Were They Created from Nothing?

Qur’an 52:35–36, Bertrand Russell, and the Rational Demand for a Necessary Creator

Presented by ChatGPT for Zia H Shah MD

Abstract

In the celebrated 1948 BBC radio debate between Bertrand Russell and the Jesuit philosopher Frederick Copleston, Russell declined to seek an ultimate explanation for the universe, maintaining that it is simply “just there.” Copleston defended a cosmological argument from contingency: beings whose existence is not explained by their own nature require an adequate explanation, and the total order of contingent beings must ultimately depend upon a Necessary Being whose existence is not received from another. More than thirteen centuries earlier, the Holy Qur’an had compressed the fundamental logic of this argument into two penetrating questions: “Were they created from nothing, or were they themselves the creators? Or did they create the heavens and the earth?” (52:35–36). These verses exclude creation by nothing, self-creation, and human authorship of the cosmos, thereby directing reason toward a transcendent Creator. This essay examines their language, context, classical interpretation, relation to Avicenna’s Necessary Existent, and relevance to the Russell–Copleston exchange. It argues that Russell did not literally abolish every form of scientific reasoning, since he continued to accept explanations within the universe; nevertheless, his decision to exempt the universe itself from the demand for explanation imposes an arbitrary boundary upon rational inquiry. “Brute fact” is not an explanation but a refusal of explanation. The Qur’an, by contrast, summons reason to follow contingency beyond the contingent cosmos to the self-subsisting, uncaused, knowing and sovereign Creator.

The 1948 encounter: when metaphysical inquiry reached an impasse

Bertrand Russell was one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers, logicians and public intellectuals. Frederick Copleston was a Jesuit priest and a distinguished historian of philosophy. Their 1948 discussion was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme and subsequently reproduced in several collections.

Copleston began from an empirical fact: at least some beings exist without containing within themselves the complete reason for their existence. Human beings depend upon parents, food, air and innumerable physical conditions. The objects composing the universe are similarly conditioned, changeable and dependent. Copleston therefore argued that the totality of such contingent realities requires an explanation beyond itself. Otherwise, even if one contingent cause were followed by another without temporal beginning, existence as a whole would remain unexplained.

Russell raised three principal objections:

He questioned whether “necessary existence” could meaningfully be attributed to a being. In his logical framework, necessity belonged primarily to analytic propositions, not to concrete existents.
He rejected the inference from the dependence of individual things to the dependence of the totality, comparing it to the fallacious inference that because every human being has a mother, the human race must have a mother.
He denied that the universe as a whole required a cause or explanation, declaring that it is “just there, and that’s all.”

The full transcript makes clear that Russell did not deny every local causal inquiry. He accepted that one may investigate causes of particular events. What he rejected was the extension of explanatory inquiry to the totality of contingent existence. When Copleston asked why one should not seek a cause or sufficient reason for the world, Russell replied that he saw no reason to suppose that “the total” had a cause. Eventually came the remarkable exchange quoted in the question:

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?

The exchange is verified in the published transcript of the Russell–Copleston debate.

One may admire Russell’s intellectual stature while finding this conclusion breathtakingly unsatisfactory. He had not demonstrated that the universe was necessary, self-explanatory or exempt from explanation. He simply refused to carry the explanatory question beyond the physical totality. As Copleston perceptively observed, failure to discover an explanation is one thing; declaring in advance that no explanation should be sought is quite another.

Qur’an 52:35–36: the Arabic text

Verse 35

أَمْ خُلِقُوا مِنْ غَيْرِ شَيْءٍ أَمْ هُمُ الْخَالِقُونَ

Am khuliqū min ghayri shay’in am humu al-khāliqūn.

Verse 36

أَمْ خَلَقُوا السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضَ ۚ بَلْ لَا يُوقِنُونَ

Am khalaqū al-samāwāti wa-al-arḍa; bal lā yūqinūn.

Six well-known English translations

The small differences among the translations are philosophically revealing. Some render min ghayri shay’ as “by nothing,” others as “of nothing,” and Muhammad Abdel Haleem as “without any agent.” All capture aspects of the Arabic challenge. The translations can be compared through the parallel text of Sūrah al-Ṭūr.

Translation	Qur’an 52:35–36
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.”
Abdullah 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.”
Abul A‘la Maududi	“Did they come into being without any creator? Or were they their own creators? Or is it they who created the heavens and the earth? No; the truth is that they lack sure faith.”
Muhammad Muhsin Khan	“Were they created by nothing, or were they themselves the creators? Or did they create the heavens and the earth? Nay, but they have no firm Belief.”
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!”
M. A. S. Abdel Haleem	“Were they created without any agent? Were they the creators? Did they create the heavens and the earth? No! They do not have faith.”

