Does God Create the World, or Is the World Part of God? Philosophers in the Islamic World on Faith, Reason, and Everything

Imagine you’re sitting with a friend, and you both watch a leaf fall from a tree. You see it twist and tumble, and you know—roughly—why it falls: gravity pulls it down, wind pushes it sideways, the stem broke loose. But now imagine asking a deeper question: Why does gravity exist at all? Why is there a universe where things fall and wind blows and leaves exist? If you try to answer that, you quickly find yourself thinking about whether something—or Someone—must be behind everything, a cause that doesn’t itself need a cause.

Now imagine someone says: “God created the world.” You might wonder: How did God create it? Did God make the world all at once, like a potter shaping a bowl, and then step back? Or is God making the world right now, every second, like a singer sustaining a note? And if God is making the world every second—keeping it from vanishing into nothing—then what about you? Are you really the one making your own choices, or is God the only one who does anything?

These are the kinds of questions that Muslim philosophers and theologians debated for centuries. They didn’t always agree. Some said reason alone can find God. Others said you need a prophet to tell you. Some said the world is eternal—it always existed. Others said it began. Some said God knows everything, including what you’re doing right now. Others said God only knows general truths, not the details. The arguments are still alive today.

Can Reason Find God on Its Own?

One huge debate was about what your own brain—without any holy book, without a prophet, without religious training—can figure out about God. Can you just think hard and get to the truth?

Some Muslim philosophers said yes. A philosopher named al-Rāzī (who was also a doctor) reportedly believed that human reason is enough. You don’t need scripture. You can understand God, morality, and how to live a good life just by using your mind. Scripture might even cause trouble—it divides people and can be used to trick them.

But that was a minority view. Most Muslim thinkers took a middle position. The philosopher al-Fārābī, who lived around 900 years ago, had an influential idea. He divided people into three groups based on how smart they are:

A tiny group—the philosophers—can use strict logical proofs to know the truth about God and the world. They don’t need religion; they can prove things directly.
A larger group can follow arguments that are very convincing but not absolutely certain. For them, religion helps confirm what they suspect and correct their mistakes.
The biggest group—most people—are persuaded by images and stories. They respond to promises of paradise and threats of hell. For them, religion is crucial: it gives them the truth in a form they can grasp.

So for al-Fārābī, religion and philosophy aren’t enemies. They’re just different versions of the same truth, packaged for different kinds of minds. The Qur’an describes God’s hands and throne and speech—not because God literally has hands like you do, but because most people need a concrete picture. Philosophers know that the “hands of God” is a metaphor. Everyone else gets the message without needing to understand the deep metaphysics.

This sounds kind of elitist. And it is. But it also solves a problem: what do you do when your holy book says something that seems to contradict what science or reason proves? Answer: take the holy book metaphorically, if you’re smart enough to handle it. If you’re not, just take it literally and trust that it’s true in a way you can’t fully understand.

The theologian al-Ghazālī, who lived about a century after al-Fārābī, agreed that some passages need metaphorical interpretation. For example, the Qur’an says God is “seated on the Throne.” Al-Ghazālī said that can’t be literal, because anything physical is changeable, and God can’t change. So the scholar must interpret it metaphorically. But don’t share that interpretation with ordinary people—it will only confuse them.

A Fight About the Age of the World

One of the most intense debates was about whether the world has always existed or whether it began at some point in the past.

The philosophers, especially Ibn Sīnā (known in the West as Avicenna), argued that the world is eternal—it has existed forever. Why? Because God is eternal and unchanging, and if God creates, God must always be creating. If God started to create at some moment, that would mean God changed—going from not-creating to creating. But God can’t change. So the world must be as eternal as God.

The theologians were horrified by this. They believed the world was created at a specific moment, out of nothing. The Qur’an says God created the heavens and the earth, and most theologians took that to mean there was a time when they didn’t exist.

