By Zia H Shah Md with the help of ChatGPT

Abstract

The Qur’an repeatedly contrasts knowledge (ʿilm) and truth (al-ḥaqq) with conjecture (ẓann), especially when human beings make claims about realities that transcend direct observation: God, divine agency, resurrection, the ultimate constitution of reality, and the destiny of human life. The Qur’anic Arabic root ẓ-n-n occurs dozens of times and has a semantic range that includes thinking, supposing, expectation, and—where context is critical—unsupported conjecture. In passages such as 10:36 and 53:28, the contrast is explicit: conjecture cannot substitute for truth.

This makes the proposition that “atheism is founded on conjecture” philosophically interesting, but it must be formulated carefully. Atheism is not one single metaphysical system. In contemporary philosophy it can mean either the psychological absence of belief in God or, in its stronger philosophical sense, the proposition that God does not exist. Naturalism, physicalism, scientism, eliminativism, nominalism, and determinism are further theses that many atheists accept but that do not follow analytically from atheism itself. The strongest Qur’anic critique therefore is not that every atheist consciously believes exactly the same propositions, but that whenever atheism expands from withholding belief into a comprehensive account of reality, it must itself answer metaphysical questions for which empirical science alone supplies no final verdict: Why is there anything at all? Why these laws? Why a mathematically intelligible cosmos? Why consciousness? Why rationality? Why normativity? Why should human reasoning track truth?

The resulting secular answers are strikingly plural. Bertrand Russell was prepared to stop explanation at the universe itself; other naturalists understand laws through Humean regularities, mathematical structures, deeper physical theories, or brute facts; philosophers of mathematics divide among Platonism, nominalism, structuralism, fictionalism, and related positions; philosophers of mind divide among reductive physicalism, emergentism, functionalism, illusionism, panpsychism, and other theories; philosophers of agency remain divided over libertarianism, compatibilism, and skepticism. These are genuine philosophical programs, not mere evasions, but their very diversity shows that science has not settled the metaphysical interpretation of its own discoveries.

Within a Qur’anic theological framework, this is precisely where ẓann becomes relevant. The objection is not to scientific inference, probability, provisional hypothesis, or disciplined uncertainty. The objection is to turning what remains metaphysically underdetermined into an ultimate ontology and then presenting that ontology as though science itself had established it. Zia H. Shah’s extensive writings on atheism develop this theme through the laws of nature, mathematics, fine-tuning, consciousness, free will, causation, and Qur’anic epistemology. His central contention is that naturalism repeatedly relocates the explanatory terminus—from God to universe, law, mathematics, multiverse, or physical substrate—without thereby eliminating the question of why that terminus exists or possesses the powers attributed to it.

The Qur’anic alternative is not an invitation to intellectual laziness. It is an invitation to distinguish description from explanation, probability from certainty, model from reality, and inference from knowledge. Its great metaphor is Qur’an 13:17: truth is like the water that remains and gives life; falsehood is like foam that rises impressively upon the surface but eventually vanishes. Shah repeatedly uses this verse as an epistemological image for intellectual history: what is real bears explanatory weight and remains fruitful; exaggeration, fashion, and unsupported metaphysical pretension ultimately dissipate.

The Qur’anic epistemology of conjecture

The Qur’an’s treatment of conjecture is more nuanced than the slogan “all ẓann is false.” The Arabic root can signify expectation or conviction in some contexts, while in the verses relevant here it denotes unsupported supposition. Classical and modern linguistic resources therefore caution that the meaning must be read contextually. The Qur’anic Arabic Corpus records the root ẓ-n-n 69 times in several derived forms, while commentary on 53:28 notes explicitly that ẓann can bear several senses and that one is baseless thought.

The decisive formula occurs twice with extraordinary clarity. Qur’an 10:36 says that many people “follow not except assumption” and that assumption cannot replace truth; Qur’an 53:28 similarly says that people who lack knowledge follow conjecture and that conjecture cannot avail against truth. The opposition is therefore epistemic: knowledge and truth on one side, conjecture without adequate warrant on the other.

The same pattern recurs across the verses identified in the question. In 6:116, following the majority is rejected as an epistemic criterion when the majority merely follows conjecture and fabricates claims. In 45:24, people who reduce existence to worldly life and attribute destruction simply to time are said to possess no knowledge of that ultimate claim; “they only conjecture.” In 43:20, an appeal to divine will as an excuse for idolatry is rejected because its proponents possess no knowledge and are only conjecturing. And 51:10 uses kharrāṣūn, a term classical commentary explains as those who estimate or assert by conjecture.

