshāf: “they have no certainty that they [themselves] were created” — echoing the Qur’an’s observation elsewhere that if you ask the deniers who created the heavens and the earth, “they will surely say: God” (cf. Q 31:25, 43:9). On this reading, the deniers actually concede the conclusion when pressed; their unbelief is a performance they cannot sustain under examination. Second: “they have no certainty that God is One” — the defect is not in acknowledging a maker but in the unity of the maker. Third, and most radically: “they have no certainty at all,” with no specified object — a settled disposition of un-conviction that no evidence can cure. Al-Rāzī supports this last reading with the verse that soon follows: “And if they saw a fragment falling from the sky, they would say, ‘Piled-up clouds’” (Q 52:44). Show such a person a miracle and he will file it under meteorology.

Al-Rāzī then draws the structural point that crowns the whole passage: verse 36, on the creation of the heavens and the earth, “is a pointer to the argument from the horizons (dalīl al-āfāq), while the earlier statement ‘were they created’ is the argument from the souls (dalīl al-anfus).” The two verses together enact the Qur’an’s signature epistemology (cf. Q 41:53): God will show His signs “in the horizons and in themselves” until it becomes clear that He is the Real. The argument from contingency is thus run twice — once inward, on the fact of one’s own createdness, and once outward, on the fact of the cosmos.

This is where bal lā yūqinūn meets Bertrand Russell most directly. Russell’s “the universe is just there, and that’s all” is, in Qur’anic terms, not an argument but a state — the state of one who has decided, in advance, that no explanation is to be sought and therefore none can be found. The verse does not accuse the deniers of lacking intelligence; Russell had more than most. It accuses them of lacking yaqīn — the settled certainty that the world is intelligible all the way down, that the question is real and admits an answer. When Russell said “shall we pass on to some other issue?”, he was, in the idiom of the sūra, declining certainty rather than lacking evidence.

VII. The Cascade: Situating the Verses in 52:29–43

Q 52:35–36 does not stand alone. It is one link in a chain of rhetorical am-questions running from verse 29 to verse 43, a passage that functions, in the apt phrase of one contemporary study guide, as “a divine cross-examination that leaves the defendant with absolutely nowhere to hide.” The cascade begins by dismissing the accusations hurled at the Prophet — that he is a soothsayer (kāhin), a madman (majnūn), a poet (shā’ir) — and issues the literary challenge (taḥaddī): “Then let them produce a discourse like it, if they should be truthful” (52:34). Then comes the metaphysical barrage:

• Were they created by nothing, or are they the creators? (35)
• Or did they create the heavens and the earth? (36)
• Or do they possess the treasuries of your Lord? Or are they the controllers? (37)
• Or have they a stairway by which they listen [to heaven]? (38)
• Or has He daughters, while you have sons? (39)
• Or do you ask them for a wage, so that they are weighed down by debt? (40)
• Or do they possess the unseen, so that they write it down? (41)
• Or do they intend a plot? — but the disbelievers are themselves the plotted-against. (42)
• Or have they a god other than God? Glorified is God above what they associate. (43)

Each am closes off an escape route. The two verses at the heart of our essay are the metaphysical foundation of the entire sequence: before the passage disqualifies every rival deity, every claim to hidden knowledge, every accusation against the Messenger, it first establishes the one fact on which all the rest depends — that these beings did not make themselves, and so their Maker exists and is One.

VIII. From Mecca to Baghdad to Paris: The Life of the Argument

The reasoning compressed into Q 52:35–36 became, over the following centuries, the most rigorously developed argument in the philosophy of religion — and, strikingly, its central development happened first in the Islamic world.

Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, 980–1037) gave the argument its classical metaphysical form in what he called the Burhān al-Ṣiddīqīn, the “Proof of the Truthful” (sometimes rendered “of the Sincere” or “the Veracious”). His starting point is the distinction between the mumkin al-wujūd (the contingent, or possible-in-itself, being, whose essence does not entail its existence) and the wājib al-wujūd (the Necessary Existent, that which cannot not exist). Every contingent being requires a cause; the totality of contingent things is itself contingent and cannot be the cause of itself; therefore there must exist a being that is necessary in itself, and this — Avicenna argues through a further chain of reasoning establishing its unity, simplicity, and intellect — is God. What is remarkable about Avicenna’s version, as the scholarship notes, is that it aspires to prove the Necessary Existent almost a priori, from the very concepts of possibility and necessity, rather than from any particular observed fact. His predecessor al-Fārābī (c. 872–950) had already framed the distinction between necessary and contingent existence on which Avicenna built. 1000-Word Philosophy + 3