Both sides had arguments. The theologians came up with a clever one. They pointed out that if the world has always existed, then the sun has made an infinite number of revolutions around the Earth. But the moon makes twelve revolutions for every one of the sun’s. So the moon has made twelve times infinity—a bigger infinity. But nothing is bigger than infinity. That’s a contradiction, they said. So the world can’t be eternal.

The philosophers replied that the number of revolutions is only potentially infinite, not actually infinite. You can always add one more, but you never reach a completed infinite set. So there’s no contradiction.

The theologians hit back: if the world is eternal, and human souls survive death, then right now there are an infinite number of dead human souls in existence. That is an actual infinity. So the philosophers can’t dodge the problem.

This debate never really ended. Both sides had good points, and neither convinced the other.

Does God Cause Everything, or Do Things Cause Things?

Here’s another question the philosophers wrestled with: when you see fire burn cotton, what actually happens?

The philosophers, again led by Ibn Sīnā, said that fire has a nature—it’s fire’s essence to burn things. The cotton has a nature that makes it burnable. When they come into contact, the fire causes the cotton to burn. That’s just how the world works. God created these natures, and God sustains them, but the fire really does the burning.

The theologians—especially a group called the Ashʿarites—said no. We don’t actually see the fire burning the cotton. We see the fire touch the cotton, and then the cotton burns. But we never see the causation itself. What we call “causation” is just a regular pattern that God set up. But really, at every single moment, God is recreating the entire universe. When fire touches cotton, God creates the burning. If God chose not to, the cotton wouldn’t burn—even if the fire was there.

This view is called occasionalism. It says that God is the only real cause. Everything that happens is God’s direct action. The fire is just an occasion for God to produce a burn.

You can see why the philosophers thought occasionalism was crazy. It means you can’t trust anything. If God could change the pattern at any moment, science becomes impossible. The theologians had an answer: God is reliable. God’s habit is to make fire burn cotton, so it almost always will. But it’s not necessary. It’s just God’s custom.

The philosophers shot back: if God is the only cause, then when you decide to raise your hand, God is really the one making that decision. You’re not an agent at all. You’re a puppet. The theologians had to find a way to say that humans are still responsible for their actions even though God causes everything. This problem—how to reconcile God’s power with human free will—is still discussed today.

The Problem of Evil

If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, why is there suffering? This is a famous problem, and medieval Muslim thinkers had several answers.

The Muʿtazilite theologians said that God must do what is best. If God caused unnecessary suffering, God would be unjust. So every case of suffering must have a reason—maybe it’s punishment, maybe it’s a lesson, maybe it’s to make you stronger, maybe it’s compensation you’ll receive in the afterlife. Whatever it is, there’s a justification.

Ibn Sīnā had a different approach. He said that evil isn’t really a thing—it’s just the absence of good, the way darkness is the absence of light. So evil doesn’t need a cause in the same way good does. But he also admitted that some evils—like a fire burning down a house with people inside—aren’t just absences. They’re real harms. His answer: fire has to be hot to be fire. To eliminate fire’s power to burn, you’d have to eliminate fire itself. And that would make the universe less good overall. So some suffering is a “necessary evil” that comes with having a world where things like fire exist.

Al-Ghazālī went even further. He argued that this world is the best possible world. If a better world were possible, and God didn’t create it, God would be stingy or weak. But God is neither. So this must be the best one. The suffering we see is just something we don’t fully understand—like a single wrong note in a symphony that, from God’s perspective, makes the whole piece more beautiful.

Can We Even Talk About God?

There’s a deep problem lurking here: if God is completely different from anything in creation, how can human language—which was made to describe creation—say anything true about God?

Some early Muslims, called the apophaticists, said we can only say what God is not. God is not ignorant, not weak, not limited, not physical. This is safer, because you can’t be wrong about a negation. But it’s also unsatisfying—you want to say something positive.

Others, called anthropomorphists, took the Qur’an literally. If it says God has hands, God has hands. Period. Don’t ask how.

