Presented by Claude for Zia H Shah MD

Opening — 0:00

Friends, I want to begin tonight with something so ordinary that we almost never notice it. [pause]

You can take a pencil, write a few symbols on a scrap of paper, and predict where a planet will be a century from now. You can sit in a quiet room, follow a chain of equations, and tell a spacecraft how to meet a comet hundreds of millions of miles away. When the spacecraft arrives, the comet is there.

Think how strange that is. The universe did not have to be like this. It could have been chaos, a fog of events with no pattern at all. It could have had patterns too tangled for any mind to follow. Or it could have been perfectly orderly with no one in it to notice. What we actually find is a cosmos that is ordered, ordered mathematically, and open to the understanding of creatures like us.

Tonight I want to ask why. My suggestion is that this quiet fact, the comprehensibility of the universe, is one of the clearest signposts leading a seeking heart toward God.

I. The Miracle Einstein Named — 1:20

You have probably heard the famous line attributed to Albert Einstein: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” It captures his meaning, but it is a popular paraphrase. What he actually wrote, in his 1936 essay Physics and Reality, is more beautiful still: “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” A few lines later he goes further and calls the fact that the world is comprehensible a miracle.

Sixteen years later, in 1952, he came back to that word in a letter to his old friend Maurice Solovine. He again called the comprehensibility of the world a miracle, or an eternal mystery, and said the miracle is reinforced as our knowledge grows. In the same letter he gently mocked the “positivists and professional atheists” who thought they had stripped the world of its wonder.

I want to be honest with you here, because faith can only stand firmly on honest ground. Einstein did not believe in a personal God. He said plainly that he believed in Spinoza’s God, revealed in the lawful harmony of what exists, and not in a God concerned with the fates and actions of human beings. He would not have joined us in prayer. [pause]

That is exactly what makes his testimony so striking. The greatest physicist of the twentieth century had no stake in defending any scripture, and still he could not shake the sense that he was standing before a miracle.

II. The Language of the Book — 3:05

Einstein was not the first to feel this. Four centuries ago Galileo wrote, in The Assayer, that the grand book of the universe stands open before our eyes, but we cannot read it until we learn its language. “It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles,” and other geometric figures. Without them, he said, we wander about in a dark labyrinth.

You will often hear this quoted as “Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the universe.” Galileo did not mention God in that passage. He did, however, believe that the book of nature and the book of Scripture came from the same Author, and he spent his life reading the first.

In 1960 the Nobel physicist Eugene Wigner gave this old wonder a modern name in his essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Mathematicians often develop ideas for their beauty alone: complex numbers, abstract symmetries, curved geometries. Years or even centuries later, physicists discover that nature was obeying those ideas all along. We seem to get more out of our equations than we put into them. Wigner ended his essay by calling the fit between mathematics and the laws of physics a miracle, and he described it as “a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” [pause]

A gift. A miracle. Notice the words these scientists reach for when they arrive at the edge of their science. A gift implies a Giver.

III. Three Layers of the Mystery — 4:40

Let us slow down and look at this mystery carefully, because it has three layers.

The first layer is that there is order at all. The laws that govern a falling apple in this city also govern galaxies billions of light-years away, and they governed the universe in its first moments. Nothing required this. Order is not the default. It is a fact, and facts ask for explanation.

The second layer is that the order is mathematical. The universe does more than repeat itself. It obeys elegant equations, often simple enough to fit on a single line. Pioneers of artificial intelligence such as Yann LeCun have made a related point: our learning machines work because the world is compositional. Complex things are built layer upon layer from simpler parts, and so the world can be learned. Even our most advanced machines are quietly betting on the intelligibility of creation.

The third layer is the most astonishing: our minds can grasp all this. A brain shaped, as we are told, to find food and escape predators can follow quantum field theory and measure the age of the cosmos. In 1927 the biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote, in a line often credited to Arthur Eddington, that “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” He may well be right. The deeper wonder is how much of that strangeness we can suppose, test and confirm.

So we have order, mathematics and mind: a world fit to be known, and a knower fit to know it.

IV. How Believers Have Reasoned — 6:20

How have thoughtful theists reasoned from this?

Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, wrote in a letter in 1599 that the laws of nature are within the grasp of the human mind. God made them so, he said, by creating us in His image, “so that we could share in his own thoughts.” For Kepler the fit between mind and cosmos was no accident. One rational Creator had made both the book and its reader.

In our own time the Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne has stated the argument precisely. Science explains a law by appealing to a deeper law. The deepest laws, by definition, cannot be explained by any law deeper still. At that point there are two options: the ultimate laws are a brute fact, or they reflect the purposeful choice of an agent. And an appeal to chance, Swinburne notes, becomes “less and less plausible, the greater the order.”

John Polkinghorne, physicist and priest, asked why science is possible at all in the deep way it has turned out to be. His answer was that the Mind of the Creator lies behind the order of the universe. Even Stephen Hawking, no friend of theology, asked in 1988 what it is that “breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.”

