The Signs in the Horizons and in the Self: An Abrahamic Refutation of Atheism, with Special Reference to Islam and the Work of Zia H. Shah, MD

Presented by Claude

Atheism, understood as metaphysical naturalism, does not lose because any single argument “proves” God. It loses because it cannot explain the existence of the universe, its life-permitting precision, the reliability of reason, the binding force of morality, consciousness, or free agency without treating each as an unexplained brute fact, while classical Abrahamic theism explains all of them with one principle: a necessary, wise, conscious Creator.
The Islamic tradition, from al-Ghazali’s kalam to Zia H. Shah’s essays at thequran.love, gives this cumulative case its sharpest shape. The Quran’s repeated call to reflect on the ayat (signs) “in the horizons and within themselves” (41:53) maps onto the cosmological and fine-tuning arguments on one side and the arguments from consciousness, reason and conscience on the other. Jewish (Maimonides, Saadia Gaon) and Christian (Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Plantinga) thinkers stand on the same ground.
The strongest atheist replies (Hume, Russell’s “brute fact”, Dawkins’s “who designed the designer?”, the Euthyphro dilemma, the multiverse) each have good answers. They mostly relocate the mystery rather than dissolve it. A reader should take the arguments as a cumulative case that makes theism the more rational worldview, not as a mathematical demonstration that compels assent.

Abstract

This essay argues that atheism, in its dominant modern form as metaphysical naturalism, is a less rational worldview than the theism shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It works through six philosophical arguments: the cosmological argument (the kalam and the Principle of Sufficient Reason); the fine-tuning of physical constants; Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, together with the related arguments set out by the Catholic apologetics site Catholicism Coffee; the presuppositional or transcendental argument from the intelligibility of nature; the moral argument; and the twin arguments from consciousness and libertarian free will. Two societal critiques follow: the role of belief in God in anchoring civil order (Locke, Voltaire, Burke), and the inability of materialism to answer the question “why?” Throughout, the essay gives special weight to the Islamic tradition: the Quranic appeal to ayat and fitra, the kalam of al-Ghazali, the metaphysics of Ibn Sina, and the contemporary synthesis of Zia H. Shah, MD, a physician and the chief editor of The Muslim Times, whose blog The Glorious Quran and Science (thequran.love) contains hundreds of essays on fine-tuning, consciousness, free will and occasionalism. It also shows the common ground with Jewish and Christian thought on each point. The main atheist rejoinders are stated and answered. The conclusion is that theism offers one unified explanation where naturalism offers a collection of brute facts.

I. The Common Ground: Signs, Disposition and the Book of Nature

The three Abrahamic faiths share a premise that frames everything that follows: the world is a text, and it can be read. The Hebrew psalmist sings that “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1), and the same tradition says bluntly that “the fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Psalm 14:1). Isaiah invites his readers to “lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things” (Isaiah 40:26). Paul tells the Romans that God’s “invisible attributes” have been “clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). The Letter to the Hebrews adds that “the worlds were framed by the word of God” (Hebrews 11:3), and John’s Gospel opens with the Logos, the rational Word through whom all things were made (John 1:1–3).

The Quran makes this appeal more often and more insistently than any other scripture. It calls natural phenomena ayat, the same word it uses for its own verses, so that nature and revelation are two volumes from one Author. “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,” it says, describing them as people who “reflect on the creation of the heavens and the earth” and conclude, “Our Lord, You did not create this aimlessly” (3:190–191). A whole catalogue of such signs (the ships on the sea, the rain that revives dead land, the winds and the clouds “held between heaven and earth”) ends with the refrain that these are signs “for a people who use reason” (2:164). The Quran also states a programme for the future: “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).

Islam joins to this outward reading an inward one: fitra, the primordial human disposition toward God. “Set your face toward the religion, inclining to truth, the fitra of God upon which He has created all people” (30:30). A prophetic tradition adds that every child is born upon the fitra. Wikipedia newageislam In an essay comparing Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology with the Quranic primordial covenant (7:172), posted at thequran.love/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/primordial-knowledge-of-god_-plantingas-reformed-epistemology-and-the-islamic-primordial-covenant.pdf, Zia H. Shah argues that both frameworks place “the onus on atheism to justify itself.” If belief in God is the natural baseline, then atheism is the departure that needs defending. thequran Edmund Burke reached the same conclusion from the other side of Christendom when he wrote that “man is by his constitution a religious animal” and that atheism is “against, not only our reason, but our instincts.” Wikipedia

Shah calls this two-sided reading of signs, outward and inward, the “Two Books” approach: scripture and nature read together. thequran It organises the rest of this essay. The cosmological and fine-tuning arguments read the signs “in the horizons.” The arguments from reason, morality, consciousness and free will read the signs “within themselves.”