The mainstream theologians tried a middle path. When you say “God knows,” you mean God knows, but God’s knowledge is not like human knowledge. You’re using the same word, but the meaning is different—like how “bat” can mean an animal or a piece of sports equipment. This is called equivocal language. But then how do you know what “God knows” even means? You can’t check.

Ibn Rushd (known in the West as Averroes) had an interesting thought: humans can never fully grasp God. To understand something fully, your intellect has to become, in a sense, that thing. But a finite human mind can’t become infinite. So we’re stuck with imperfect concepts. Our minds naturally split God into multiple attributes—knowledge, power, will—but in reality, God is perfectly simple. The plurality is in our heads, not in God.

So What’s the Big Picture?

If you step back, you can see patterns in these debates. The philosophers wanted to protect reason and natural causation. They wanted science to be possible and human effort to matter. The theologians wanted to protect God’s absolute power and sovereignty. They wanted God to be truly in charge of everything.

Neither side won completely. The debates produced some of the most sophisticated philosophy ever written. And they’re still relevant. When someone says “science explains everything” or “God is the only cause,” they’re picking up threads from arguments that are more than a thousand years old.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably realized: these questions don’t have simple answers. That’s not a failure. It’s a sign that the questions are real.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in the debate
Occasionalism	The view that God is the only real cause; everything else is just an occasion for God to act
Emanation	The idea that the universe flows from God like light from the sun—eternally and necessarily
Demonstration (burhān)	A logical proof starting from certain premises that yields certain conclusions
Taʾwīl	Metaphorical interpretation of scripture, used when the literal meaning conflicts with reason
Kalām cosmological argument	A proof for God’s existence based on the claim that the universe began to exist
Divine simplicity	The claim that God has no parts—God is not a composite of body and soul, or essence and attributes
Modulation of existence (tashkīk al-wujūd)	Mullā Ṣadrā’s idea that existence comes in degrees, with God as the most intense degree

Key People

Al-Fārābī (d. 950): A philosopher who argued that most people need religion because they can’t follow philosophical proofs; religion is philosophy packaged for the masses.
Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) (d. 1037): One of the most influential philosophers in history. He argued that the world is eternal, that God knows only universal truths (not details), and that evil is mostly just absence of good.
Al-Ghazālī (d. 1111): A theologian who wrote The Incoherence of the Philosophers, attacking Ibn Sīnā’s views. He defended occasionalism and argued that this is the best possible world.
Ibn Rushd (Averroes) (d. 1198): A philosopher who wrote a reply to al-Ghazālī called The Incoherence of the Incoherence. He believed that religion and philosophy can’t really conflict, and that scripture should be interpreted metaphorically when it seems to contradict reason.
Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1636): A later philosopher who combined philosophy, theology, and mysticism. He argued that existence is a single reality that comes in degrees, and that everything except God is constantly changing.

Things to Think About

If God is eternal and unchanging, could God choose to create the world at a specific moment? Or would that require God to change? And if God must create eternally, is creation really a free act?
Al-Ghazālī said this is the best possible world, even though it contains suffering. Is that a comforting idea or a disturbing one? What would it take to prove that a different world would be better?
If you saw a fire burn cotton, would you say “the fire caused the burning” or “God caused the burning, using the fire as an occasion”? What difference does the answer make for how you live your life?
Can you say something true about God using human language? If you say “God is good,” does that mean the same thing as when you say “Your friend is good”? If not, what does it mean?

Where This Shows Up

Science vs. religion debates today often replay the argument between al-Ghazālī and Ibn Sīnā about whether nature has its own causal powers or whether everything depends directly on God.
Discussions about free will in neuroscience, law, and theology still wrestle with whether humans are genuine agents or just along for the ride.
Arguments about the problem of evil in contemporary philosophy of religion use versions of the same moves Ibn Sīnā and al-Ghazālī made: evil as necessary consequence, evil as part of a best possible world, evil as justified by unknown reasons.
The question of how to read sacred texts—literally, metaphorically, or something in between—is alive in every religious community today, from debates about creationism to debates about interpreting scripture on moral issues.