Qur’an 4:157 makes the same epistemological distinction in another domain: competing claims about the fate of Jesus are criticized on the grounds that those making them lacked knowledge and followed conjecture. The theological subject differs, but the epistemic principle is stable: a proposition concerning an unseen or disputed reality is not upgraded into knowledge merely by repetition or confidence.

This distinction matters for modern discussions. Science itself does not claim omniscience. It proceeds through observations, models, controlled inference, probability, error correction, and revisability. A good scientific hypothesis may be uncertain without being arbitrary. The Qur’anic objection to ẓann therefore should not be weaponized against ordinary probabilistic reasoning. Rather, it becomes most relevant when an inference is asked to bear more metaphysical weight than its evidence can support.

That is why the crucial debate is not “faith versus science.” It is which worldview is entitled to claim that its ultimate interpretation of scientific findings is knowledge rather than philosophical inference.

Atheism is not one doctrine—and that strengthens rather than weakens the central question

Any serious critique must first avoid defining atheism too broadly. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that “atheism” has several senses. Psychologically, it may mean simply lacking belief in God. In philosophy of religion, it commonly denotes the proposition that God does not exist.

This distinction is essential. Someone who says, “I do not know whether God exists, and I withhold belief,” is making a weaker epistemic claim than someone who says, “There is no God, reality is exhaustively physical, consciousness is reducible, objective purposes do not exist, and all apparently transcendent features will ultimately be explained naturalistically.” The latter position is not merely atheism; it is a package of metaphysical commitments.

Consequently, it would be inaccurate to say that atheists as such unanimously believe that consciousness is an illusion, or that mathematics is brute, or that laws of nature are brute, or that the universe itself is brute. They do not. Contemporary philosophy contains multiple competing secular ontologies. The philosophy of mathematics alone ranges across Platonism, nominalism, structuralism, fictionalism, and other positions. Philosophers of laws of nature dispute whether laws are governing entities, modal facts, relations among universals, or features of the “best system” describing the total mosaic of events. Philosophers of free will divide among incompatibilists, compatibilists, libertarians, skeptics, and revisionists.

The significant point is therefore not “atheists disagree, therefore atheism is false.” Theists disagree too, and disagreement alone proves little. The deeper point is epistemological: atheism by itself does not supply a unified positive ontology capable of answering the questions that theism answers by reference to a necessary, intelligent, purposive source.

Once God is excluded, the demand for explanation does not disappear. It migrates.

One may stop at the universe.

One may stop at the laws.

One may stop at an initial quantum state.

One may stop at a multiverse-generating mechanism.

One may stop at mathematics.

One may stop at a Humean totality of events.

One may declare that no further explanation is required.

But each stopping point is a philosophical decision, not an experimental result.

This is the sense in which the Qur’anic critique of ẓann can be sharpened: atheism does not become conjectural merely because it rejects God; it becomes conjectural when it asserts an ultimate metaphysics beyond what the evidence itself establishes while denying equivalent inferential legitimacy to theism.

Brute facts, laws of nature, and the relocation of mystery

Bertrand Russell provides one of the clearest historical examples. In his famous 1948 BBC debate with Frederick Copleston, Russell resisted the demand for an explanation of the universe as a whole. The surviving transcript records him objecting to the very expectation that the total universe must have an explanation; another transcript preserves his famous remark that the universe is simply “just there.”

This position is philosophically respectable. It amounts to accepting a brute fact: a fact for which no further explanation exists. The modern literature connects brute facts directly with rejection of unrestricted versions of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the principle that facts require sufficient explanation.

Yet brute-fact naturalism carries an obvious dialectical cost. If the theist is criticized for terminating explanation in God, while the naturalist terminates explanation in the universe or its basic structure, then the debate cannot be decided merely by accusing one side of “stopping.” Both stop somewhere. The question becomes: what kind of terminus is intellectually adequate?

Classical theism does not propose God as one unexplained object among other objects. Its claim is that contingent realities ultimately depend upon a necessary reality whose existence is not derivative. Contemporary discussions of cosmological arguments still turn on precisely these issues: contingency, explanation, necessary being, and whether brute facts are philosophically admissible.

Zia H. Shah repeatedly frames the dispute this way. His essays on laws of nature argue that naturalism may remove the word “God” while retaining unexplained lawlike order as its functional explanatory terminus. His 2026 article on whether atheist scientists “worship” laws of nature cites the concern that cosmological explanations using physical laws already presuppose that some lawful mathematical structure is available to do explanatory work. An earlier essay similarly argues that saying the fundamental laws “just are” does not explain their existence, form, applicability, or remarkable intelligibility.