II. The Cosmological Argument: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

The kalam: an Islamic gift to world philosophy

The best-known modern version of the cosmological argument still carries an Arabic name. Kalam was the dialectical theology of medieval Islam, and its central argument was sharpened by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Against the Aristotelian thesis of an eternal world, al-Ghazali argued that a beginningless past would require an actually infinite series of events already traversed, which he held to be absurd. thequran Wikipedia The Jewish thinker Saadia Gaon (882–942), writing in Baghdad in the same intellectual climate, had given parallel proofs for creation in time in his Book of Beliefs and Opinions. The Christian philosopher William Lane Craig revived the argument in The Kalam Cosmological Argument (1979). Wikipedia In its modern form it runs:

Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Shah’s essay “The Kalam Cosmological Argument: A Robust Case for God’s Existence” (thequran.love/2025/03/26/the-kalam-cosmological-argument-a-robust-case-for-gods-existence/) sets out exactly this structure, crediting the first premise to al-Ghazali. He supports the second premise with modern cosmology: the Big Bang, Alexander Vilenkin’s remark that “all the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning,” and the Borde–Guth–Vilenkin theorem, under which a universe that has on average been expanding cannot be extended infinitely into the past. Shah follows Craig in arguing that the cause must be timeless, spaceless, immaterial and personal. thequran A timeless cause that produces a temporal effect points to a free agent rather than a mechanism, because a mechanism that is eternally sufficient would produce an eternal effect.

Contingency: Ibn Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas, Leibniz

There is a second, and arguably deeper, version of the cosmological argument that does not depend on the universe having a beginning at all. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) distinguished between a thing’s essence (what it is) and its existence (that it is). Since nothing in the essence of a contingent thing guarantees that it exists, every contingent being needs a cause outside itself. The chain of contingent causes cannot explain itself, so it must end in a wajib al-wujud, a Necessary Existent whose essence is to exist. Ibn Sina called this the “Proof of the Truthful” (burhan al-siddiqin). Maimonides took up the argument in the Guide for the Perplexed. Aquinas built it into his Third Way. Leibniz gave it its modern form with the Principle of Sufficient Reason: there must be a sufficient reason why anything exists, and why it is thus and not otherwise. Shah traces this lineage from Plato and Aristotle through Ibn Sina to Aquinas and Craig, and argues that “the cosmological argument is for the eternal God of the Abrahamic faiths” (thequran.love/2026/03/18/the-eightieth-particle-and-the-fingerprint-of-god/). thequran Edward Feser and David Bentley Hart have pressed the same point in contemporary Thomist and Orthodox terms: God is not one more being inside the universe but the ground of being itself.

Atheist rejoinders

Hume asked, “Why may not the material universe be the necessarily existent being?” thequran The reply is that everything we know about the universe marks it as contingent: it is made of parts, it changes, it is subject to entropy, and on the best evidence it had a beginning. A necessary being cannot have any of these features.

Bertrand Russell, in his 1948 BBC debate with Frederick Copleston, answered that the universe is “just there, and that’s all.” This brute-fact reply is the atheist’s most honest answer, but it costs a great deal. Science itself proceeds on the assumption that things have explanations. To give up the Principle of Sufficient Reason exactly at the point where it would lead to God is special pleading. If the universe can exist with no reason at all, why not a horse, or a tsunami, popping into existence uncaused in the living room?

Quantum fluctuations and Hawking. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow wrote in The Grand Design (2010) that “because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” thequran Shah answers in “Where Do Atheists Go Wrong On the Laws of Nature?” (thequran.love/2025/03/13/13383/) and in a 2019 essay on the divine name al-Hakeem (thequran.love/2019/11/10/religion-and-science-al-hakeem-the-wise-the-creator-with-a-purpose/), where he notes that the book’s very title is something of a “Freudian slip.” thequran A law of gravity is not nothing. ucg A quantum vacuum is a structured physical state, governed by equations, not the absolute nothing of the cosmological question. Laws describe how things behave; they do not bring anything into existence. As John Lennox puts it, the laws of the internal combustion engine do not make Henry Ford unnecessary. thequran

The Quran puts the dilemma in a single verse: “Or were they created by nothing, or were they the creators [of themselves]?” (52:35). Atheism has to choose one of those two horns, and neither is rational.

III. The Argument from Fine-Tuning: A Universe Set on a Knife-Edge

The evidence

If the cosmological argument asks why there is a universe, the fine-tuning argument asks why it is this kind of universe: one balanced, against overwhelming odds, to allow stars, chemistry and conscious observers. In a 2026 interview transcript on his blog (thequran.love/2026/10/29/fine-tuning-interview/), Shah describes the evidence the way a physician works through a diagnosis. He uses the image of a mixing board with dozens of dials and cites a 2006 Physical Review D paper by Max Tegmark, Anthony Aguirre, Martin Rees and Frank Wilczek, which states, “We identify 31 dimensionless physical constants required by particle physics and cosmology,” constants our theories need but cannot derive. His main examples:

