Good day, and thank you all for being here. My name is Zia H. Shah. By training and by daily work I am a physician. I am board-certified in internal medicine, in pulmonary disease, and in sleep medicine, and for most of my working life I have spent my days listening to lungs, reading sleep studies, and watching the quiet machinery of the human body keep a person alive through the night. In the hours left over, I write. For a number of years now I have been building a website called The Glorious Quran and Science, at thequran dot love, where I try to bring the Quran, modern science, and philosophy into one honest conversation. thequran Over the last two years, more and more of that writing has gathered around a single idea, an idea first defended with full rigor more than nine hundred years ago by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. That idea is called occasionalism, and tonight I want to introduce it to you.

Let me state it simply before we complicate it. Occasionalism is the view that God is the only true cause of every event. What we call causes in nature — the fire, the medicine, the falling rain — are the occasions on which God creates the effects, according to a regular and reliable custom. thequranthequran The fire does not burn the cotton by a power of its own; God creates the burning when fire and cotton meet. thequranWikipedia The laws of nature, in this picture, are not chains that bind the world, still less chains that bind God. They are descriptions of His habit. thequranthequran

I know how that sounds to modern ears. To some it sounds pious but unscientific. To others it sounds like a medieval curiosity. My aim tonight is to persuade you that it is neither. I want to approach it from three directions, as three movements of one piece of music: first the science, then the philosophy, and finally the theology of the Quran. And I want to be honest with you at each step about what can be claimed and what cannot.

Let me begin where a physician naturally begins: with observation.

Every day, as a pulmonologist, I watch a patient take a breath. The diaphragm contracts, the pressure in the chest falls, air flows in, and oxygen crosses a membrane thinner than a soap bubble into the blood. I can describe every step. I can measure it, graph it, and treat it when it fails. But notice what my description is. It is a description of what reliably happens. It is not, by itself, an account of why there is anything at all that happens reliably. Medicine tells me the how in astonishing detail. It is silent about the why.

For about two centuries after Isaac Newton, many thoughtful people believed that physics had answered the why as well. The universe was imagined as a clock. The French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined an intellect that, knowing the position and motion of every particle at one instant, could calculate the entire future and the entire past. thequran In such a universe God, if He existed at all, was the watchmaker who wound the spring and stepped away. That is the God of Deism, and it is not the God of the Quran. thequran

Then, in the twentieth century, the clock broke. thequran Let me give you the example I return to again and again in my writing, because anyone can see it beside a swimming pool on a sunny afternoon. When sunlight strikes the surface of the water, some of it bounces back — that is the shimmer you see on top — and some of it passes into the water, bends, strikes the tiles, and lets you see the bottom of the pool. thequran Light comes in tiny packets called photons, and each photon does one thing or the other. Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the last century, made this the opening lesson of his little book QED, using a sheet of glass. In his own words, “out of 100 photons that come down, an average of 4 will be reflected by the front surface,” and the rest pass through. And then he tells us plainly that we cannot predict which photon will do which. We can only calculate the probability. arxivquantumatlas Quantum mechanics, the most precisely tested theory in the history of science, tells us the ratio exactly and tells us nothing at all about the individual photon. thequran

Is this simply our ignorance, a hidden gear we have not yet found? The physicists Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, in the words of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” Their work, building on John Bell’s theorem, rules out the simplest kind of hidden gears — local hidden variables that would secretly pre-program each particle’s choice. Whatever settles the individual outcome, it is not a little local mechanism sitting inside the particle.

Now I must be careful here, and I want to model that carefulness for you. Quantum mechanics does not prove God. There are interpretations of quantum theory — the many-worlds picture of Hugh Everett, the pilot-wave theory of David Bohm — that restore a kind of determinism. thequranthequran Physicists still argue about what the equations mean. thequranthequran What quantum mechanics does do is remove the old objection. No one can now say with confidence that a sealed, self-running clockwork leaves no room for God to act. When the photon reaches the water, there are, broadly, three possible answers to the question of what decides its fate: blind chance, a hidden order we cannot see, or the will of God. thequran Occasionalism takes the third answer, and it does so without changing a single prediction of physics. God, on this view, governs every photon without disturbing the statistics of the beam. thequran Natural law describes His habit across the whole ensemble; each individual event is His act. thequran

And quantum indeterminacy is only one window. Ask a second question: why are the laws of nature what they are? Cosmologists have found that a number of the constants of physics appear finely tuned for a universe that can host life. The value of the cosmological constant, the energy of empty space, is the most famous case; as the physicist Steven Weinberg, who framed “the cosmological constant problem,” put it, the calculated contributions are larger than observation allows by some one hundred and twenty orders of magnitude, so the cancellation has to be accurate to about one hundred and twenty decimal places. Fine-tuning is not a proof either, and there are live alternatives such as a multiverse. But even a multiverse would not explain its own laws or its own existence. thequran

Then ask a third question, the deepest of all: what keeps the laws operating from one moment to the next? Stephen Hawking put it beautifully near the end of A Brief History of Time. Even if we found the one unified theory, he wrote, it would be just a set of rules and equations. “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” goodreadsquotepark An equation does not sustain anything. It describes. Something must make the description true, now, and now, and now again. Occasionalism gives that something a name.

