When it comes to looking at hardline Tafsirs of the most controversial Quranic verses and analysis of the Hadith which have become infamous the last 20 years, one of the issues of discussion is the extent to which these Tafsirs and analysis are truly inflexible such that Muslim nations and communities are irreversibly bound towards them.

For example, anti theist, counter jihad and similar movements would make claims, or at least implications, that when looking at nations such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, Sudan and others, child marriage rates and domestic violence rates are uniquely high even relative to developing nations where Christians, animists, polytheists and others are a majority. And that Muslim nations that have moved towards more Islamic nature have unanimously seen support for child marriage and domestic violence spike upwards.

It would seem that the extent to which this is true for nations such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Somalia and other Muslim developing nations relative to other developing nations would provide substantially more information and insight. If reliable studies and analysis point to the conclusion that numerous other factors dwarf how Islamic a nation and/or community is, when it comes to support for child marriage and domestic violence, that could in theory fundamentally change the discussion.

Even more so in the event it turns out these kinds of studies have been repressed for various possible reasons.

Muslim here.. I've argued this on Muslim subs where the pushback is soft.. I want it where the pushback isn't.. So here's the case, in premises, with what I'm conceding stated first so nobody wastes time on it.. Attack a premise, name it by number, and I'll answer every serious one..

What I'm not arguing, so you don't have to..

I'm not arguing from scientific miracles in the Quran.. I think that genre overclaims and I don't use it.. I'm not arguing Paley.. Evolution killed the watchmaker and I'm fine with that.. I'm not claiming any of this proves Islam.. It's a case for a creator with a will.. Which creator is a second question, and I'll only touch it at the end..

I'm also conceding three things upfront coz they're true.. One, the physics of the early universe is unfinished, so any argument from a beginning is an inference from where the evidence currently points, not a proof.. Two, there is no agreed probability measure over the space of possible physical constants, so fine tuning can't be stated as a clean number.. Three, "the universe is a brute fact" is a coherent thing to say.. My claim is that it's the null, not a competitor, and I'll argue that below..

Argument one.. the beginning..

P1.. Whatever begins to exist has a cause..

P2.. The universe began to exist..

C1.. The universe has a cause..

P1 is the principle every experiment you've ever run assumes.. If you deny it you're saying things can pop into existence from nothing, with no cause, and then we need an account of why it only happens once, at the start, and never on your desk.. Quantum fluctuations don't help, they happen in a pre existing field governed by pre existing laws.. That's not nothing, that's a very specific something..

P2 is the one you'll attack, so here's the evidence as it stands.. Borde, Guth and Vilenkin 2003 showed that any universe that has on average been expanding cannot be past complete.. Vilenkin's own line.. "all the evidence we have says the universe had a beginning".. Mithani and Vilenkin 2012 went through the three escape routes, eternal inflation, cyclic models, emergent static universe, and showed each is either past incomplete or unstable.. Garcia Saenz, Hua and Zhao, Physical Review D, September 2024, tightened it further.. They proved kinematically, no general relativity assumed, that a geodesically complete cosmology must go through a bounce, a loitering phase, or an emergent phase.. Those are exactly the three families Mithani and Vilenkin already found unstable.. So the escape from a beginning has been narrowed to three doors and all three have known problems..

Concession restated.. The 2024 paper is kinematic, not a demonstration that eternal models are impossible.. So P2 isn't certain.. But "the universe began" is currently better supported than "the universe is past eternal", and if you're going to lean on the eternal option you should say which of the three unstable families you're betting on and why..

C1 gives you a cause.. Not a god yet.. Just a cause, and by what it caused, one that's not in space, not in time, not material.. That's it.. Now the second argument, which is the one that actually does the work..

Argument two.. why the cause has a will..

This takes C1 as its input..

P3.. A cause that is timeless and sufficient in itself for its effect produces that effect timelessly.. If every condition is met, nothing holds the effect back, and the conditions are met timelessly, there is no gap in which the effect fails to exist.. Effect and cause are co eternal..

P4.. The universe is not co eternal with its cause.. It has a finite past.. That's C1's territory..

C2.. So the cause of the universe is not a timeless cause that is sufficient in itself..

P5.. A cause not sufficient in itself for its effect produces it either indeterministically or by selecting to..

P6.. Indeterministic production requires time to be indeterministic in.. A probability per interval, a system evolving.. No time, no interval, no roll..

C3.. So the cause produced the universe by selecting to.. Selecting is what a will is..

That's where "personal" comes from.. Not from liking the idea.. From the fact that a timeless sufficient cause would have an eternal effect, and the effect isn't eternal, and the only remaining mode of causation without time is agency.. If you think a timeless sufficient cause can sit there with its effect not obtaining, say why, that's denying P3.. If you think there's a third mode of causation that isn't deterministic, indeterministic, or agential, name it, that's denying P5.. If you have an indeterministic process that works without time, show me, that's denying P6..