The cosmological constant, the energy of empty space. Quantum theory overestimates it by about 10^120, “the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics.” Our universe sits in a narrow “Goldilocks zone,” where the constant is positive but extraordinarily small. Steven Weinberg, a lifelong atheist, admitted it “does seem remarkably well adjusted in our favor.” thequran
The initial low entropy of the universe. Roger Penrose calculated its improbability at one part in 10^(10^123), a number that could not be written out even with one digit on every particle in the observable universe. thequran
The strength of the strong force, captured by Rees’s parameter ε = 0.007. Rees writes that if it were 0.006 or 0.008, “we could not exist.” thequran
The neutron–proton mass difference and the expansion rate. Hawking himself wrote in A Brief History of Time (1988) that if the expansion rate one second after the Big Bang had been smaller “by even one part in a hundred thousand million million,” the universe would have recollapsed, though a few pages later he noted that inflation “could then explain” this without assuming the initial rate “was very carefully chosen.”

To his credit, Shah notes where the evidence is weaker. He says Fred Hoyle’s famous carbon-resonance case may have a wider margin than was first thought, which is why he leads with the cosmological constant and initial entropy. He also points out that this is not fringe science. Luke Barnes’s 2012 review and his book with Geraint Lewis, A Fortunate Universe, conclude that the fine-tuning is real, and the atheist physicist Sean Carroll, in his 2014 debate with William Lane Craig, conceded that it is “the best argument that the theists have when it comes to cosmology” before adding that “it is still a terrible argument.”

From evidence to Creator

Shah sets out the logic as a differential diagnosis among necessity, chance and design. Necessity fails because no known theory fixes the constants, and even if a “theory of everything” did, we would still have to ask why the only possible universe happens to permit life. Chance in a single universe asks us to accept odds we would reject anywhere else. Robin Collins illustrates this with a dart thrown blindly that lands in a one-foot bull’s-eye on a galaxy-sized board. Design expects exactly what we observe. In Collins’s likelihood framing, when an observation is unsurprising on one hypothesis and enormously surprising on another, it counts strongly for the first. thequran Shah’s own summary, the title of one of his essays, is that “All Roads Lead to Rome and All Arguments for God Lead to the Fine Tuning of Our Universe”: the cosmological, design and moral arguments all converge on a necessary, wise and purposeful Creator. thequran

The Quran supplies the theological vocabulary. “He created each thing and determined it with precise determination” (25:2). “We have created everything according to a measure (qadar)” (54:49). “The heaven He raised and imposed the balance (al-mizan)” (55:7). Shah reads qadar not as a list of physical constants but as “the theological name for what physics calls fine-tuning.” Above all he points to the observational challenge of Surah al-Mulk: “You do not see in the creation of the Most Merciful any inconsistency. So return your vision… Then return your vision twice again” (67:3–4). thequran Shah develops this in “A Perfect Order: Scientific Reflections on Quran 67:3–4 and Cosmic Fine-Tuning” (thequran.love/2025/04/18/a-perfect-order-scientific-reflections-on-quran-673-4-and-cosmic-fine-tuning/), noting that a century of telescopes and colliders has done exactly that: looked again, and again, and found deeper order rather than flaws. thequran Other verses he draws on fill out the picture: the heavens and earth were “a joined entity” before being parted (21:30), and “We are its expander” (51:47).

The multiverse objection

The atheist’s strongest reply is the multiverse. If there are enough universes with randomly varying constants, one of them will permit life, and we will naturally find ourselves in it. thequran Shah answers in “Lord of the Worlds: Quranic Verses, Multiverse, and the Fine-Tuning of the Cosmos” (thequran.love/2025/10/15/lord-of-the-worlds-quranic-verses-multiverse-and-the-fine-tuning-of-the-cosmos/) and in his interview, with four points. First, the multiverse is unobserved and perhaps unobservable, so it is a metaphysical posit, not a scientific result. Second, a universe-generating mechanism needs finely set laws of its own, so the fine-tuning is “pushed back a step, not removed.” thequran + 2 Antony Flew made the same point: “multiverse or not, we still have to come to terms with the origins of the laws of nature.” epsociety Third, multiplying unseen universes to avoid one God violates Occam’s razor on a cosmic scale. thequran Fourth, Shah draws attention to motive: some prominent advocates openly present the multiverse as the alternative to God, which suggests it is driven by worldview more than by evidence. thequran He adds a theological point. The Quran calls God Rabb al-‘alamin, “Lord of the worlds,” in the plural, so a multiverse, if it exists, would only enlarge the canvas of the Creator. Plantinga makes a similar remark about divine “creative genius.” thequran

“Who designed the designer?”

