Cosmology

Published: 2002

The Koran strongly recommends pondering and meditating on Creation to find the Creator. Hence, the so-called “cosmological verses” are frequently quoted as one of the many miracles in the Qur’anic text. The world is encouraged to be explored, provided the explorer is wise enough to recognize that the harmony in the cosmos originates in God.
By looking at the cosmos, the intelligence He put in us constantly meets His intelligence. Several Koranic verses draw the reader’s attention to the numerical order that is present in the cosmos. The cosmic regularities, which are a consequence of God’s will, can thus be qualified as “mathematical regularities.

The esoteric doctrines of Islam go one step further. According to the Akbarian school, founded after the work of Muhyi-d-din Ibn Arabi (1165 — 1240), Creation is God’s self-disclosure through the veils and signs of creatures.

The things “are” not, since only God is. They only have a given preparation to receive being and qualities from God. The (relative) stability of cosmic phenomena rests on God’s (absolute) immutability. However, the cosmos’ status is paradoxical: it lies between absolute Being, God Himself, and absolute nothingness. Consequently, we cannot make clear-cut statements about the world’s fundamental reality.

According to Islamic theology, God does not fix the laws of physics and the initial conditions and let the world evolve mechanistically. In fact, God, as the “primary” cause, does not have to create the world again at each instant, so there are no secondary causes. In this continuous renewal of creation, God creates the atoms and their accidents anew at each time.

The regularities observed in the world do not result from causal connection but from the constant conjunction of phenomena, a habit or custom established by God’s will. This principle of Islamic theology apparently contradicts modern scientific views, which, of course, stipulate the existence of secondary causes. But we must understand the Islamic tradition’s negation of causality as an emphasis on the metaphysical mystery of the laws’ continuous validity. This questioning of causality does not obstruct our scientific investigation of the cosmos. On the contrary, it prompts us to reflect upon how God acts and shows His signs “upon the horizons” (Koran, 41:53).

In the Middle Ages, the Arab astronomer al-Farghani “measured” the distance to God’s throne at 120 million km, based on simple assumptions about the properties of the planetary spheres in the Ptolemaic cosmological paradigm. The Islamic doctrine of the renewal of creation also means that new creatures continuously appear. At each level of the cosmos, new things always appear. God is infinite, and “self-disclosure never repeats itself.” So God’s self-disclosure is endless. What appears in Creation corresponds exactly to the flow of possible things.

This is why, according to al-Ghazali (1058 – 1111), “there is nothing in possibility more wondrous than what is” because what is actually reflects God’s desire to show to us. This helps us understand the Prophetic saying: “Curse not time, for God is time.
The production of an infinite number of “patches” of the physical universe described by chaotic inflation reflects God’s eternal self-disclosure. The appearance of “emerging properties” at all levels of complexity, particularly life and intelligence, is another aspect of this continuous self-disclosure. This is why Ibn Arabi comments:
This is why Ibn Arabi comments:

God does not become bored that you should become bored.