That brings us to our second movement, the philosophy, and to al-Ghazali himself.

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was born in Tus, in Khorasan, in what is now northeastern Iran, and he died there in the year 1111. He was a jurist, a theologian, a philosopher, and finally a Sufi. utm In 1091, in his early thirties, the vizier Nizam al-Mulk appointed him to the great Nizamiyya college in Baghdad, the intellectual summit of the Muslim world. Around the year 1095, the same year he suddenly gave up his posts in Baghdad, he published his most famous critical work, Tahafut al-Falasifa, The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Its target was the Aristotelian philosophy of al-Farabi and above all of Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna. And in the seventeenth of its twenty discussions, he takes up the question of causality. utm

The seventeenth discussion opens with a sentence that I consider one of the most important sentences in the history of philosophy. In Michael Marmura’s translation it reads: “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.” His argument is this. Take any two things where this is not that and that is not this — drinking and the quenching of thirst, eating and satiety, contact with fire and burning. Nothing in the concept of the one contains the other. thequran Their connection, he says, is due to the prior decree of God, who creates them side by side. stanfordstanford

Then comes his famous example. Fire touches cotton, and the cotton burns. What have we actually observed? We have observed the burning happening with the fire — at the moment of contact. We have never observed the burning happening by the fire, through some power flowing out of the flame. Observation shows us conjunction. It does not show us necessity. And so al-Ghazali concludes that the true agent of the burning is God, and that fire, which is inanimate, has no action of its own. ilahiyatstudies +2

Al-Ghazali knew the obvious objection, and he stated it against himself. If there is no necessary connection, the philosophers say, then a man who leaves a book at home must admit that when he returns it may have turned into a servant boy or an animal. utm Al-Ghazali’s answer is the heart of the matter. The world is not chaotic, because God’s habit, His ‘ada, is constant, and the repetition of that habit, time after time, fixes in our minds a well-founded expectation. stanfordstanford God, as he puts it, has created in us the knowledge that He will not do these possible things. archivemuslimphilosophy The order of nature is real. It is simply not self-made. It is a faithfulness, not a mechanism.

Now notice how strikingly modern this is. Nearly six centuries later, in Paris, the French priest and philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, in The Search after Truth, published in 1674 and 1675, arrived at the same conclusion: there is only one true cause, because there is only one true God; natural causes are only occasional causes. philosophyprofessorstanford And in 1748, in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who had read Malebranche carefully, made the same observation that al-Ghazali had made: in experience we never perceive necessary connection, only constant conjunction, one event regularly following another. arxiv +3 Here is the pivot of my own argument. Al-Ghazali and Hume saw the same thing. Hume drew from it a skeptical agnosticism; al-Ghazali drew from it the living God. The data do not choose between them. As I have put it in my writing, determinism and occasionalism describe the same observable universe, and the only difference between them is God. thequranthequran

Al-Ghazali did not go unanswered. About eighty-five years later, in Andalusia, the great philosopher, judge, and physician Ibn Rushd of Cordova — Averroes to the Latin West — wrote a reply titled The Incoherence of the Incoherence, in 1180 or 1181. He was blunt. To deny the existence of efficient causes that we observe in sensible things, he said, is sophistry. And he added a line that every scientist should take seriously: “he who denies causes must deny the intellect.” Ibn Rushd feared that if causes are not real, then knowledge itself collapses. ilahiyatstudiesbu

It is a fair worry, and I want to answer it directly, because it is the question every scientist in this room is asking. Does occasionalism make science impossible? I believe the answer is no, and that it actually gives science firmer footing. thequran Science never needed necessity. It needs regularity, and occasionalism grounds regularity in the faithfulness of God. thequranthequran Al-Ghazali himself had no quarrel with mathematics, logic, or the study of nature; he quarreled with the claim that the world’s order is self-sufficient and binding even on its Creator. utmWikipedia The engineer can trust steel and the physician can trust penicillin precisely because God’s custom is reliable. Science describes the how. Theology addresses the why. thequranthequran And it is worth noting that modern physics has itself quietly given up the language of necessity at the bottom of things; it speaks of probabilities, amplitudes, and laws that describe patterns. That is much closer to al-Ghazali’s world than to the clockwork of Laplace.

I should add one honest note of scholarship. Leading historians of al-Ghazali, such as Frank Griffel of Yale, point out that the seventeenth discussion actually presents occasionalism as one of two acceptable options, the other being created causes that depend entirely on God. What al-Ghazali rules out absolutely is that any cause necessitates its effect independently of God. In my own work I lean toward the stronger occasionalist reading, but I want you to know the debate exists. stanford +3

And that brings me to our third movement, the one closest to my heart: the theology of the Quran.