Richard Dawkins’s central argument in The God Delusion (2006) is that any designer complex enough to design a universe would itself need explaining. thequran Three replies are decisive. First, as Craig notes, recognising design as the best explanation does not require explaining the designer. reasonablefaith Archaeologists who find arrowheads do not need a theory of the archers’ origins. Second, Dawkins attacks a finite, complex engineer inside the universe. Classical theism, whether Jewish (Maimonides), Christian (Aquinas) or Islamic (the tawhid of al-Ghazali and Ibn Sina), holds that God is simple, not made of parts, and necessary, not caused. Shah makes this point in “The Anesthesia of Familiarity” (thequran.love/2026/11/02/the-anesthesia-of-familiarity-a-wake-up-call-20-minute-interview-script/): the question “works against a complex engineer who is one more object inside the universe,” not against a necessary ground of being. worldviewsummit thequran Third, Dawkins’s objection, if valid, would equally rule out every ultimate explanation, including the naturalist’s own brute laws. Surah al-Ikhlas states the theistic answer in four lines: God is One, al-Samad (the Self-Sufficient on whom all depend), neither begotten nor begetting, with nothing comparable to Him (112:1–4).

IV. The Argument from Reason: Can a Naturalist Trust a Naturalist’s Brain?

Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism

Alvin Plantinga, the most influential Christian philosopher of the past half-century, set out the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) in Warrant and Proper Function (1993) and refined it in Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011). Plantinga accepts evolution. His target is the combination of evolution with the claim that nothing guided it. thequran Natural selection rewards adaptive behaviour, not true belief. If our cognitive faculties were shaped only for survival, the probability that they reliably track truth is low or impossible to estimate. Wikipedia thequran Shah explains the argument in “Can We Trust Our Reasoning: Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism?” (thequran.love/2024/12/26/can-we-trust-our-reasoning-evolutionary-argument-against-naturalism/) and returns to Plantinga’s well-known tiger example: a hominid who wrongly believes the tiger is a friendly kitten, but also wrongly believes the best way to play with it is to run away, survives as well as one with true beliefs. So the naturalist who accepts evolution has a defeater for all his beliefs, including naturalism itself. thequran thequran C. S. Lewis made a version of this argument in Miracles (1947), and the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, writing in the New York Review of Books in 2012, granted that defenders of naturalism, “even with the aid of evolutionary theory,” have “not proposed a credible solution.” Shah, characteristically, reads it as “an argument for guided evolution.” thequran That position is also held by Francis Collins, the Christian geneticist who led the Human Genome Project, and by Mirza Tahir Ahmad, whose Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge and Truth (1998) compared evolution to a strategic game of chess rather than a game of dice. Wikipedia

The six arguments of Catholicism Coffee

The Catholic apologetics site Catholicism Coffee, in Maximillian Kriones’s article “6 Rational Arguments Against Atheism” (subtitled “The Surprising Conflict Between Atheism and Reason”), adds to Plantinga’s case and organises it well. The author first defines his target carefully. He means atheism as naturalism, the belief that only material things exist, and he grants that his arguments “work against a closed system of atheism.” Someone who believes “there is something more out there” may feel them “less.” catholicismcoffee That honesty is worth copying: these arguments refute materialist atheism, which is the form that dominates public debate. The arguments, as the article sets them out:

The Epistemological Skyhook (drawing on philosopher Jim Slagle). If atheism is true, every belief is produced by natural processes “whose goal is not truth.” The universe is indifferent to us, so why expect rational function in our minds at all? catholicismcoffee
Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument, illustrated with an imagined drug called “Matrix” that makes your reasoning unreliable without your knowing it. Under naturalism, evolution plays the role of that drug, and so atheism undermines the very mind that produced it. catholicismcoffee
The Argument from Determinism. Materialist atheism leads to determinism, and determinism removes rational belief, because beliefs are rational only if they come from freely followed reasoning. If I am a “puppet of the laws of nature,” my beliefs are fixed by physics, not by truth. catholicismcoffee catholicismcoffee
The Argument from Intuitions: Lack of Explanation (from philosopher Rob Koons). We rely on intuitions in logic, mathematics and ethics; we honour, for example, self-sacrifice for abstract causes, which a survival-driven process should not favour. Saying “nature gave us these intuitions” makes them unreliable, since nature is blind. catholicismcoffee
The Argument from Intuitions: Lack of Ironclad Reliability (Koons). Even if our intuitions happen to be accurate, there are “thousands of possible worlds where our intuitions went wrong,” and atheism gives no reason to think we live in one where they are right. catholicismcoffee
The Conflict Between Atheism and Science (Koons). Scientists choose theories for their simplicity and elegance. That method works only if the laws of nature really are simple and elegant, and atheism gives no reason to expect that. catholicismcoffee

Taken together, these make one point: naturalism saws off the branch on which reason sits. The Abrahamic alternative is that humans are made in the image of a rational God (Genesis 1:27), thequran or, in the Quranic idiom, that God “taught Adam the names, all of them” (2:31) and breathed into him of His spirit (15:29). The reliability of reason then fits the worldview rather than standing as an unexplained miracle within it.

V. The Presuppositional Argument: Atheism Borrows Its Tools

Presuppositional or transcendental apologetics, associated in Reformed Christianity with Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen, extends the argument from reason. Its claim is not that God is the best explanation of some datum, but that God is the precondition of explanation as such. Logic, mathematics and the uniformity of nature are universal, necessary, unchanging and immaterial. A universe of particles in motion has nothing in it that is universal, necessary or immaterial. So the atheist who argues must use tools his worldview cannot ground. He is, in effect, borrowing from the theist’s account.