The literary setting: a cascade of questions

Sūrah al-Ṭūr is an early Meccan chapter concerned with revelation, moral accountability, resurrection and the final judgment. Its opening oaths announce that divine judgment cannot be indefinitely avoided. It then contrasts the destiny of those who denied the truth with that of the God-conscious.

Beginning with verse 29, the chapter turns directly toward the objections of the Prophet’s opponents. Was Muhammad, may peace and blessings be upon him, a soothsayer or madman? Was he merely a poet? Had he invented the Qur’an? If so, could his opponents produce a discourse comparable to it?

Then the argument descends—or rather ascends—to a more fundamental level. Before denying the Messenger, revelation or resurrection, the objectors must account for their own existence:

Did they originate without any originating cause?
Did they create themselves?
Did they create the heavens and the earth?
Do they possess the treasures of God?
Do they control reality?
Do they have independent access to the unseen?
Is there another deity besides Allah?

The repeated particle am—“or”—creates a relentless interrogative rhythm. Each question removes another imagined avenue of escape. The passage does not initially offer a discursive syllogism. It interrogates the listener until the untenability of the alternatives becomes self-evident.

This method is characteristic of the Qur’an. It does not address the human being as a detached calculating machine. It speaks simultaneously to reason, conscience, memory, moral intuition and the primordial disposition known as fiṭrah. The hearer is not allowed to discuss existence as though he were absent from the evidence. He himself is a contingent being standing within the question.

“Were they created from nothing?”

The passive verb khuliqū—“were they created”—immediately places human beings before the mystery of their received existence. No person chose to come into being. No one selected his century, parents, genetic inheritance, planet or the laws governing the body into which he awakened. Human existence is radically received.

The phrase min ghayri shay’ admits several related nuances in classical commentary:

without a Creator;
from absolute nothing through no agent;
without origin, ground or explanation;
or, in a secondary interpretation, for no purpose.

Al-Ṭabarī, al-Qurṭubī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and later commentators record more than one grammatical possibility. Ibn Kathīr gives the central theological meaning succinctly: were they brought into existence without one who brought them into existence? Or did they bring themselves into existence? Neither alternative is true; Allah created them after they had not been anything mentioned. This classical interpretation is summarized in Ibn Kathīr’s commentary on 52:35.

The verse is not denying the Islamic doctrine of creation ex nihilo—God’s creation without pre-existing material. It is denying creation by nothing. These are entirely different propositions:

Creation from no pre-existing material by an omnipotent Creator is a theological claim.
Creation by absolute nothing, with no cause, power, ground or agency, is metaphysical incoherence.

Nothing is not an invisible substance, quantum field or empty container waiting to produce a universe. Absolute nothing has no properties, potentialities, laws or causal powers. From nothing, nothing acts, because there is nothing present to act.

“Or were they themselves the creators?”

Self-creation is even more plainly contradictory. To create oneself, one would have to exist before existing: one must already be present as a cause in order to bring oneself into existence as an effect. The proposed creator and the not-yet-created being would have to be numerically identical at the same moment.

Aquinas employed precisely this insight in his Second Way: nothing can be the efficient cause of itself, because it would then have to be prior to itself. His Third Way proceeded from things that are possible to be or not to be toward a being possessing necessity through itself. The relevant text appears in the Summa Theologiae, I.2.3, on the existence of God.

The Qur’anic question is even more immediate. It requires no technical vocabulary. Human beings know that they did not make themselves. Parents are conditions of biological generation, but parents do not create the laws of biology, the elements composing the embryo, consciousness, existence itself or the cosmos supporting the entire process. Every parent is also a dependent recipient of existence.

Self-organization does not solve the problem. A physical system may organize itself because it already exists with particular capacities and operates under regularities. Biological evolution can explain the diversification of living forms once replicating life, variation, heredity, selection and a suitable environment are given. It does not explain why there is any physical reality, law-governed potential or existence in the first place.

“Or did they create the heavens and the earth?”

Verse 36 enlarges the frame. The first question concerns human existence; the second concerns cosmic existence. If human beings did not create themselves, perhaps they might imagine themselves intellectually sovereign over everything else. The Qur’an therefore directs attention to the heavens and the earth—the complete created order as available to human experience.