For me, occasionalism is not a philosophy imposed on the Quran from outside. It is what the Quran sounds like when you read it slowly. thequran Consider the Throne Verse, Ayat al-Kursi, chapter two, verse two hundred fifty-five: “Allah — there is no deity except Him, the Ever-Living, the Sustainer of all existence. Neither drowsiness overtakes Him nor sleep.” And near its end: “His Kursi extends over the heavens and the earth, and their preservation tires Him not.” A God who is never drowsy and never tired of preserving is a God who is preserving right now. thequran

Listen to chapter thirty-five, verse forty-one: “Indeed, Allah holds the heavens and the earth, lest they cease. And if they should cease, no one could hold them in place after Him.” The stability of the universe is not a property it owns. It is held. quranquranverses

Listen to chapter fifty-five, Surah Al-Rahman, verse twenty-nine: “Whoever is within the heavens and earth asks Him; every day He is bringing about a matter.” Abdullah Yusuf Ali renders it, “every day in new splendour doth He shine.” This is not a retired architect. This is the Lord of every moment. thequranquran

The Quran brings this all the way down to the smallest things. Chapter six, verse ninety-five: “Indeed, Allah is the cleaver of grain and date seeds. He brings the living out of the dead.” surahquransurahquran The germinating seed — a process botany can describe in exquisite detail — is attributed to God directly. And chapter six, verse fifty-nine: “Not a leaf falls but that He knows it.” quran In my writing I sometimes summarize this vision in three images: the photon, the leaf, and the heart. The same God who knows the fate of every photon striking every pool knows every falling leaf, and He knows what is hidden in every human heart. thequran +2 “We are closer to him than his jugular vein,” says chapter fifty, verse sixteen. thequran

Then there is the verse that, more than any other, states occasionalism in a single breath. thequran At the Battle of Badr, the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, threw a handful of sand toward the opposing army. And the Quran says, in chapter eight, verse seventeen: “And you threw not, when you threw, but it was Allah who threw.” thequran +2 Read that grammar carefully. It does not deny that the Prophet threw. “When you threw” affirms the human act. Yet it attributes the decisive efficacy to God. That is the shape of occasionalism exactly: a real human act, nested within the creative act of God. thequran

What follows from this? Let me name four things that our main presentation will develop.

First, Tawhid, the oneness of God. If anything in creation had causal power entirely its own, it would be, in a quiet way, a partner in God’s sovereignty. Occasionalism takes the declaration la ilaha illallah, there is no god but God, all the way down: there is no god but God, and there is no independent cause but God. thequran +2

Second, prayer. If the world were a sealed machine, prayer would be at best therapy for the one who prays. But if every moment is freshly willed, then asking God for healing, for rain, for guidance, is asking the One who is actually deciding. As a physician, I treat with the best medicine I know. I also pray. Occasionalism tells me those are not two competing activities but one.

Third, miracles. The philosophers of al-Ghazali’s day struggled to make room for miracles, because for them a miracle meant breaking a necessary law. For the occasionalist, there is no necessary law to break, only a habit that its Author may set aside. ilahiyatstudiesthequran When the Quran says of Abraham, in chapter twenty-one, verse sixty-nine, “O fire, be coolness and safety upon Abraham,” no contradiction occurs. thequran +2 The One who ordinarily creates burning at the touch of flame simply did not create it that day. politurco

Fourth, faith and reason, and with them, human freedom. People often fear that if God creates every act, human beings become puppets. The classical answer, which I share, is that God creates the act and we acquire it through our intention, and so we remain accountable. thequran +2 The Quran holds both truths together: “And you do not will except that Allah wills,” in chapter seventy-six, verse thirty, alongside its constant call to choose, to reflect, and to take responsibility. Our will is real, but it is not the uncreated foundation of reality. thequran And this is why every Muslim says Inshallah — if God wills. thequran The Quran itself teaches it, in chapter eighteen, verses twenty-three and twenty-four: “And never say of anything, ‘Indeed, I will do that tomorrow,’ except when adding, ‘If Allah wills.’” thequranthequran I like to call the world that this little phrase describes the Inshallah Universe. thequran Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism is, at bottom, the metaphysics of Inshallah. thequranthequran

So here is where we are going in the presentation that follows. We will look more closely at the photon at the water’s surface, at the interpretations of quantum mechanics, and at what physics can and cannot tell us about the individual event. We will read the seventeenth discussion of the Tahafut and weigh it fairly against Ibn Rushd, Malebranche, and Hume. We will walk through the Quranic verses on God’s continuous sustaining, from the opening of Surah Al-Hadid to the Throne Verse, and ask what they mean for Tawhid, for prayer, for miracles, and for human freedom. And all along the way I will try to keep three things distinct: what the Quran says, what science has established, and what is philosophical inference built upon both. thequran

You do not have to be a Muslim to find this question worth your time. Whether you come tonight as a believer, a seeker, or a skeptic, the question is the same one Hawking asked: what breathes fire into the equations? Al-Ghazali answered that question nine centuries ago with a single word: God. My invitation to you tonight is simply to take his answer seriously, to test it against the best of our science and the best of our philosophy, and to see whether, as I have come to believe, the old theologian of Tus may have the last laugh. thequranthequran

Thank you. Let us begin.