Critics on Wikipedia’s “Criticism of atheism” and “Transcendental argument” pages note that Bahnsen tends to equate atheism with materialism, and that the argument shows at most that some transcendent ground is needed, not which God it is. Wikipedia Both points are fair, and a careful theist should grant them. But the core insight survives, and Islamic theology developed its own version. Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism, which Shah has defended in more than thirty essays (see “Dr. Zia H. Shah’s Occasionalism: A Comprehensive Synthesis,” thequran.love/2026/06/10/dr-zia-h-shahs-occasionalism-a-comprehensive-synthesis/), argued six centuries before Hume that we never observe a necessary connection between fire and the burning of cotton, only that one regularly follows the other. thequran Hume reached the same observation and ended in scepticism: the uniformity of nature becomes a habit of the human mind, which nothing guarantees. Al-Ghazali ended in theism: the regularity is God’s ‘ada or sunna, His faithful custom, which is why “you will find no change in the sunna of God” (33:62). thequran As Shah puts it, “al-Ghazali arrived at theism; Hume arrived at skepticism.” thequran Shah’s 2026 essay “Lawful Nature as Witness, Not Rival” (thequran.love/2026/10/27/lawful-nature-as-witness-not-rival-the-god-of-the-gaps-charge-its-mirror-image-and-the-case-for-a-creator-of-an-intelligible-world/) presses the point: the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” that Eugene Wigner noted is not a gap in which to insert God but the condition that makes science possible. thequran God, on this view, is not a stopgap for ignorance; He is why the world can be known at all. The induction problem that Hume left unsolved has a solution only if the order of nature is underwritten by a faithful Mind. thequran

VI. The Moral Argument: Who Makes the Ought?

The moral argument has a simple form:

If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
Objective moral values and duties do exist.
Therefore, God exists.

The second premise is something every sane person acts on. We do not believe merely that torturing children for fun is unfashionable or maladaptive. We believe it is wrong, and wrong even if a whole society approved of it. The first premise is conceded by many atheists. knowingallah Hume observed that no “ought” follows from an “is.” Under naturalism, as Shah writes in “Beyond the Epistemic Horizon” (thequran.love/2026/10/25/beyond-the-epistemic-horizon-a-scientific-philosophical-and-islamic-theological-refutation-of-metaphysical-naturalism/), science can describe why humans evolved moral emotions but cannot show that those emotions track any binding truth. thequran Evolution explains why we feel obligated; it cannot explain why we are. If naturalism is true, he notes, the murderer who dies unpunished and the martyr who dies unrewarded meet the same end, and the Quran’s description of the materialist creed, “nothing destroys us except time” (45:24), becomes the last word on justice. Kant drew the same conclusion: morality rationally requires us to postulate God and immortality so that virtue and happiness can finally meet. thequran

The Abrahamic faiths ground morality both in the nature of God and in the human conscience He created. The Hebrew Bible’s moral law is given by a God who is Himself holy (“Be holy, for I am holy,” Leviticus 19:2). Paul speaks of a law “written in their hearts” (Romans 2:15). The Quran says God inspired the soul with “its wickedness and its righteousness” (91:7–8), so that fitra includes moral as well as religious recognition. islam365

The Euthyphro rejoinder. The atheist asks: is something good because God commands it (which would make morality arbitrary), or does God command it because it is good (which would make the good independent of God)? utm Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers give the same answer: it is a false dilemma. Goodness is neither above God nor arbitrarily decreed by Him. It is grounded in His unchanging nature, which His commands express. str + 2 Islamic thought develops this through the divine names: God is al-Haqq (the Real, the True), al-Quddus (the Holy), al-‘Adl (the Just), al-Rahman (the Merciful). qurantalkblog Because His commands come from what He is, they cannot be arbitrary, and because the standard is God, it is not external to Him. qurantalkblog The Quran says plainly, “God does not command immorality” (7:28). The reason is not that a law binds Him from outside, but that commanding immorality would contradict His nature. sapienceinstitute

VII. The Argument from Consciousness: The Hard Problem as a Sign Within

In 1995 the philosopher David Chalmers named the “hard problem of consciousness”: even a complete account of brain function (the “easy problems” of discrimination, integration and report) leaves unexplained why any of this processing is accompanied by subjective experience, by the redness of red or the pain of pain. thequran thequran Thomas Nagel’s question “What is it like to be a bat?”, Frank Jackson’s Mary, a colour scientist who has never seen colour, and the conceivability of philosophical zombies all show the same explanatory gap. Shah has collected these thought experiments (thequran.love/2024/11/20/philosophical-thought-experiments-to-grasp-hard-problem-of-consciousness/) and made the hard problem a central part of his case against materialism. thequran