Humankind did not create:

space and time;
matter and energy;
the laws and symmetries of nature;
the initial physical conditions of the cosmos;
the mathematical intelligibility of those laws;
the stars that forged the heavier elements;
the planetary conditions permitting embodied life;
or the rational mind capable of investigating them.

Scientific discovery greatly expands knowledge of how physical states relate to other physical states. It does not transform human investigators into the authors of the reality they investigate. A cosmologist may reconstruct cosmic history, but reconstruction is not creation. An equation may describe a physical structure, but an abstract equation does not cause itself to be instantiated in a concrete universe.

The heavens and the earth thus function as a public, universal sign. They are not evidence confined to a mystical elite. Every human being inhabits them, depends upon them and confronts their unchosen existence.

The Qur’anic argument in logical form

The reasoning implicit in 52:35–36 may be expressed as follows:

Human beings exist.
Human beings did not create themselves.
Absolute nothing cannot exercise causal power.
Human beings did not create the cosmic order upon which they depend.
Therefore, the existence of humanity and the cosmos must ultimately derive from a reality other than humanity, absolute nothing and the contingent cosmic order considered merely as a collection of dependent things.
That ultimate reality cannot itself be dependent in precisely the same way, or the explanation has not yet reached its ultimate ground.
Therefore, contingent reality points toward a non-contingent, uncaused and self-subsisting source of existence.

The Qur’an does not spell out every intermediate premise because its rhetorical questions appeal to truths already available to ordinary reason. Once creation without a creator and self-creation have been excluded, the rational space narrows decisively.

Avicenna and the Necessary Existent

The Qur’an did not present a scholastic treatise, but it established the conceptual world within which Muslim philosophers reflected upon creation, contingency, divine unity and self-subsistence. Among the most important formal developments was the Burhān al-Ṣiddīqīn, the “Proof of the Truthful,” associated with Abū ʿAlī Ibn Sīnā, or Avicenna.

Avicenna distinguished between:

the contingent or possible existent—mumkin al-wujūd—whose essence neither requires existence nor entails non-existence; and
the Necessary Existent through itself—wājib al-wujūd bi-dhātihi—whose existence is not received from another.

A human being is contingent because there is no contradiction in imagining that a particular human might never have existed. The same applies to planets, stars and particular physical configurations. Their essences do not explain why they are actual rather than merely possible.

Avicenna reasoned that if all existents were contingent, their existence would remain dependent. Even an everlasting or infinite series of contingent causes would not become necessary merely by being extended indefinitely. Every member would still possess borrowed existence. The collection would therefore require a cause or ground that is not merely another member of the dependent collection.

This is not necessarily an argument for a first event in time. Avicenna held that even a universe without a temporal beginning would remain ontologically dependent upon the Necessary Existent. The question is not merely, “What happened before the first physical moment?” It is, “Why does any contingent reality exist at all, at every moment of its existence?”

Avicenna then argued that the Necessary Existent must be one, simple, uncaused and independent. If it were composed of more fundamental parts, it would depend upon those parts and upon the principle uniting them. If there were two absolutely necessary beings, they would require differentiating features; whatever accounted for that differentiation would expose dependence or composition. The Necessary Existent therefore provides a metaphysical route toward tawḥīd. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s account of Avicenna’s metaphysics explains how Avicenna’s causal analysis culminates in a First Absolute Principle.

This vocabulary resonates deeply with Qur’anic divine names:

Al-Qayyūm: the Self-Subsisting One by whom all else subsists;
Al-Ghanī: the One independent of all creation;
Al-Awwal: the First, not preceded by another;
Al-Ṣamad: the One upon whom all depend while He depends upon none;
Al-Ḥaqq: the ultimately real and true.

Avicenna’s philosophy should not simply be identified with Qur’anic theology in every detail; Muslim theologians, including al-Ghazālī, challenged important aspects of his system. Nevertheless, his distinction between contingent existence and the Necessary Existent is one of the most powerful philosophical articulations of the insight summoned by 52:35–36.

Aquinas, Leibniz and the widening tradition

The argument from contingency did not remain confined to Islamic philosophy. Aquinas’s Third Way reasons from generated and corruptible things toward a being whose necessity is not caused by another. Although Aquinas’s formulation is not identical to Avicenna’s, the historical and conceptual affinities are unmistakable.

Leibniz later formulated the Principle of Sufficient Reason:

No fact can be real or existent, and no statement true, unless there is a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise.