Al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) gave the tradition its other great form. Suspicious of the philosophers’ claim that the world emanates eternally and necessarily from God, in his Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (“The Incoherence of the Philosophers”) he pressed a version that turns on the world’s having a temporal beginning. His syllogism became the template for what modern philosophers, borrowing the Arabic word for theology, call the kalām cosmological argument: “Every being which begins has a cause for its beginning; now the world is a being which begins; therefore, it possesses a cause for its beginning.” Al-Ghazālī argued that an actual infinite regress of past events is impossible, so the world cannot be beginningless. Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126–1198), defending the philosophers against al-Ghazālī, insisted rather that the universe was fashioned from pre-existing potentiality and emphasized a prime-mover argument in the Aristotelian mode — a reminder that the Islamic tradition contained the debate within itself long before it reached Europe. Solas + 2

When the argument crossed into the Latin West, it split into the two forms Copleston would later weave together. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) made it the Third of his Five Ways: from the observation that things in nature are “possible to be and not to be” (contingent), he argued that not everything can be merely possible, for then at some time nothing would have existed, and from nothing, nothing comes; therefore there must exist something necessary — “and this all men speak of as God.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) gave the argument its most elegant modern statement by grounding it in the Principle of Sufficient Reason: “no fact can be real or existent, no statement true, unless there be a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise.” From this principle he drew the question that has haunted metaphysics ever since — “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — and argued that the sufficient reason for the whole series of contingent things cannot lie within the series but must lie in a necessary being outside it. Medium + 4

Edward Feser has usefully distinguished these strands: Avicenna’s and Aquinas’s arguments consider reality “under the guise of the transcendental attribute of being,” reasoning that the being of contingent things must derive from a being that is necessary; Leibniz’s argument considers reality “under the transcendental attribute of truth,” reasoning that the intelligibility of contingent things presupposes a being intelligible in itself. When Copleston told Russell in 1948 that he was “basing the argument on the principle of sufficient reason,” he was standing at the end of a nine-hundred-year chain that began in the Qur’an’s am khuliqū min ghayri shay’. Bloggercopleston

IX. Russell’s Refusal and the Self-Destruction of Reason

We can now see exactly what Russell did, and why it was both magnificent and self-defeating.

Russell’s objections come in three layers. First, the semantic objection: “necessary” is meaningful only of analytic propositions, not of beings, so “necessary being” is as empty as “the existent round-square.” Second, the epistemic objection: our concept of cause is drawn entirely from observing particular things, and we have no warrant to extend it to “the total.” Third, the fallacy-of-composition objection: to infer that the universe has a cause because each thing in it has a cause is like inferring that the human race has a mother because each human does. copleston

Each has been answered, and the answers are instructive. The semantic objection presupposes a narrow verificationist theory of meaning — the very “over-dogmatic” insistence that “what will not go into my machine is non-existent, or it is meaningless” that Copleston pointedly identified — and that theory has been almost universally abandoned since the 1950s, not least because it fails its own test. (Indeed, as commentators have noted, Russell’s own remarks are subtler than Copleston sometimes took them to be: when Russell said the word “universe” has “no meaning,” he meant, in line with his theory of descriptions, that there is no single object the word denotes, not that the word is unintelligible.) The fallacy-of-composition objection cuts less than it seems: some properties genuinely do transfer from parts to wholes (a wall made entirely of brick is a brick wall), and Copleston’s reply was that he never argued the whole must have a phenomenal cause of the same kind as its parts, but that a totality of contingent things, precisely because every member is contingent, cannot as a whole be necessary and so requires a cause of a different, transcendent kind. copleston

But it is the epistemic objection, and Russell’s final refusal, that reveals the deepest problem — and here Copleston’s rejoinder was decisive and, I will argue, correct. Russell wished to look for causes locally, in physics, while denying that reality is causally intelligible globally. He compared the scientist to a man looking for gold: “A man may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere.” But the analogy fails at the crucial point. The prospector does not assume gold is everywhere, true — but he does assume, without a flicker of doubt, that wherever gold is or is not, there is a fact of the matter with an explanation: that the distribution of gold in the earth is the intelligible result of geological causes. That assumption — that nature is “not simply discontinuous,” that phenomena have reasons that reward investigation — is not one hypothesis among others that science tests. It is the precondition of science’s even getting started. Every experiment ever performed is an act of faith that the universe will answer when questioned. thedailyhatch