His argument has three strands. First, consciousness is the most certain datum we have. We know matter only through experience; experience is not something we infer. A worldview that cannot fit the most certain fact into itself has a problem at its base. Second, the hard problem is a sign within the self in the sense of 41:53. Shah connects it to the Quranic verse on the soul: “They ask you about the spirit (ruh). Say: the spirit is of the command (amr) of my Lord, and you have been given of knowledge only a little” (17:85). His commentary on that verse (thequran.love/2026/02/08/the-divine-command-and-the-enigma-of-consciousness-a-multidisciplinary-commentary-on-quran-1785/) treats the explanatory gap as an “ontological signpost” pointing to the ‘Alam al-Amr, the World of Command, rather than to matter. thequran Third, in “The Divine Interstice” (thequran.love/2026/01/29/the-divine-interstice-mammalian-consciousness-as-the-irreproachable-sign-of-the-creator/), he presents mammalian consciousness as an “irreproachable sign of the Creator,” arguing that no arrangement of non-conscious parts explains the arising of a single, unified “I.” thequran thequran He also cites near-death-experience research and the views of Roger Penrose and Federico Faggin, and he is careful to say these do not prove the soul but are “consonant with” it. thequran thequran He also points to the Quran’s challenge at the deathbed: “Why, then, when [the soul] reaches the throat… do you not bring it back, if you are truthful?” (56:83–87; see thequran.love/2026/10/24/bring-it-back-if-you-are-truthful-consciousness-and-the-quranic-challenge-at-the-deathbed/). thequran

The materialist rejoinder comes in two forms. One says that neuroscience will eventually close the gap; the other, illusionism (Daniel Dennett, Keith Frankish), says that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion. thequran thequran The first is a promissory note that has not been paid in centuries and arguably cannot be paid, since the gap is conceptual, not merely empirical. The second refutes itself: an illusion is itself a seeming, an experience, so denying experience presupposes it. Shah’s essay on illusionism (thequran.love/2026/10/22/the-ontological-primacy-of-consciousness-a-multidisciplinary-refutation-of-illusionism-and-a-synthesis-of-abrahamic-theology/) makes this point. thequran Augustine, as we will see, made it sixteen centuries ago.

The theistic explanation is economical. If the ultimate reality is itself a conscious, knowing Mind (in the Quran, al-‘Alim, the All-Knowing, and al-Hayy, the Living), then finite consciousness is a derived share of what is most fundamental, not an anomaly. The Jewish teaching that humanity bears the tzelem Elohim, the image of God, and the Christian Logos tradition say the same thing in their own idioms.

VIII. The Argument from Libertarian Free Will: The Chooser Comes First

Free will is where Shah’s writing has been most forceful recently. In “The Chooser Comes First: An Unapologetic Defense of Libertarian Free Will” (thequran.love/2026/10/28/the-chooser-comes-first-an-unapologetic-defense-of-libertarian-free-will/), he defends the view that in a real choice the self is a genuine originator who could have done otherwise, given everything that came before. He admits this is a minority view among academics. In Bourget and Chalmers’s PhilPapers Surveys, counting those who “accept or lean towards” each view, the 2009 survey of 931 philosophers found 59.1% for compatibilism, 13.7% for libertarianism and 12.2% for no free will, and the 2020 survey of 1,758 found 59.16%, 18.83% and 11.21%. But he points to a revealing pattern in the 2020 data: on Shah’s account, libertarianism correlates negatively with physicalism (r = −0.42) and positively with theism (r = 0.44). Those two figures could not be independently confirmed here, though the published 2020 paper does report that libertarianism correlates with mind–body dualism (r = 0.43) and with the “design” response to fine-tuning (r = 0.54). The debate, in other words, is being decided by people’s prior commitments about what reality is made of, not by close attention to the act of choosing.

Shah’s method takes its principle from the Quran. Surah Al ‘Imran 3:7 teaches that the decisive verses (muhkamat), “the mother of the Book,” govern the reading of the ambiguous ones (mutashabihat). Applied to the “book of reality,” the decisive data are consciousness, the self and the felt act of choosing. Materialism and the causal closure of the physical are theoretical inferences built on top of those data, and so cannot overturn them. Augustine’s Si fallor, sum (“if I am deceived, I exist,” City of God XI.26) and Descartes’s cogito show that the experiencing, thinking self survives radical doubt. As a physician, Shah offers an analogy: a doctor whose scans are clear does not tell a patient her headache does not exist. The report of pain is the thing the scans are trying to explain. thequran

This leads to a sharp dilemma for the atheist. If even one genuinely libertarian choice occurs, the causal closure of the physical is false, and metaphysical materialism falls with it. That is why compatibilism “lowers the bar” and redefines freedom so that it fits physicalism. thequran The Catholicism Coffee argument from determinism closes the circle: if hard determinism is true, our beliefs, including the belief in determinism, are fixed by physics rather than by reasons, and rational argument loses its point. catholicismcoffee

