How did the endless universe we live in come into being?

How did the equilibrium, harmony, and order of this universe develop?

How is it that this Earth is such a fit and sheltering place for us to live in?

Questions such as these have attracted attention since the dawn of the human race. The conclusion reached by scientists and philosophers searching for answers with their intellects and common sense is that the design and order of this universe are evidence of the existence of a supreme Creator ruling over the whole universe.

This is an indisputable truth that we may reach by using our intelligence. Allaah declares this reality in His holy book, the Quran, which He inspired as a guide for humanity fourteen centuries ago. He states that He has created the universe when it was not, for a particular purpose, and with all its systems and balances specifically designed for human life.

Allaah invites people to consider this truth in the following verse:

“Are you a more difficult creation or is the heaven? He [i.e., Allaah] constructed it. He raised its ceiling and proportioned it.And He darkened its night and extracted its brightness. And after that He spread the earth.” [Quran, 79: 27-30]

Elsewhere it is declared in the Quran that a person should see and consider all the systems and balances in the universe that have been created for him by Allaah and derive a lesson from his observations:

“And He has subjected for you the night and day and the sun and moon, and the stars are subjected by His command. Indeed in that are signs for a people who reason.” [Quran, 16: 12]

In yet another verse of the Quran, it is pointed out:

“He causes the night to enter the day, and He causes the day to enter the night and has subjected the sun and the moon — each running [its course] for a specified term. That is Allaah, your Lord; to Him belongs sovereignty. And those whom you invoke other than Him do not possess [as much as] the membrane of a date seed.” [Quran, 35: 13]

This plain truth declared by the Quran is also confirmed by a number of the important founders of the modern science of astronomy. Galileo, Kepler, and Newton all recognized that the structure of the universe, the design of the solar system, the laws of physics and their states of equilibrium were all created by The Creator and they arrived at that conclusion as a result of their own research and observations.

Materialism: A 19th-Century Fallacy

The reality of the creation of which we speak has been ignored or denied since the earliest times by a particular philosophical point of view. It is called “materialism”. This philosophy, which was originally formulated among the ancient Greeks, has also made an appearance from time to time in other cultures and has been advanced by individuals as well. It holds that matter alone exists and that it has done so for an infinity of time. From these tenets, it claims that the universe has also “always” existed and was not created.

In addition to their claim that the universe exists in an infinity of time, materialists also assert that there is no purpose or aim in the universe. They claim that all the equilibrium, harmony and order that we see around us are merely the product of coincidence. This “coincidence assertion” is also put forward when the question of how human beings came into being comes up. The theory of evolution, widely referred to as Darwinism, is another application of materialism to the natural world.

We just mentioned that some of the founders of modern science were faithful people who were in agreement that the universe was created and organized by The Creator. In the 19th century, an important change took place in the attitudes of the scientific world with respect to this matter. Materialism was deliberately introduced to the agenda of modern science by various groups. Because the 19th century’s political and social conditions formed a good basis for materialism, the philosophy gained wide acceptance and spread throughout the scientific world.

The findings of modern science however undeniably demonstrate how false the claims of materialism really are.

The Findings of 20th-Century Science

Let us recall the two assertions of materialism about the universe:

The universe exists in infinite time and, because it has no beginning or end, it was not created. Everything in this universe is merely the result of chance and not the product of any intentional design, plan, or vision. Those two notions were boldly advanced and ardently defended by 19th-century materialists, who of course had no recourse other than to depend upon the limited and unsophisticated scientific knowledge of their day. Both have been utterly refuted by the discoveries of 20th-century science.

The first to be laid in the grave was the notion of the universe existing in infinite time. Since the 1920s, there has been mounting evidence that this cannot be true. Scientists are now certain that the universe came into being from nothingness as the result of an unimaginably huge explosion, known as the “Big Bang”. In other words, the universe came into being–or rather, it was created by The Creator.

The 20th century has also witnessed the demolition of the second claim of materialism: that everything in the universe is the result of chance and not design. The Research that has been conducted since the 1960s consistently demonstrates that all the physical equilibriums of the universe in general and of our world in particular are intricately designed to make life possible. As this research deepened, it was discovered that each and every one of the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, of the fundamental forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, and of the details of the structure of atoms and the elements of the universe has been precisely tailored so that human beings may live.

Scientists today call this extraordinary design the “anthropic principle”. This is the principle that every detail in the universe has been carefully arranged to make human life possible. To sum up, the philosophy called materialism has been utterly refuted by modern science. From its position as the dominant scientific view of the 19th century, materialism collapsed into fiction in the 20th.

How could it have been otherwise? As Allaah indicates:  “And We did not create the heaven and the earth and that between them aimlessly. That is the assumption of those who disbelieve, so woe to those who disbelieve from the Fire”. [Quran, 38: 27)

It is wrong to suppose that the universe was created in vain. A philosophy so utterly flawed as materialism and systems based on it were doomed to failure from the very beginning.

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Sources:

Materialism can no longer claim to be a scientific philosophy, by Arthur Koestler

The Quran and Earth, by Harun Yahya