This is why declaring the universe a brute fact is what we might call a science-stopper. If it is legitimate to say of the universe as a whole “it is just there, and that’s all,” then it is unclear on what principled ground one forbids saying the same of any stubborn phenomenon within it. The Principle of Sufficient Reason, or something like it, is not an optional metaphysical extravagance; it is the operating assumption of the entire rational and scientific enterprise. This is the point made forcefully by the contemporary philosopher Alexander Pruss, who argues in The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment (Cambridge University Press, 2006) that denying the PSR “leads to a collapse of explanatory frameworks,” and that accepting a brute fact should be, at most, a desperate last resort, because to do so casually is to undermine the very rationality of inquiry. Robert Koons has argued along similar lines, in a 1997 paper, that even an infinite regress of causes leaves the collection of all contingent facts itself unexplained. Thequran

Here, then, is the irony at the center of the 1948 debate, and the heart of my thesis. Bertrand Russell was perhaps the supreme rationalist of his age — the man who tried, in Principia Mathematica, to derive the whole of mathematics from pure logic, who is ranked with Kurt Gödel as one of the two greatest logicians of the twentieth century. And yet, cornered by a question his logic could not dissolve, he chose to abandon the demand for reasons rather than follow it where it led. To say “the universe is just there, and that’s all” is to declare that the largest fact of all — the fact that anything exists — falls outside the reach of reason. But if the totality of things can be a brute fact, then intelligibility is not a fundamental feature of reality but a local accident, and the confidence that underwrites all inquiry is left hanging over an abyss. In refusing to ask the question of the cause of the world, Russell did not defeat the cosmological argument; he suspended the very principle of rationality that made his own life’s work possible. His stubbornness was, as I said at the outset, exemplary and breathtaking. It was not, for that reason, right.

X. The Modern Cosmological Turn: “A Universe from Nothing”?

The debate did not end in 1948; it migrated into cosmology. Three developments deserve mention, in the resonant-not-concordist spirit of this platform: modern science does not prove Q 52:35, but it has made the verse’s central question harder to evade, not easier.

A beginning in time. When Russell spoke, the steady-state model of an eternal universe was still respectable. It is no longer. The convergence of Edwin Hubble’s discovery of cosmic expansion, the detection of the cosmic microwave background, and the measured abundances of the light elements established the Big Bang model of a universe that began in a hot, dense state 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years ago (the age given by the ΛCDM model in the Planck Collaboration’s final 2018 data release, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2020: tU = 13.800 ± 0.024 Gyr). As the physicist Paul Davies wrote in The Runaway Universe (1978), “An initial cosmological singularity… forms a past temporal extremity to the universe… On this view the big bang represents the creation event” — the creation not only of all matter and energy but of space-time itself. A universe that “just is,” eternally and without beginning, is precisely the picture that twentieth-century cosmology dismantled.

The Borde–Guth–Vilenkin theorem. In 2003 Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin proved that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be extended infinitely into the past but must be “past-incomplete” (“Inflationary spacetimes are not past-complete,” Physical Review Letters 90, 151301). In their own words, “The result depends on just one assumption: the Hubble parameter H has a positive value when averaged over the affine parameter of a past-directed null or noncomoving timelike geodesic.” The theorem is notably general — as Vilenkin observes in Many Worlds in One (2006), “A remarkable thing about this theorem is its sweeping generality. We made no assumptions about the material content of the universe. We did not even assume that gravity is described by Einstein’s equations” — and it applies even to inflationary-multiverse and many cyclic scenarios. It is essential, however, to state the theorem’s limits honestly, as this platform’s register demands. The BGV result assumes a classical spacetime description; it is, in the words of critics such as Sean Carroll, “only a guideline to when our classical description breaks down,” not a metaphysical proof of an absolute beginning. Vilenkin himself, though he judges that the theorem “makes a plausible case that there was a beginning,” has cautioned that “there is no such thing as ‘definitive ruling out’ in science.” The theorem is best presented as strong empirical support for the premise that the universe began, not as a QED. Scienceandculture + 2