Shah also addresses the traditional worry that divine omnipotence or foreknowledge squeezes out freedom. In “The Ever-Present God” (thequran.love/2026/08/26/the-ever-present-god-al-ghazalis-occasionalism-as-presented-by-zia-h-shah-md-a-defense-of-divine-participation-without-denying-human-free-will/) and “Foreknowledge Without Fatalism” (thequran.love/2026/10/26/foreknowledge-without-fatalism-a-quranic-and-philosophical-defense-of-human-free-will/), he argues that God’s knowing a choice does not cause it. He draws on quantum indeterminacy to argue that physics no longer requires a closed, deterministic future, thequran and he reads verses such as “whoever wills, let him believe; and whoever wills, let him disbelieve” (18:29) and “so he who wills may take to his Lord a way” (76:29) as affirming real, accountable choice within the bounds of the divine will. thequran + 2 Moral accountability, central to all three Abrahamic faiths (“I have set before you life and death… therefore choose life,” Deuteronomy 30:19), makes sense only if we are the real authors of our deeds. Free will, Shah concludes, is not a defeater for theism but evidence for it, because it cannot be accommodated within pure physicalism. thequran

IX. The Societal Critique: Can Civil Society Stand Without God?

The philosophical arguments concern truth; the societal arguments concern consequences. Consequences do not establish truth, but they are not irrelevant either. A worldview that cannot sustain the conditions of its own flourishing deserves suspicion.

John Locke, the father of classical liberalism, wrote in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) that “promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist,” and that “the taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.” uchicago Voltaire, a deist and a fierce critic of the established Church, wrote in his 1768 epistle against the Treatise of the Three Impostors that “if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” calling belief in God the sacred bond of society. Substack Wikipedia Burke, watching the French Revolution, condemned its “atheistical fanaticism” and predicted that atheism “cannot prevail long.” Wikipedia

A modern reader must say plainly where these arguments go wrong and where they go right. Locke’s conclusion that atheists should not be tolerated is unacceptable. libertyfund The Quran itself declares that “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256), and many atheists are honest, faithful and kind. Voltaire’s line is easily read cynically, as if God were a useful fiction to keep servants honest. goodreads Christopher Hitchens mocked it on exactly those grounds. goodreads The correct form of the argument is not “atheists are immoral” but this: atheism cannot ground the morality that atheists practise. Promises bind, human dignity is inviolable, and justice is owed even to the powerless; these are convictions an atheist may hold but cannot justify in his own terms, as Section VI showed. Societies live for a time on inherited moral capital. The twentieth century’s experiments in state atheism, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China and the Khmer Rouge, show what can happen when the transcendent restraint on power is deliberately removed. explained Pope Pius XI warned in 1937 that militant atheism aimed at “undermining the very foundations” of civilisation. wordpress The Abrahamic faiths, for all the sins of their adherents, place every ruler under a higher law: Nathan before David (“You are the man,” 2 Samuel 12:7), the prophets before kings, and the Quranic command to “stand firm for justice as witnesses for God, even against yourselves” (4:135).

X. The Question “Why?”: Meaning, Suffering and Hope

Science is very good at answering “how?” It cannot, by its own method, answer “why?” Why is there a cosmos? What is a human life for? What does suffering mean, and does it have a remedy? Atheism’s answer is in the end the one Bertrand Russell gave in “A Free Man’s Worship”: all human achievement is “destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system,” and we must build our lives on a foundation of “unyielding despair.” Some atheists rise to this with real courage. But they cannot claim that their worldview supplies meaning; at most, it permits people to invent meanings that the universe neither confirms nor remembers.

The Abrahamic faiths answer “why?” directly. The Quran says: “I did not create jinn and humankind except to worship Me” (51:56). Worship here, as the commentators explain, means to know and to love God. “Did you think that We created you without purpose and that you would not be returned to Us?” (23:115). The believers of 3:191 conclude their reflection on the heavens with “You did not create this aimlessly (batilan).” Pascal wrote of an “infinite abyss” in the human heart that “can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object.” Augustine opened his Confessions: “our heart is restless until it rests in You.” The Quran echoes him: “Verily, in the remembrance of God do hearts find rest” (13:28).

On suffering, the Abrahamic answer is not a tidy theodicy but a framework in which suffering can mean something: trial (ibtila’, 67:2, “who created death and life to test you, which of you is best in deed”), the refining of the soul, the assurance that no injustice goes finally unanswered, and a hope that reaches beyond the grave. Job’s whirlwind, the Cross and the Quranic promise that “with hardship comes ease” (94:5–6) speak in different registers to one conviction: the universe is not indifferent to us. Atheism can offer stoic endurance; it cannot offer redemption. Even the problem of evil, often thought to be atheism’s strongest card, presupposes a real standard of good. Without God, “evil” means only “what I dislike,” and the complaint loses its force.

