Islamic Scientific Schools

In the Name of Allah---the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. Create a Butterfly Out of Nothing There is a fundamental divide between the human power to reshape and the Divine power to originate . When humanity builds, constructs, or bioengineers, we act strictly as artists working with an inherited medium. The bioengineer editing a strand of DNA or assembling a synthetic cell relies upon pre-existing nucleotide bases, pre-existing subatomic forces, and pre-existing thermodynamic laws. We do not bring forth the fundamental fabric of reality; we merely borrow from a canvas that was stretched across the void long before our arrival. To truly challenge the reality of God Almighty, one must strip away all inherited foundations. We must bypass stem cells, synthetic genomes, molecular biology, and existing chemical elements. We must remove space, time, matter, and energy themselves. The true challenge is this: If God does not exist, create a butterfly out of absolute nothingness. The Metap...

In the Name of Allah---the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. Stars: The Qur'anic Clocks of Cosmic Entropy Stellar Light, the Arrow of Time, and the End of the Present Cosmic Order Time is one of the most fundamental features of human experience. We remember the past, experience the present, and anticipate the future. Yet physics reveals something profound about the direction in which time appears to flow: entropy tends to increase . The Second Law of Thermodynamics states, in simplified form, that the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase. Entropy is commonly associated with disorder, but in modern statistical physics it is more accurately understood as a measure of the number of microscopic configurations compatible with a system's macroscopic state. As entropy increases, energy becomes progressively less available for performing useful work. This principle has profound implications for the ultimate destiny of the physical universe. If the universe continues toward...

In the Name of Allah---the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. The Dynamic Cosmos and Moral Purpose: Unpacking Ibn Taymiyyah’s Causal Realism and Moral Rationalism The intellectual history of classical Islam is often framed around the dramatic clash between the Hellenistic philosophers ( Falasifa )—such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and al-Farabi—and the speculative theologians ( Mutakallimun ) of the Ash'arite and Mu'tazilite schools. While the Falasifa posited a cosmos governed by deterministic, necessary natural laws that constrained divine intervention, late Ash'arite theologians, exemplified by Imam al-Ghazali, responded by adopting radical occasionalism . In their effort to protect divine omnipotence ( Qudrah ), the Ash'arites stripped created things of all inherent efficacy, asserting that God directly creates every atom, motion, and event out of nothing in each micro-moment. In the 14th century, the Syrian polymath Imam Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728 AH / 1328 CE) mounted a p...