“Nothing” that is not nothing. In A Universe from Nothing (2012), the physicist Lawrence Krauss argued that quantum field theory shows how the universe could arise spontaneously from “nothing,” so that — in Richard Dawkins’s exuberant afterword — the theologian’s last trump card, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, “shrivels up before your eyes.” The rebuttal came not from a theologian but from a fellow physicist-philosopher, David Albert of Columbia University (who holds a doctorate in theoretical physics), in his review “On the Origin of Everything” in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (March 2012). Albert’s point was as simple as it was devastating: the quantum vacuum is not nothing. “Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff,” he wrote. Quantum fields, and the laws that govern them, are something; to call their lowest-energy state “nothing” and then announce that something has come from nothing is, Albert charged, an equivocation. “Where,” he asked, “are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from?” His verdict was blunt: “all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right.” The exchange illustrates the deep point of Q 52:35 with almost comic precision. Am khuliqū min ghayri shay’ — “were they created from nothing?” The verse’s shay’ means, exactly, a thing; the Qur’an’s question is whether being can arise from literal non-being, with no cause whatsoever. The moment a cosmologist supplies a quantum vacuum, a set of laws, a multiverse, or an inflaton field, he has conceded the verse’s implicit point: the world was not created min ghayri shay’. It came from something — and that something now requires its own explanation. Thinking to Believe + 2

XI. Resonances: Scripture, Reason, and the Contemporary Conversation

In keeping with this platform’s commitments, I want to frame the convergence of Qur’an, philosophy, and cosmology as resonance rather than as concordist proof-texting. The Qur’an is not a physics textbook, and Q 52:35–36 is not a derivation of the Big Bang. What the verses offer is a way of seeing — an insistence that existence is a question, that the question has an answer, and that the answer is not the world itself.

Several philosopher-scientists of our own moment illuminate that resonance without being made to endorse any creed. The physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne framed the ultimate choice, as summarized on this platform, as a choice between two candidates for the role of the final brute fact: either the laws of nature “just are,” or a divine Mind “just is.” His point is that everyone terminates their explanations somewhere; the question is whether the terminus is impersonal and unintelligible or personal and self-explanatory. Paul Davies, an agnostic, has repeatedly noted that the laws of nature “seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design” and that the universe’s rational transparency to the human mind is itself a fact that cries out for explanation. Thomas Nagel, an atheist, has argued in Mind and Cosmos that a purely materialist account of a mindless universe struggles to explain the emergence of consciousness and reason. Roger Penrose’s calculations on the extraordinarily low entropy of the early universe underscore how special, how far from “just anything,” the initial state had to be. None of these thinkers is a witness for Islam. But each, in his own idiom, refuses Russell’s move; each insists that the intelligibility of the world is a real feature that reasoning may pursue. That refusal is the modern echo of bal lā yūqinūn read in reverse — the recovery of yaqīn, the certainty that the question is worth asking. Thequran + 2

XII. Epilogue: The Question at Maghrib

Return, at the end, to the two scenes with which this essay has been concerned.

In one, a Meccan idolater named Jubayr ibn Muṭ’im stands at the edge of a congregation at sunset, having come to ransom prisoners, and hears a voice reciting: Were they created from nothing? Or are they the creators? Or did they create the heavens and the earth? He is a man who has never in his life doubted his gods, and in the space of two verses the ground shifts beneath him; he says it was as if his heart would take flight, and that this was the hour faith was first planted in him. In the other, three centuries into the age of radio, the most formidable logician of the modern world listens to the same question posed in the vocabulary of Leibniz, considers it with the full power of a mind that had tried to rebuild mathematics from its foundations, and answers: the universe is just there, and that’s all. Shall we pass on to some other issue?

The difference between the two men is not intelligence, and it is not evidence. Both heard the same question. It is what the Qur’an calls yaqīn — the willingness to let the question remain a question until it yields its answer, rather than dissolving it by decree. Russell’s dismissal has a genuine grandeur; there is courage in refusing to be consoled by an argument one cannot feel. But the cost of that refusal is the intelligibility of everything. To say that the totality of what exists is a brute fact is to concede that reason runs out precisely where it matters most, and once that concession is made, no principled line can be drawn to protect the rest of the rational enterprise — including the logic to which Russell devoted his life.

Q 52:35–36 does not bully the reader into belief. It does something quieter and more demanding: it lays the alternatives on the table, in an order so exhaustive that only one square is left empty, and then it declines to fill it, trusting the listener’s own reason to see what must go there. Were you made by nothing? Did you make yourself? Did you make the heavens and the earth? The verse leaves the conclusion unspoken because, as al-Rāzī saw, its denial “would be the denial of a necessary truth.” The heavens and the earth are here. You are here. Something is here rather than nothing. The Qur’an’s wager — and it is a wager that the whole of science unknowingly shares every time it asks “why?” — is that this is not a fact to be shrugged at but a question to be followed, all the way to its answer. What do you say: shall we pass on to some other issue? The two verses of Sūrat al-Ṭūr, like the debate they so uncannily anticipate, suggest that we cannot — and that the refusal to ask is itself the only answer reason cannot afford to give.