Muhammad Iqbal, in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930), argued that religious experience is a genuine source of knowledge alongside sense perception and reason. uin-malang He saw the Quran’s insistence on reflecting on nature and history as the beginning of an empirical attitude, a call to read the world as the field of divine creativity. Said Nursi, writing against the militant secularism of early Republican Turkey, used a homely version of the design argument in the Risale-i Nur: just as “every letter must be written by someone,” the universe, a book whose every letter shows the Writer’s knowledge and wisdom, points to its Author. sohbetsociety He regarded aggressive atheism as a threat shared by all monotheists and called on devout Muslims and Christians to stand together against it. nursisociety

Caveats: What These Arguments Do and Do Not Establish

A refutation that wants to persuade honest readers must also be honest about its limits.

Cumulative, not coercive. No single argument here is a knock-down proof, and each has serious critics: Graham Oppy and others on the kalam, Michael Ruse and Stephen Law on Plantinga, the cosmologists who favour the multiverse. The case is strongest as a cumulative inference to the best explanation, the method Shah, as a physician, calls “differential diagnosis.” He himself admits that fine-tuning “doesn’t compel anyone to believe,” which he takes to be how God wants it, since faith should be a free choice. thequran
Theism, not yet a particular religion. These arguments lead to a necessary, wise, conscious, morally perfect Creator, the God common to Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. Which revelation is true is a further question. Antony Flew is the cautionary example. After decades as the world’s leading philosophical atheist, he announced in 2004 that the laws of nature, the organisation of life and the existence of the universe convinced him there is a God, as set out in There Is a God (2007, with Roy Abraham Varghese). But he became a deist and never accepted revelation, and critics have questioned how much of the book reflects his own late-life thinking. epsociety + 2 His case shows the arguments’ reach and their limits.
On the sources used. Many recent posts at thequran.love are labelled as “presented by” AI systems (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) “for Zia H Shah MD” and synthesise his earlier work. thequran + 2 This essay has relied mainly on pieces that state Shah’s own arguments or that he authored directly, such as “The Chooser Comes First,” the fine-tuning interview and the kalam essay. Readers should keep the distinction in mind when citing. The Catholicism Coffee article could not be retrieved in full because the site blocked automated access. Its six arguments are reconstructed here from consistent verbatim excerpts, and their numbering is an editorial reading of the article’s table of contents.
Science claims are provisional. The Borde–Guth–Vilenkin theorem, estimates of fine-tuning, and the readings of quantum indeterminacy that support libertarian freedom are live research areas. A theism that ties itself to a particular scientific result risks a “God of the gaps.” The stronger arguments (contingency, the intelligibility of nature, the reality of consciousness and moral obligation) do not depend on any one finding.

Epilogue: The Horizons and the Self

The Quran’s promise in 41:53, “We will show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth,” can be read as a summary of the whole argument of this essay, and perhaps of the whole history of the debate between faith and unbelief.

The signs in the horizons have grown more striking, not less, as human vision has extended. The medieval kalam theologian argued for the world’s beginning from the impossibility of an infinite past; the modern cosmologist measures the afterglow of that beginning in the microwave sky. The psalmist saw the heavens declaring glory; the physicist finds a cosmological constant tuned to one part in 10^120 and an initial entropy beyond any number that could be written out. Surah al-Mulk told its first hearers to look again, and again, for a flaw, and four centuries of telescopes have done so and returned, in the verse’s words, “humbled and wearied,” having found deeper order.

The signs within the self are older and closer still. Before any argument, there is the one who argues. Augustine found that he could doubt everything except the doubter. Al-Ghazali, in the crisis described in Deliverance from Error, found that reason could not rescue itself until a “light which God cast into the breast” restored its trust. Descartes found the thinking self at the base of all knowledge. Plantinga found that reason can be trusted only if a rational Mind made it. And every one of the eight billion people now alive knows, in the act of choosing, that the choice is theirs. Shah’s image is that “the chooser comes first”: the self is the first datum, and no theory about the world can coherently dissolve the one who holds the theory.

Atheism asks us to regard all of this, the existence of the world, its precision, its intelligibility, our reason, our conscience, our consciousness and our freedom, as a series of unrelated accidents, each one a brute fact with no further explanation. The Abrahamic faiths propose that they are one story told by one Author. Judaism calls Him the One whose name is “I am who I am.” Christianity calls Him the Logos through whom all things were made. Islam calls Him Allah, the Lord of the worlds, al-Haqq, the Real. The fitra in every human heart, the disposition the Quran says God placed in all people, is the faculty that recognises this story as true. It can be overlaid by habit, culture or what Dawkins himself called “the anaesthetic of familiarity,” which hides the wonder of existence. But it cannot be erased, for “there is no altering the creation of God” (30:30). thequran qurangallery

The believers of Surah Al ‘Imran, standing, sitting and lying on their sides, reflect on the heavens and the earth and arrive at a single sentence. It serves as both the conclusion of the philosophical argument and the beginning of prayer: Rabbana ma khalaqta hadha batilan, “Our Lord, You have not created all this in vain.”