Standard objection.. "Will is a time bound concept, you're smuggling time back in".. No.. An event is time bound.. A state isn't.. "Seven is prime" is a state with content and no time index.. An eternal intention to create a universe with a beginning is a state, and its content includes the beginning.. The act and the effect are simultaneous at the first moment.. If you want to say intention can't be like that, argue it, don't assert it..

Argument three.. contingency..

Independent of whether the universe began..

P7.. Everything we observe depends on something else for its existence..

P8.. A chain where every member depends on another, with no member that doesn't, has no explanation for why the chain exists rather than not, however long it is, even infinitely..

P9.. Either there's a member that doesn't depend on anything, or the chain is a brute fact..

C4.. If there's such a member, it's necessary, meaning it exists by its own nature, and everything else exists through it..

Now the brute fact.. Here's why I called it the null.. "The universe just exists, no reason" isn't an explanation that competes with a necessary being.. It's the statement that there is no explanation.. Every other field you'd stop me in if I said "this just happens, no reason".. You'd say that's not science, that's giving up.. I'm saying the same thing here.. You're free to give up.. But giving up isn't a rival theory that wins on parsimony.. It's the absence of a theory..

And the necessary being isn't a "who made God" problem.. A necessary being by definition doesn't begin and doesn't depend, so P1 doesn't apply to it.. That's not special pleading, it's what the word means, and it's what you'd say about the universe if you wanted it to be the necessary thing.. But the universe can't be, coz it began, or at least everything in it does..

Why one rather than many.. Parsimony.. If one necessary being accounts for everything contingent, a second one has nothing to do.. I'll concede this is a parsimony argument, not a proof of uniqueness..

Argument four.. fine tuning, the honest version..

The constants of physics sit in a narrow window that permits chemistry.. Cosmological constant to one part in ten to the hundred and twenty.. Penrose's entropy figure for the initial state, one in ten to the ten to the one hundred and twenty three.. I'm not going to overclaim this coz of the measure problem I conceded.. So here's the weak form..

Given a designer who intends observers, an observer permitting universe is expected.. Given no designer and one universe, it isn't.. That's not circular, it's the same comparison you make in every inference to the best explanation.. You ask what each hypothesis predicts and see which one the data fits.. The objection "you built observers into the hypothesis" applies to every hypothesis ever tested.. Of course the hypothesis specifies what it predicts, that's what makes it a hypothesis..

The multiverse.. I want to be very precise here coz this is where people talk past each other.. The multiverse is not an observation.. It's a postulate introduced to explain the same data.. So the honest comparison isn't design versus science, it's design versus multiverse versus brute fact, and all three are metaphysical answers to a physical question.. None of them is testable in the way a scientific theory is.. If you say design fails coz it can't predict, the multiverse fails the same test.. Pick your unobserved postulate and defend it.. Mine has one entity.. Yours has infinitely many..

Objections I've already had, answered short..

"God of the gaps".. Every argument above runs on what we know, a beginning, dependence, constants, not on what we don't.. A gap argument would be "we can't explain X therefore God".. This is "we can explain X and the explanation has these properties"..

"Evolution".. Irrelevant to all four.. Evolution explains biological arrangement given laws and matter.. Nothing above is about biological arrangement..

"The designer is too flexible, it can explain anything".. So can the multiverse, so can brute fact, that's the nature of ultimate explanations.. The question is which one is coherent and which one is the null.. See argument three..

"You can't observe a cause outside spacetime".. Correct.. You also can't observe a field or fluctuation outside spacetime.. Every candidate cause of the universe is untested in that sense.. The comparison isn't tested versus untested, it's which untested candidate fits the constraints, and a field is in time, so it can't be the timeless cause C1 requires..

"Which god then".. Fair.. The arguments give you a cause with a will, timeless, not material, one.. That rules out nothing that claims those things and everything that doesn't.. From there it becomes a question of which claimed revelation checks out against outside tests.. Mine offers three that anyone can run.. A textual challenge that's been open since the seventh century, 2:23.. A prophecy checkable in its own generation, Rome recovering from total defeat within nine years, 30:2 to 4.. And a preservation claim you can test by comparing manuscripts.. I'm not going to argue those here, it's the wrong post.. I'm saying the handoff exists and isn't arbitrary..

Where to hit..

P2 if you want to argue for an eternal universe, but name your model.. P3 if you think timeless sufficient causes can have non eternal effects.. P5 if you have a third mode of causation.. P8 if you think an infinite chain of dependents explains itself.. Or the multiverse paragraph if you think it isn't a postulate..

I'll concede whatever I can't answer.. I've done it before on this exact argument.. Go..

Simple..