> Allah created the universe out of nothing

[Qatada]

Allah created the universe out of nothing

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Allah created a singularity � The Caliph Speaks

For thousands of years there have been only two theories on the creation of the universe or the origin of the universe.One of the theory state, that the universe has always been as it is now. This is known as the Steady-State universe (or static Universe) Theory. The other theory was that the universe was created in its present form.


Neither of these theories turn out to be right. It was only in the early 1900’s when Albert Einstein came up with his General Theory of Relativity that proved that the universe had a beginning. Although at that time, many scientists found it exceedingly difficult to accept this fact, that the universe had a beginning, almost all cosmologists and astrophysicists now regard it as an undeniable fact that the universe did have a beginning.

The Universe had a beginning

In less that half a century, man’s view of the universe, formed over millennia, has been transformed. Hubble’s discovery that the universe was expanding, and the realization of the insignificance of our own planet in the vastness of the universe, were just the starting point. As experimental and theoretical evidence mounted, it became more and more clear that the universe must have had a beginning in time, until in 1970 this was finally proved by Penrose and myself, on the basis of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. That proof showed that general relativity in only an incomplete theory: it cannot tell us how the universe started off, because it predicts that all physical theories, including itself, break down at the beginning of the universe. However, general relativity claims to be only a partial theory, so what the singularity theorems really show is that there must have been a time in the very early universe when the universe was so small, that one could no longer ignore the small-scale effects of the other great partial theory of the twentieth century, quantum mechanics. At the start of the 1970s, then, we were forced to turn our search for an understanding of the universe from our theory of the extraordinarily vast to our theory of the extraordinary tiny. That theory, quantum mechanics, will be described next, before we turn to the efforts to combine the two partial theories into a single quantum theory of gravity.

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, pg 54-55

This is crucial because then we can start to expound the creation of Allah’s universe, and of life in particular, at the very beginning … when there was “nothingness”.





PART 2:

Allah, the Originator of the Universe

1. (1) To Him (Allah) is due the primal origin (Arabic: bada’a) of the heavens and the earth: When He decrees a matter, He says to it: “Be”, and it is.
   Al Baqarah 2:117
   Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s commentary on the above verse:
   Lest anyone should think that the heavens and the earth were themselves primeval and eternal, we are now told that they themselves are creatures of God’s will and design. Cf. vi. 102, where the word bada’a is used as here for the creation of the heavens and the earth, and khalaqa is used for the creation of all things. Bada’a goes back to the very primal beginning, as far as we can conceive it. The materialists might say that primeval matter was eternal: other things, i.e. the forms and shapes as we see them now, were called into being at some tome or other, and will perish. When they perish, they dissolve into primeval matter again, which stands as the base of all existence. We go further back. We say that if we postulate such primeval matter, it owes its origin itself to God. Who is the final basis of existence, the Cause of all Causes. If this is conceded, we proceed to argue that the process of Creation is not then completed. All things in the heavens and on the earth are created by gradual processes. In “things” we include abstract as well as material things. We see the abstract things and ideas actually growing before us. But that also is God’s creation, to which we can apply the word khalaqa, for in it is involved the idea of measuring, fitting it into a scheme of other things. Cf. liv. 49; also xxv. 59. Here comes in what we know as the process of evolution. On the other hand, the “amr” (Command, Direction, Design) is a single thing, unrelated to Time “like the twinkling of an eye” (liv. 50). Another word to note in this connection is ja’ala “making” which seems to imply new shapes and form, new dispositions, as the making of the Signs of the Zodiac in the heavens, or the setting out of the sun and moon for light, or the establishment of the succession of day and night (xxv. 61-62). A further process with regard to the soul is described in the word sawwã, bringing it to perfection (xci. 7) but this we shall discuss in its place. Fatara (xlii. 11) implies, like bada’a, the creating of a thing out of nothing and after no pre-existing similitude, but perhaps fatara implies the creation of primeval matter to which further processes have to be applied later, as when one prepares dough but leaves the leavening to be done after. Badaa (without the ‘ain), xxx. 27, implies beginning the process of creation: this is made further clear in xxxii. 7 where the beginning of the creation of pristine man from clay refers to his physical body, leaving the further processes of reproduction and the breathing in of the soul to be described in subsequent verses. Lastly, baraa is creation implying liberation from pre-existing matter of circumstance, e.g. man’s body form clay (lix. 24) or a calamity from previously existing circumstances (lvii. 22). See also vi. 94, n. 916; vi. 98, n. 923; lix. 24, nn. 5405-6.
2. Praise be to Allah, who created (out of nothing) (Arabic: fatara) the heavens and the earth, …

[Qatada]

asalaam alaikum


i just like the linguistics comments in it :)

[Abdul-Fattah]

Selam aleykum
I hope you don't mind me adding my two cents again ^_^

Neither of these theories turn out to be right. It was only in the early 1900’s when Albert Einstein came up with his General Theory of Relativity that proved that the universe had a beginning. Although at that time, many scientists found it exceedingly difficult to accept this fact, that the universe had a beginning, almost all cosmologists and astrophysicists now regard it as an undeniable fact that the universe did have a beginning.

Actually it wasn't Einstein's relativity which ended the reign of the steady state theory, but rather after the discovery of the red shift of stars:

In the 1920s, when astronomers began to look at the spectra of stars in other galaxies, they found something most peculiar: there were the same characteristic sets of missing colors as for stars in our own galaxy, but they were all shifted by the same relative amount toward the red end of the spectrum. To understand the implications of this, we must first understand the Doppler effect. As we have seen, visible light consists of fluctuations, or waves, in the electromagnetic field. The wavelength (or distance from one wave crest to the next) of light is extremely small, ranging from four to seven ten-millionths of a meter. The different wavelengths of light are what the human eye sees as different colors, with the longest wavelengths appearing at the red end of the spectrum and the shortest wavelengths at the blue end. Now imagine a source of light at a constant distance from us, such as a star, emitting waves of light at a constant wavelength. Obviously the wavelength of the waves we receive will be the same as the wavelength at which they are emitted (the gravitational field of the galaxy will not be large enough to have a significant effect). Suppose now that the source starts moving toward us. When the source emits the next wave crest it will be nearer to us, so the distance between wave crests will be smaller than when the star was stationary. This means that the wavelength of the waves we receive is shorter than when the star was stationary. Correspondingly, if the source is moving away from us, the wavelength of the waves we receive will be longer. In the case of light, therefore, means that stars moving away from us will have their spectra shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (red-shifted) and those moving toward us will have their spectra blue-shifted. This relationship between wavelength and speed, which is called the Doppler effect, is an everyday experience. Listen to a car passing on the road: as the car is approaching, its engine sounds at a higher pitch (corresponding to a shorter wavelength and higher frequency of sound waves), and when it passes and goes away, it sounds at a lower pitch. The behavior of light or radio waves is similar. Indeed, the police make use of the Doppler effect to measure the speed of cars by measuring the wavelength of pulses of radio waves reflected off them.
ln the years following his proof of the existence of other galaxies, Rubble spent his time cataloging their distances and observing their spectra. At that time most people expected the galaxies to be moving around quite randomly, and so expected to find as many blue-shifted spectra as red-shifted ones. It was quite a surprise, therefore, to find that most galaxies appeared red-shifted: nearly all were moving away from us! More surprising still was the finding that Hubble published in 1929: even the size of a galaxy’s red shift is not random, but is directly proportional to the galaxy’s distance from us. Or, in other words, the farther a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away! And that meant that the universe could not be static, as everyone previously had thought, is in fact expanding; the distance between the different galaxies is changing all the time.
A brief history of time p23-24.