If the universe is fundamentally purposeless, if matter in motion is all there is, and consciousness is an accidental byproduct of blind evolution, then nothing genuinely matters. Not justice. Not love. Not suffering. Not the heat death of the universe. Not your life. The atoms do not care. They never did.
You live as though things matter. Every human being does. Even the committed nihilist locks his door, feeds his children, and feels moral outrage when he reads about genocide. The lived experience of mattering is universal, persistent, and impossible to consistently deny. The question is what explains it.
The options
There are only two. Either the sense that things matter is an illusion (a useful evolutionary fiction that helped our ancestors survive but does not track anything real) or it tracks something real. The universe either contains genuine value, or it simulates value well enough to fool every conscious being who has ever existed.
The first option is coherent but unliveable. No one actually treats their moral convictions as evolutionary illusions. The philosopher who argues that morality is subjective still feels genuine outrage at injustice (real outrage, not performed or strategic outrage) that comes from somewhere deeper than theory. The gap between what the materialist believes and how the materialist lives is the most telling piece of evidence in the entire debate.
The Quranic refusal of purposelessness
The Quran addresses the question of purpose with a directness that the modern philosophical literature has only recently rediscovered:
The verse poses the question rhetorically because the answer is taken to be settled by examination. The Arabic word ʿabath means precisely what the modern nihilist proposes about existence: pointlessness, futility, action without aim. The Quran’s claim is that creation is not ʿabath. The claim runs against the modern thesis directly. The verse’s grammatical structure (a question whose expected answer is “no”) treats purposelessness as the position that needs to be defended, with purpose as the default that examination reveals.
The same point is made elsewhere with equal directness:
The Arabic word sudā describes a state of being released without aim, the way an animal is left untethered to wander. The verse rules out exactly this picture of human existence. The grammatical force of the question presupposes that the answer is no, and that the human creature, on careful examination of its own situation, will find that being-left-without-purpose is something other than what its existence is.
Why the illusion theory fails
If the sense that things matter is merely an evolutionary adaptation, then it has the same epistemic status as any other adaptation. It is no more trustworthy than the moth’s attraction to flame: useful in one context, lethal in another, ultimately about survival rather than truth. The position undermines moral intuitions and all intuitions, including the intuitions that support science, logic, and the evolutionary theory itself. The argument from illusion, applied consistently, destroys the ground it stands on.
There is a further problem. Evolution selects for survival, not for the experience of meaning. A being that reproduces efficiently does not need to feel that its life matters. Bacteria reproduce far more successfully than humans without any sense of purpose. The human experience of meaning (the felt significance of love, beauty, justice, and truth) is an explanatory surplus that materialism cannot easily account for, since it is not predicted by survival alone.
The theistic explanation
If things feel like they matter because they do matter (because the universe has a purpose, because conscious beings are not accidents, because moral facts are grounded in something real) then the question is what grounds them. The Islamic answer is tawḥīd: one God who is the source of all existence, all value, all purpose. Things matter because the Author of reality made them matter. Your sense that justice is real, that love is significant, that suffering is genuinely wrong: these are perceptions of the moral order God established, not illusions.
The fiṭrah, the innate human disposition toward recognising God, includes the recognition that the universe is not indifferent. The persistent, universal, irrepressible human conviction that things should be a certain way is the fiṭrah operating. It is the deepest equipment you have, and it is pointing at something real.
The apatheist’s dilemma
The apatheist says: “Even if God exists, why should I care?” The answer is: because you already do. You care about justice. You care about the people you love. You care that your life is not wasted. You care that suffering has meaning and that cruelty is genuinely wrong. All of these convictions presuppose a universe in which things matter, and a universe in which things genuinely matter is a universe that needs a ground for that mattering. God is that ground. The question is whether you are willing to follow the caring to its logical foundation.
The nihilist’s position is intellectually consistent but humanly impossible. No one lives as though nothing matters. The honest question is: why not? What is it about reality that makes meaninglessness feel like a lie? The Islamic answer is that it feels like a lie because it is one.
If you have read this far, something in you resists the nihilist conclusion. The resistance is not weakness. The resistance is the most honest thing about you. The fiṭrah, the innate human orientation toward truth, toward meaning, toward a moral order that transcends personal preference, is what makes nihilism feel wrong even when the arguments for it seem airtight. Follow the resistance. It knows something the arguments do not. It knows that the universe is not indifferent, because the God who made it is not indifferent, and the being He made to know Him was never designed to live as though nothing matters.
The argument compressed
The argument is simple. Either the universe contains genuine purpose, or the universal human experience of purpose is a cosmic accident. Either moral facts are real, or the moral outrage you feel at injustice is a chemical event with no more significance than a sneeze. Either conscious experience matters, or the most remarkable phenomenon in the known universe is a meaningless byproduct. The theistic position (that purpose, morality, and consciousness are real because their Author is real) is more coherent, and is the only position that matches how every human being actually lives. The nihilist lives as though things matter. The theist explains why they do.
The meaning crisis of the modern world is a symptom rather than a puzzle to be solved by better philosophy. The symptom is that of a civilisation that removed God from the centre of its worldview and then discovered that nothing else can hold the centre together. The Islamic tradition diagnosed this centuries before the modern West discovered it. Tawḥīd holds the centre because it identifies the one reality that actually grounds everything else: the God whose existence is the fact that gives all other facts their significance, rather than one fact among many. The person who feels that nothing matters is feeling the absence of God, and the absence of God is the one thing that would, in fact, make nothing matter. The feeling is accurate. The conclusion should follow.
The structural problem with combining nihilism and the problem of evil
Consider what the two options actually require of you. If nothing genuinely matters, then the suffering that is invoked as evidence against God does not genuinely matter either. Suffering cannot simultaneously be meaningless (a mere physical event in a purposeless universe) and a moral indictment against a God who permitted it. If you want to use the reality of suffering as an argument, you need suffering to be objectively bad, not merely unpleasant. If suffering is objectively bad, then value is real. If value is real, a purely physical universe cannot account for it. The argument from evil against God and the argument from meaninglessness pull in opposite directions: you can consistently hold one or the other, but holding both requires suffering to be simultaneously meaningful enough to indict God and meaningless enough to require no grounding. That is not a stable position. Follow the reasoning, and it forces a choice, and only one of the available options has a coherent account of why anything matters at all.