Here one must be precise. Modern philosophy of science does not possess a settled account of what a law of nature metaphysically is. One influential Humean family of theories treats laws as the axioms of the deductive system that best balances simplicity and strength in summarizing the total history of events. Under that conception, laws do not stand above reality as commands causing events; they summarize the best pattern found within reality. Other philosophers defend non-Humean conceptions on which laws have stronger modal or governing force. The metaphysics remains contested.

This creates a revealing dilemma for a purely naturalistic interpretation.

If laws govern matter, what are these nonmaterial or modal facts, and why do they have this governing character?

If laws merely describe regularities, then they cannot themselves explain why those regularities exist.

If deeper laws explain present laws, the same question arises one level deeper.

If the final laws are necessary, that necessity needs metaphysical justification.

If they are contingent, their particular form cries out for explanation.

If they are brute, explanation stops by stipulation.

None of these conclusions is generated simply by measuring nature. They are philosophical interpretations of what measurement reveals.

This is close to Shah’s recurring argument: atheism often claims to have removed theological mystery while actually redistributing mystery into impersonal categories—law, matter, initial conditions, necessity, probability, or mathematics.

From the Qur’anic perspective, the issue is not that these scientific categories are unreal. The issue is whether they possess self-explanatory ultimacy.

Mathematics, intelligibility, and the problem of an ordered cosmos

Mathematics intensifies the difficulty because physical science does not merely find recurring events; it finds recurring events susceptible to exceptionally precise mathematical representation.

Philosophers do not agree on what mathematics itself is. Mathematical Platonists hold that mathematical objects or structures exist objectively and independently of human thought; nominalists reject abstract mathematical entities and must reconstruct mathematical discourse without ontological commitment to such objects; fictionalists and structuralists offer still other accounts.

These disagreements matter because a strict physicalist must explain why entities or truths that appear nonspatial, noncausal, and abstract nevertheless fit the physical universe so deeply. A Platonist can affirm objective mathematical reality, but then reality contains more than concrete physical objects. A nominalist preserves a more austere ontology, but inherits the problem of accounting for mathematical truth and the usefulness of mathematics without abstract entities.

Shah turns this into one of his principal critiques of physicalism. His essays on mathematics argue that mathematical truths do not create physical reality; equations describe structures but do not by themselves explain why any concrete universe instantiates them. His later work connects this to the familiar observation associated with Eugene Wigner: mathematics developed in seemingly abstract contexts repeatedly turns out to describe nature with unexpected effectiveness. Shah interprets this not as a proof in the strict mathematical sense but as evidence congenial to the hypothesis of an intelligible cosmos grounded in Mind.

The theological inference is straightforward. If the universe is the product of a rational Creator, then it is unsurprising in principle that nature should exhibit rational structure and that finite minds should be capable of discovering it. This does not predict every equation in advance, and therefore it should not be confused with a scientific theory competing against physics. It is a metaphysical explanation of why physics is possible at all.

Naturalism has responses: evolutionary processes can help explain why organisms possess successful predictive capacities; mathematical language may be selected precisely because scientists retain mathematical systems that fit observation; structural realism may dissolve part of the mystery. None is trivial.

Yet even if evolution explains why our brains track useful middle-scale regularities, it does not by itself explain why reality is governed by deep mathematical symmetries that human beings can uncover far beyond the ancestral environment. Nor does it determine whether mathematical truth is invented, discovered, instantiated, or abstract.

Again the Qur’anic category is not ignorance but proportion. Where evidence supports a model, call it knowledge provisionally appropriate to its domain. Where metaphysical interpretation exceeds the model, acknowledge that further inference has begun.

Consciousness and free will: when the observer becomes the anomaly

Consciousness is especially difficult for reductionist physicalism because every scientific observation already presupposes conscious observers capable of experience, inference, and judgment.

One influential naturalist response is illusionism. Keith Frankish defines illusionism as the view that phenomenal consciousness, conceived as intrinsically private qualitative properties or qualia, is an introspective illusion. The position does not mean that people are unconscious in the ordinary behavioral sense; rather, it denies that experience possesses the phenomenal properties that introspection seems to reveal. Frankish explicitly describes illusionism as replacing the traditional “hard problem” with an “illusion problem”: why do we represent ourselves as having phenomenal properties if we do not actually possess them?

