For much of the history of Western science, the dominant cosmological assumption was that the universe was eternal: that it had always existed, that there was no moment of beginning, and therefore no question about what caused it to begin. An eternal universe is a universe that requires no creator. This was one reason many scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries preferred it.
The assumption is no longer scientifically tenable.
The evidence for a beginning
Multiple independent lines of evidence now converge on the conclusion that the universe began at a finite point in the past. The expansion of the universe, discovered in the early twentieth century, implies that the universe was once smaller, denser, and hotter, and tracing the expansion backward leads to a state of extreme density at a finite time in the past. The cosmic microwave background radiation (the thermal afterglow of the early universe) provides direct observational confirmation of this early hot dense state. The abundances of light elements in the universe match the predictions of Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
The second law of thermodynamics provides an independent line of argument. In a closed system, entropy increases over time. If the universe were infinitely old, it would have already reached maximum entropy, a state of complete thermal equilibrium, sometimes called heat death. The universe has not reached this state. Therefore it has not existed forever. It had a beginning.
What this means philosophically
The beginning of the universe is more than a scientific datum. It has philosophical implications that were recognised long before the Big Bang theory was formulated. If the universe began to exist, it began to exist at some point rather than at no point. Its beginning was either caused or uncaused.
An uncaused beginning of the universe (something coming from nothing, with no prior state and no causal conditions) is philosophically baffling. “Nothing” in the technical sense is something other than quantum vacuum fluctuation or spacetime foam or a prior universe. It is the absence of anything at all, including space, time, and physical laws. The idea that such a nothing spontaneously produced a universe requires explanation, rather than mere assertion.
A caused beginning implies a cause that is external to the universe. Since the universe includes all matter, energy, space, and time, its cause must be non-physical, non-spatial, and non-temporal. It must also be enormously powerful, powerful enough to bring a universe into existence. And since space and time did not exist before the universe, the cause must be capable of existing and acting without being embedded in space and time, which is what the classical theistic tradition has always claimed about God.
The Quranic statement of cosmic origins
The Quran, in a verse revealed in seventh-century Arabia, makes a structural claim about the origin of the universe that maps with surprising precision onto what cosmology has now established:
The verse describes the cosmos as having begun in a unified, undifferentiated state (ratq, “joined together”) before being separated (fataq, “split apart”). The image is closer to what modern cosmology describes than any other ancient cosmological account: a singular dense state that subsequently expanded and differentiated into the structured cosmos we now observe. The Quran is making a theological claim about creation that the empirical evidence has, fourteen centuries later, converged on rather than a scientific prediction in the modern sense.
The Quran addresses the same theme of cosmic expansion elsewhere with equal directness:
The Arabic active participle mūsiʿūn (those who expand) describes an ongoing action. The verse is not a static claim about a finished cosmos but a claim about an actively-changing cosmos that is, at the moment of the verse’s recitation and forward, undergoing expansion. The empirical confirmation of cosmic expansion in the twentieth century placed alongside the verse produces a remarkable convergence between the Quran’s framing and what is now established physics.
The reaction of physicists
The cosmological implications of a universal beginning were not welcomed by all physicists. Several prominent physicists in the mid-twentieth century actively sought alternatives (steady-state cosmology, bouncing universe models, eternal inflation) partly because they recognised that a universe with a beginning pointed in a theistic direction. Some of them said so explicitly. The steady-state theory’s developers acknowledged that their motivation was partly to avoid the theological implications of the Big Bang.
The evidence, however, continued to accumulate. The cosmic microwave background radiation, discovered in 1965, effectively ended the steady-state model as a serious option. The universe had a beginning. The philosophical implications did not go away simply because physicists preferred they did.
The logical structure here is worth making explicit. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist (the evidence for this is now overwhelming). Therefore the universe has a cause. The cause of the universe cannot itself be part of the universe, since it must precede the existence of space, time, matter, and energy, all of which came into being at the beginning. Something that is outside space, outside time, not made of matter, and powerful enough to bring a universe into existence is a precise description rather than a distant philosophical abstraction. And it matches, in its essential features, what every major theistic tradition has meant when it speaks of God. You do not need to accept any specific religion to follow this argument. You only need to follow the chain of causation honestly to wherever the evidence leads.
The Islamic framework on the act of creation
The Islamic understanding of creation is direct: God brings into existence what did not previously exist, by an act of will. The Quran describes this with the term kun fa-yakūn (“Be, and it is”), the foundational image of divine creation in the tradition. The act is intentional, purposive, and grounded in the will of a being who does not Himself depend on anything prior. The cosmological argument’s conclusion (that there is a non-physical, non-temporal, powerful cause of the physical universe) is precisely the description of the God Islam has always identified as the Author of the cosmos. The convergence between the philosophical argument and the Quranic theology is something to be recognised rather than something that requires the reader to take Islam on faith.
The cumulative force of the argument is stronger than a bare claim that something transcendent exists. It points toward a single source of reality, reason, and moral order, and the move from theism to Islam is the most disciplined continuation of the line of thought.