He then asked why there is something rather than nothing. The explanation of the contingent series, he argued, cannot be found merely by adding further contingent members. It must lie in a necessary reality outside the series. Sections 31–38 of Leibniz’s Monadology connect the Principle of Sufficient Reason with the ultimate explanation of contingent existence.

Thus the trajectory runs across civilizations:

the Qur’an poses the primordial questions;
Muslim philosophers develop the metaphysics of contingency and necessity;
Christian scholasticism adapts related distinctions;
Leibniz gives the demand for intelligibility its famous rationalist formulation;
Copleston brings that tradition into direct confrontation with Russell.

Does science depend upon cause and effect?

Scientific inquiry undeniably presupposes that nature is sufficiently ordered, stable and intelligible to be investigated. Scientists seek mechanisms, regularities, laws, boundary conditions, symmetries and unifying explanations. Even when a phenomenon is statistical rather than deterministic, science does not treat it as emerging from absolute nothing. A quantum event occurs within a physical framework described by a theory, involving states, fields, probabilities and mathematical rules.

Nevertheless, philosophical precision is important. It would be too strong to say that Russell literally “dismantled all human rationality.” Russell accepted scientific reasoning and causal investigation within the universe. One can consistently maintain a restricted explanatory principle: ordinary events have causes or probabilistic explanations, while the physical totality has none.

Russell’s position is therefore not formally self-contradictory. Its weakness is different and more profound: it is explanatorily arbitrary. Why should rational inquiry be valid until it reaches the boundary of the cosmos and then suddenly become illegitimate? Why may we ask why a star, organism or quantum field exists in a particular state, but not why there are stars, fields, laws or any physical reality whatsoever?

To declare that the universe is a brute fact is not to discover an explanation. It is to announce that the demand for explanation will no longer be honored at that point.

Science need not presuppose an unrestricted version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in order to conduct experiments. But the broader philosophical faith that reality is intelligible—the confidence that questions deserve investigation rather than prohibition—is deeply continuous with the cosmological argument. The Qur’an asks reason to remain faithful to that impulse even when the investigation passes from physics into metaphysics.

Russell’s “mother of the human race” analogy

Russell argued that Copleston committed a fallacy of composition. Every person has a mother, but it does not follow that the human race has a mother. Similarly, even if every object within the universe has a cause, it does not follow that the universe has a cause.

This objection succeeds against a crude argument:

Every object has a physical cause.
The universe is an object.
Therefore, the universe has a physical cause of the same kind.

But that was not Copleston’s argument. Nor is it the strongest Qur’anic or Avicennian argument. The central premise is not that every thing has a cause. It is:

Every contingent or dependent reality requires an adequate ground of its existence.

The universe is not inferred to be contingent merely because its members have mothers or local physical causes. It is judged contingent because the physical order displays features incompatible with self-explanatory necessity: composition, change, differentiation, finite structures, conditional relations and numerous apparently alternative possibilities.

Russell’s analogy therefore changes the relevant property. “Having a mother” cannot apply to a class in the way it applies to an individual organism. But “being composed entirely of ontologically dependent realities” raises a legitimate explanatory question about the collection. A wall made entirely of suspended links does not become self-supporting merely because the chain contains infinitely many links.

Still, the defender of the cosmological argument must do more than repeat that the universe is contingent. The contingency of the physical totality must be defended. The universe does not appear logically or metaphysically necessary: no contradiction is evident in supposing different laws, constants, initial conditions, quantities of matter or no physical universe at all. To call this particular cosmos “necessary” requires an argument, not a label.

Does the quantum world invalidate the argument?

During the debate Russell appealed to contemporary physics, suggesting that individual quantum transitions might lack causes. Even if some quantum events are fundamentally indeterministic, this would not establish that things emerge from absolute nothing or that contingent existence needs no ground.

Three distinctions are essential:

Indeterministic is not unconditioned. A quantum event may not be determined by a prior state in the classical manner, yet it occurs within a physical system governed by probabilistic regularities.
Unpredictable is not inexplicable. An event may be impossible to predict individually while belonging to a statistically describable and experimentally confirmed framework.
A physical vacuum is not metaphysical nothing. A vacuum described by physics possesses structure, fields, laws and measurable properties. It is therefore something rather than nothing.

The argument from contingency does not require that every physical event have a deterministic antecedent. It asks why any contingent physical system—with deterministic or probabilistic laws—exists at all.

“Who created God?”