This is precisely the kind of theory Shah has targeted in his recent work. His argument is that consciousness occupies a uniquely privileged epistemic status because every denial, theory, measurement, and inference appears within consciousness. For him, a metaphysics that preserves physical ontology by redescribing phenomenal experience as illusion risks subordinating what is most immediately given to what is known only through that very experience.

There is force in that objection, but fairness requires acknowledging that illusionists do not think they are denying all mental life. Their thesis concerns a particular philosophical conception of phenomenal properties. That distinction prevents the critique from becoming a caricature.

Still, the existence of such a serious debate demonstrates the central point: science has not produced a settled reductive account of consciousness. Naturalists themselves disagree profoundly about whether consciousness is identical with brain states, realized functionally, emergent, fundamental, panpsychic, or partly illusory.

Free will presents a parallel problem. Some popular discussions claim that neuroscience has shown free will to be an illusion, often invoking Benjamin Libet’s experiments or later studies of preparatory neural activity. But contemporary philosophical surveys emphasize that the interpretation is far less decisive. The readiness potential has received extensive criticism, neuroscience has not established universal causal determinism, quantum theory admits competing deterministic and indeterministic interpretations, and present science does not demonstrate that every human action is wholly predetermined by the distant past.

This matters theologically because one frequently hears the transition:

brain activity precedes reported awareness
therefore conscious agency is causally impotent
therefore free will is illusory
therefore moral responsibility is reconstructed naturalistically.

Only the first of those statements is an empirical observation in the relevant experiments. The later transitions require substantial philosophical premises.

Shah’s essays on free will emphasize this distinction and argue that the freedom experienced in deliberation should not be discarded merely because a materialist ontology has difficulty accommodating it.

The Qur’anic critique again becomes epistemological: the problem is not investigating neural causation. The problem is declaring the metaphysical nonexistence of genuine agency before science has established such a conclusion.

To call consciousness or freedom an “illusion” may eventually turn out to be correct under some carefully specified philosophical meaning. But at present it is not a deliverance of laboratory science equivalent to the measured charge of the electron or the sequence of a genome. It is an interpretation.

And interpretation, however sophisticated, must not masquerade as direct observation.

Fine-tuning, explanation, and the limits of “accident”

Cosmological fine-tuning is another area in which scientific data and metaphysical interpretation must be kept distinct. Contemporary physics employs theories containing parameters, constants, boundary conditions, and initial conditions whose values matter to the development of complex structures. Luke Barnes’s scientific review surveys fine-tuning discussions involving cosmological expansion, entropy, particle masses, fundamental constants, stars, chemistry, and other conditions relevant to life. More recent literature continues to treat fine-tuning as a serious subject while debating its explanatory significance.

The data do not by themselves say “God.” Nor do they by themselves say “multiverse.” The possible explanations include deeper necessity, selection effects, multiverse hypotheses, unknown physics, coincidence, design, or combinations of these ideas.

The philosophical asymmetry becomes important here. Design is often rejected as “not scientific” because it posits a transcendent cause. Yet some naturalistic alternatives also invoke structures not directly observed, such as broader ensembles of universes or yet-unknown deeper laws. That does not make such proposals illegitimate; theoretical science often reasons beyond direct observation. But it means the mere fact that an explanation transcends immediate observation cannot by itself disqualify it.

The relevant comparison must concern explanatory virtues: scope, coherence, prior plausibility, predictive implications, ontological economy, and how much unexplained machinery each proposal requires.

Shah interprets fine-tuning within a cumulative theistic case rather than as an isolated proof. His writings repeatedly connect the laws of nature, mathematical order, fine-tuning, intelligibility, consciousness, and moral agency into one explanatory picture. Whether one finds that cumulative inference persuasive will depend partly on prior metaphysical commitments. But it is misleading to portray the design inference as a violation of science while treating every naturalistic extrapolation as science itself.

The Qur’anic emphasis is not “believe because we do not understand.” It is closer to: observe what is understood and ask what kind of ultimate reality best explains why such an intelligible, ordered, life-permitting world exists.

That is the difference between a “God of the gaps” and a God inferred from the existence of the entire explanatory order. Shah’s recent work explicitly emphasizes this distinction: lawful nature is not a rival to God, because laws are what require metaphysical grounding in the first place.