Then there is the argument from reason. C. S. Lewis, and later the philosopher Alvin Plantinga, asked a pointed question. If our minds are only the product of blind processes aimed at survival, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about quarks and galaxies? Theism has an answer: reason is trustworthy because it comes from Reason.

Remarkably, the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel agrees that the materialist picture cannot account for the intelligibility of the world or for our ability to grasp it. He does not conclude that God exists, but he refuses to call the mystery solved. And the philosopher Robin Collins has argued that the universe seems tuned not only for life but for discoverability, as though it were made to be found out.

V. The Quranic Lens — 8:40

Now let me turn to the Book I hold dearest, because the Holy Quran speaks to this mystery very directly.

“We will show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth” (41:53). The signs in the horizons are the ordered cosmos. The signs within ourselves are the mind that can read it. The Quran places both halves of Einstein’s miracle side by side.

The Quran insists that creation is measured. “Indeed, all things We created with predestination” (54:49), and the Arabic word there is qadar, measure. God “created each thing and determined it with precise determination” (25:2). The sun and the moon move “by precise calculation” (55:5). What is a law of physics, if not measure that can be calculated?

The Quran does more than permit us to study this order. It commands us to. “Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of the night and the day are signs for those of understanding.” These people remember God, reflect on creation, and say, “Our Lord, You did not create this aimlessly” (3:190–191).

It even invites us to test that order. “You do not see in the creation of the Most Merciful any inconsistency” (67:3). Look again, it says, and then look twice more, and your vision will come back to you humbled (67:4). [pause]

And why is the cosmos one coherent order rather than a patchwork? “Had there been within the heavens and earth gods besides Allah, they both would have been ruined” (21:22). Rival wills would mean rival laws. Each deity, says 23:91, would have taken away what it created. One Lawgiver means one law. The unity physicists keep finding in nature is the fingerprint of tawhid.

As I wrote recently at thequran.love, in “Allah, Creator of All Things,” creation is not a side subject in the Quran. It is the foundation on which the whole Quranic worldview rests. “Allah is the Creator of all things” (39:62). He is “the One, the Prevailing” (13:16). He is “Creator of all things, so worship Him” (6:102).

Our tradition adds something profound here. Al-Ghazali taught that the laws of nature are not necessities locked inside matter. They are God’s habit, His sunnah, the dependable custom of a faithful Creator. Fire burns cotton because God is consistent, not because fire is a little god. That is why the world is lawful, and that is why it can be known.

VI. A Fair Hearing — 11:15

A serious case must give its critics a fair hearing.

Some say that of course we observe order, because only an orderly universe could produce observers. That is true as far as it goes. But observers need only local, temporary order. What we find is universal, mathematically elegant law across billions of years and billions of light-years, far more than survival requires.

Others say evolution explains why our minds track the truth. Perhaps it does, for truths that help us survive. But evolution never rewarded our ancestors for understanding curved spacetime.

Others say we simply invent mathematics to fit the world. Yet the mathematician Richard Hamming, who offered that very explanation, judged it insufficient. He admitted that believing the world can be explained by mathematics “amounts to an act of faith.”

Others appeal to a multiverse. But a machine that generates universes needs finely ordered laws of its own. As I have argued on my blog, the multiverse pushes the question back one step without answering it.

The physicist Sean Carroll offers the strongest reply: every worldview has to stop somewhere, so why not stop at the laws as a brute fact? Here I want to be careful. The believer does not claim that everything needs a cause, a claim that only invites the question, “Then who caused God?” The claim is that contingent things, things that could have been otherwise, need an explanation, and the laws of nature are contingent. A self-existent, necessary Creator is a different kind of stopping point from an arbitrary equation.

So let me be clear about what this argument is. It is not a proof. It is an inference to the best explanation. It does not compel; it invites.

VII. The Responsibility to Defend — 13:20

That brings me to responsibility. In the same essay I argued that if Muslims collectively give up the intellectual defense of the Creator, we give up a foundation of our whole worldview. The duty falls most heavily on scholars, scientists and educators. It has to be carried with integrity. We must not deny good science. We must not invent so-called scientific miracles. And we must engage our critics accurately, as fellow seekers and not as enemies. A believer who cannot answer every objection has not thereby disproved God. As I put it there, the aim is larger than winning a debate.

Closing — 14:10

So let us end where every honest scientist ends, in humility.

Isaac Newton reportedly said, near the end of his life: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” And Einstein, as his collaborator Banesh Hoffmann recorded, said that all our science, measured against reality, is “primitive and childlike — and yet it is the most precious thing we have.” [pause]

It is precious because it is a gift. We did not make the order of the heavens, and we did not make the minds that read it. We are dependent beings, living in a reality we did not originate, who have been allowed to read its pages.

The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, Einstein’s admirers like to say, is that it is comprehensible. For the believer the mystery does not shrink. It becomes a conversation. The universe is comprehensible because it was made by the All-Knowing, and made for those He created to know Him. [pause]

Look up tonight, and read a sign. Alhamdulillah. Thank you.