The Qur’anic and Avicennian argument does not assert that “everything has a cause,” followed by an arbitrary exemption for God. Its premise is that whatever is created, contingent or dependent requires a cause or sufficient ground.

God is not introduced as one more item within the universe whose unexplained existence happens to be tolerated. He is identified as the terminus required by the distinction between derived and underived existence. If God were created, composed or dependent, then what was being described would not be God in the classical sense; it would be another contingent being requiring explanation.

The question “Who created God?” therefore resembles asking, “What caused the uncaused ground?” If it were caused, it would not be the uncaused ground under discussion. This does not by itself prove that such a ground exists; the proof proceeds from the existence and contingency of the world. But it shows why the cosmological argument is not guilty of making an arbitrary exception.

The explanatory contrast is:

The universe is proposed as a complex, changing, differentiated and apparently contingent physical reality.
God is proposed as the uncomposed and necessary foundation of all dependent actuality.

One may challenge whether the argument successfully establishes such a being, but the two cases are not symmetrical.

“Rather, they are not certain”

The conclusion of verse 36 is striking:

بَلْ لَا يُوقِنُونَ — Bal lā yūqinūn
“Rather, they are not certain.”

The Qur’an does not conclude, “They have no intelligence.” Nor does it say that no evidence has been given. Their problem is a failure of yaqīn: settled certainty, existential conviction and fidelity to what reason already indicates.

This diagnosis suggests several levels of knowledge:

A person may verbally acknowledge a Creator.
He may rationally recognize that self-creation is impossible.
He may admire the heavens and earth.
Yet he may fail to allow those truths to become governing certainty.

In the Meccan context, many of the Prophet’s opponents already admitted Allah as Creator. Their crisis was not always theoretical atheism. It was the refusal to draw the moral and religious consequences of divine creation: worship, humility, obedience, gratitude and accountability.

Thus the verses move from rubūbiyyah to ulūhiyyah: from recognizing the Lord who creates and sustains to worshipping Him alone. Verse 43 makes the destination explicit:

“Or do they have a god other than Allah? Glory be to Allah above what they associate with Him.”

The cosmological argument is therefore not presented as an intellectual trophy. It is a summons to worship.

The effect of these verses on Jubayr ibn Muṭʿim

The intellectual and spiritual power of the passage is illustrated in the report of Jubayr ibn Muṭʿim. Before accepting Islam, he heard the Prophet Muhammad, may peace and blessings be upon him, recite Sūrah al-Ṭūr during the sunset prayer. When the Prophet reached verses 35–37, Jubayr later said that his heart almost flew.

The report is preserved in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 4854 and is summarized with its reference in the hadith concerning Sūrah al-Ṭūr.

His reaction demonstrates the verses’ method. They do not merely state a conclusion. They awaken a recognition. Jubayr heard himself addressed:

You did not make yourself.
Nothing did not make you.
You did not make the heavens and earth.
Therefore, who gave you existence?
And what does your dependence require of you?

The argument entered not only his discursive intellect but his entire moral consciousness.

Russell and the price of brute fact

Russell’s answer—“the universe is just there”—remains logically possible only if brute facts are admitted. But its philosophical price is considerable.

First, it terminates inquiry without explanation

“Brute fact” names an absence of explanation; it does not supply one. The statement is equivalent to saying that at the deepest level reality has no reason for being as it is.

Second, it places an unexplained boundary around reason

Russell permitted causal investigation of particular things while denying its legitimacy concerning the totality. Yet no decisive argument was offered for this boundary. The exclusion appears imposed rather than discovered.

Third, it leaves contingency unexplained

Even if every physical event is explained by an earlier event, the complete series may still be contingent. An infinite sequence of borrowed books does not explain ownership; an infinite series of dependent conditions does not generate independence.

Fourth, it makes intelligibility ultimately accidental

If the universe and its laws are brute facts, then the remarkable success of reason in understanding nature has no deeper foundation. Rational minds simply happen to arise within an order that happens to be mathematically intelligible.

Fifth, it converts agnosticism into a metaphysical commitment

Russell introduced himself as an agnostic. Yet declaring the universe inexplicable is stronger than confessing ignorance. “I do not know the explanation” is epistemic modesty. “There is no legitimate explanatory question” is a substantive philosophical thesis.

Copleston was therefore justified in insisting that the denial of explanation should come, if at all, at the end of inquiry—not at its beginning.

The theological vision of the two verses

Qur’an 52:35–36 teaches far more than a bare first cause.

God is Creator

The universe is not divine, self-generating or metaphysically autonomous. It is creation: real, meaningful and dependent.