Qur’an 10:61–67: knowledge, witness, conjecture, and cosmic order

The requested passage from Sūrat Yūnus provides an unusually concentrated synthesis of these themes. In M. A. S. Abdel Haleem’s translation, it begins:

“In whatever matter you [Prophet] may be engaged and whatever part of the Quran you are reciting, whatever work you [people] are doing, We witness you when you are engaged in it. Not even the weight of a speck of dust in the earth or sky escapes your Lord, nor anything lesser or greater: it is all written in a clear record.”

The opening assertion is metaphysically maximal. Reality is not ontologically abandoned. Nothing is too small to fall outside divine knowledge. In theological language, the universe is therefore neither self-subsisting nor epistemically opaque to its Creator.

The verses then move from ontology to existential security:

“But for those who are on God’s side there is no fear, nor shall they grieve. For those who believe and are conscious of God, for them there is good news in this life and in the Hereafter–– there is no changing the promises of God –– that is truly the supreme triumph.”

Knowledge of ultimate reality is not merely speculative metaphysics in this Qur’anic vision. It affects the existential posture of the human person. If reality is founded on purposive divine intelligence, then consciousness, responsibility, hope, and moral striving are not accidental by-products in an indifferent universe.

The passage then directly juxtaposes divine knowledge with human conjecture:

“Do not let the words of those who do not believe grieve you [Prophet]. Power belongs entirely to God; He hears all and knows all; indeed, all who are in the heavens and on the earth belong to Him. Those who call upon others beside God are not really following partner-gods; they are only following conjectures and assumptions and telling lies.”

The precise immediate target is pagan associationism rather than twenty-first-century atheism, so responsible exegesis should not simply pretend the verse originally said “atheists.” Yet the epistemological principle readily generalizes: claims about ultimate reality require knowledge proportionate to the claim.

The conclusion then returns to nature:

“It is He who made the night so that you can rest in it and the daylight so that you can see–– there truly are signs in this for those who hear.”

The architecture of the passage is remarkable. It moves through omniscience → human action → accountability → spiritual security → divine sovereignty → critique of conjecture → observable cosmic regularity.

Shah’s extended commentary on these verses reads this natural regularity through the tradition of Islamic occasionalism. On this view, what science describes as stable causal regularities are not autonomous powers operating independently of God; they are the dependable order of divine action. Shah specifically interprets the alternation of night and day in 10:67 as a paradigm of a stable sunnat Allāh, a regularity that science can describe without thereby displacing its theological ground.

That framework avoids two opposite errors.

The first is anti-scientific supernaturalism, in which divine agency is invoked mainly where scientific explanation is absent.

The second is metaphysical naturalism, in which successful scientific description is converted into evidence that divine agency is absent.

The Qur’anic position presented by Shah is instead layered: the more orderly nature is, the more fully science may describe it; and the more intelligible that order becomes, the stronger the metaphysical question of its ground becomes.

Qur’an 13:17 and the fate of intellectual froth

Qur’an 13:17 gives the argument its most memorable image. Rain descends; valleys flow according to their capacity; the flood carries swelling foam. Metals placed in fire similarly produce dross or scum. The Qur’an then declares this a parable of truth and falsehood: the foam disappears, while what benefits people remains.

Shah has made this verse central to his philosophy of intellectual history. His commentaries portray truth as weight-bearing, durable, beneficial reality and falsehood as temporarily conspicuous but ultimately unstable froth.

The metaphor is especially apt for the present theme because it is not merely triumphalist. Foam can be visually impressive. It can cover the surface. It can appear larger than the water beneath it. Its defect is not lack of visibility but lack of substance.

Applied philosophically, the lesson is not that every secular theory will disappear or that every religious proposition automatically possesses substance. Religious people can also follow inherited conjectures, bad arguments, false reports, and wishful thinking. Qur’an 6:116 itself warns that numerical majority is no guarantee of truth.

The criterion is therefore more demanding: what survives scrutiny, explains reality deeply, coheres with what is known, and benefits understanding?

Scientific theories exemplify this process within their own domain. Models are proposed, tested, corrected, replaced, or retained. The enduring theory is not the theory with the loudest advocates; it is the one that continues to bear explanatory and predictive weight.

The same standard should apply to metaphysics.

If “the universe is simply there” proves to be an adequate stopping point, it must withstand the question why contingency needs no explanation.

If laws are fundamental, their ontology must be clarified.

If mathematics is fundamental, its relationship to physical instantiation must be explained.

If consciousness is an illusion, the theory must explain the reality of the seeming without covertly reinstalling the very subjectivity it denies.

If free will is unreal, responsibility and rational deliberation require reconstruction.

If a multiverse explains fine-tuning, the generating mechanism and probability measure must themselves enter the explanatory ledger.

And if God is proposed as the ultimate ground, theology must show that “God” is not simply an arbitrary label filling ignorance but a coherent candidate for necessary being, rational source, sustaining cause, and ground of intelligibility.

No worldview is exempt from examination.

That is precisely what makes Qur’an 13:17 such a powerful episteme: the verdict belongs not to fashion but to reality.

Thematic epilogue: when conjecture meets the Real

The deepest Qur’anic challenge to atheism is not the childish claim that atheists never reason or possess evidence. They plainly do. Nor is it that believers possess empirical demonstrations of every theological proposition in the same sense that physicists possess measurements of particle masses.

The challenge is more fundamental.

What warrants the move from the success of natural science to the metaphysical conclusion that nature is all that exists?

A telescope can tell us how distant a galaxy is. It cannot, by telescope alone, tell us that only physical things exist.

A particle accelerator can probe fields and interactions. It cannot, merely by detecting them, demonstrate that mathematical truth is reducible to matter.

Neuroscience can correlate brain states with experience. It cannot, by correlation alone, decide the ontology of subjectivity.

Psychology can reveal unconscious influences on decision-making. It cannot, by that fact alone, prove that all agency is illusory.

Cosmology can reconstruct early cosmic history. It cannot simply read from the equations whether existence as a whole is brute, necessary, designed, or instantiated within a wider ensemble.

Those additional conclusions are philosophy.

And once philosophy begins, the Qur’an asks a severe question: What do you know, and what are you only assuming?

That question cuts both ways. A Muslim who makes claims unsupported by revelation, reason, or evidence can also fall into ẓann. The Qur’an’s epistemic discipline is universal. But it becomes particularly incisive when a worldview advertises itself as uniquely evidence-based while carrying a large body of metaphysical assumptions that are neither experimentally measured nor consensually established.

This is why the diversity of secular metaphysics is philosophically significant. Russell can stop at the universe. A Humean can stop at the mosaic of events. Another thinker may treat laws as fundamental. A mathematical realist may admit abstract reality. A nominalist may deny it. A physicalist may reduce mind. An illusionist may reinterpret phenomenal consciousness. A panpsychist may distribute mentality throughout matter. A compatibilist may preserve freedom by redefining it. A skeptic may reject it. None of this diversity discredits secular philosophy; it demonstrates its vitality. But it also demonstrates that “science says” is an inadequate description of what are actually contested metaphysical choices.

Zia H. Shah’s project can be understood as an extended attempt to expose this boundary. Across his writings on laws, mathematics, fine-tuning, consciousness, free will, causation, and Qur’anic epistemology, he argues that naturalism repeatedly treats its preferred stopping points as intellectually innocent while regarding God as an illicit explanatory addition. His counterproposal is that theism can unify what naturalism leaves scattered: being, law, intelligibility, mathematics, consciousness, agency, moral significance, and cosmic purpose.

The argument need not be overstated. Theism is an inference to an ultimate explanation, not a laboratory measurement. But atheistic metaphysics is also an inference whenever it moves beyond the modest statement “I am unconvinced” to the stronger claim that reality contains no transcendent intelligence, purpose, or divine ground.

At that level, the two worldviews meet on genuinely philosophical terrain.

The Qur’an’s contribution is to insist that ultimate questions deserve more than inherited assumptions, fashionable materialism, sociological consensus, or rhetorical confidence.

“Conjecture avails nothing against truth.”

And Qur’an 13:17 supplies the final image. Falsehood can swell. It can glitter. It can dominate the surface of intellectual culture. But foam has no independent depth; it rides upon something more substantial than itself. Truth is the water beneath it—the reality that remains, sustains, and gives life. Shah’s reading of the verse makes precisely this durability the test of ultimate intellectual seriousness.

In that light, the Qur’anic dispute with atheism is not ultimately a contest between “religion” and “science.” It is a contest between two interpretations of what science discovers.

One interpretation sees an intelligible universe, mathematical order, conscious knowers, moral agents, fine-tuned conditions, and stable laws, and concludes that no transcendent explanation need be sought.

The other sees those same realities as āyāt—signs whose intelligibility points beyond themselves.

The first may call the final stopping point universe, law, mathematics, quantum state, necessity, or brute fact.

The Qur’an calls the deeper ground al-Ḥaqq—the Real, the Truth.

And it asks humanity not merely which account is fashionable, but which is knowledge, which is conjecture, and which—when the froth has passed away—will remain.

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