God is transcendent

The ultimate Creator cannot be merely another object within the cosmic inventory. He is the source of the entire physical order, including space, time and causality as they operate within nature.

God is self-subsisting

Created things possess received existence. Allah possesses underived existence. In Qur’anic language, He is al-Qayyūm, while the heavens and the earth stand only by His command.

God is one

Multiple ultimate creators would require differentiation, limitation and relations between them. These features would call for further explanation. The final ground must be uniquely ultimate.

Creation is purposeful

The alternative classical reading—“Were they created for nothing?”—adds an existential dimension. The God who creates knowingly and wisely does not create rational and moral beings in vain. Creation entails accountability.

Knowledge demands worship

To acknowledge the Creator while refusing gratitude, obedience and worship is to stop the argument before its moral conclusion. The Qur’an unites metaphysics with spiritual transformation.

A balanced verdict on Russell

Russell’s resistance should not be dismissed merely by calling him stubborn. He raised genuine philosophical questions:

Can necessity meaningfully apply to existence?
Does explanation of each member require an explanation of the whole?
Must the Principle of Sufficient Reason apply universally?
Could the universe itself be necessary or brute?
Does an explanation by God genuinely advance understanding?

These questions continue to be debated in contemporary philosophy. The modern Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discussion of the cosmological argument acknowledges both the power of the demand for explanation and significant objections to unrestricted versions of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Yet Russell’s final response remains inadequate. He did not show that necessary existence is incoherent; he interpreted necessity through a particularly restrictive philosophy of logic. He did not demonstrate that the universe is exempt from explanation; he insisted that causality learned within nature could not be extended beyond nature. He did not explain existence; he accepted its inexplicability.

The Qur’an does not permit this premature halt. It asks the question before which analytical evasions become exposed:

Were they created without anything that created them—or did they create themselves?

Russell’s brute universe corresponds to the first alternative: a reality that ultimately exists without cause, reason or ground. The Qur’an does not treat that as a satisfactory stopping point. It presents it as one of the impossibilities that rational reflection must overcome.

Selected references

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, First Part, Question 2, Article 3.
Avicenna. Discussions of contingency, causation and the Necessary Existent in The Metaphysics of The Healing and Remarks and Admonitions; overview in “Ibn Sina’s Metaphysics”.
Al-Qurṭubī. Commentary on Qur’an 52:35.
Ibn Kathīr. Commentary on Qur’an 52:35.
Leibniz, G. W. Monadology, §§31–38.
Russell, Bertrand, and Frederick Copleston. “A Debate on the Existence of God,” BBC Third Programme, 1948.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Cosmological Argument” and “Principle of Sufficient Reason”.

Thematic epilogue: the question that will not disappear

A human being awakens within existence without having requested it. Above him stretches a universe he did not build; within him shines a consciousness he did not manufacture; around him operate laws he did not legislate. He may trace one physical event to another, one generation to an earlier generation and one cosmic state to a prior state. Yet after every mechanism has been described, the primordial question remains: why is there anything capable of mechanism, law, order and description at all?

Russell answered that the universe is simply there. The Qur’an refuses to let the mind rest in that resignation. Its questions move like flashes of light across the landscape of possibility: Were you made by nothing? Did you make yourself? Did you create the heavens and the earth?

No.

That single admission opens the path from contingency to dependence, from dependence to the Necessary Existent, from cosmic intelligibility to divine wisdom, and from creation to worship.

The verses do not ask reason to surrender. They ask it to complete its journey. They do not fill a temporary gap in scientific knowledge with God. They point beneath every scientific explanation to the abiding ground that makes a knowable universe, rational inquiry and contingent existence possible. Every discovery may answer another question about how the universe works, but none can turn nothing into a creator or a dependent being into the author of its own existence.

At the edge of Russell’s brute fact, the Qur’anic question still stands—brief, majestic and undefeated:

أَمْ خُلِقُوا مِنْ غَيْرِ شَيْءٍ أَمْ هُمُ الْخَالِقُونَ

Were they created without a Creator—or were they themselves the creators?

The heavens offer no answer in human speech, yet their existence is an answer. The earth does not formulate a syllogism, yet every atom testifies to received being. And the human heart, when no longer shielded by habitual distraction, may respond as the heart of Jubayr ibn Muṭʿim responded: not with a casual hypothesis, but with the trembling recognition that it stands before the signs of the One who alone is uncreated, self-subsisting and eternally real.