Jafar Shaikh Idris
Was it created out of nothing?
Suppose that you told someone that there was nothing, nothing at all in a certain region, and then lo! a duck appeared alive and kicking. Why wouldn't he believe you however much you assure him that that was indeed the case? Not only because he knows that ducks don't come into being in that way, as some might suppose, but because believing this violates an essential principle of his rationality. Thus his attitude would be the same even if the thing that he was told to have come from nothing was something that he never heard of before. It is because we believe that nothing comes out of nothing, that we keep looking for causes by which we explain the occurrence of events in the natural, social or psychological world. It is because of this rational principle that science was possible. Without it, not only our science but our very rationality will be in jeopardy. Moreover, the idea of causation is essential even to the very identity of things, as it was observed by the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes):
It is self-evident that things have identities, and they have qualities in virtue of which every existent has its actions, and in virtue of which things have different identities, names and definitions. If it were not the case that every individual thing had an action peculiar to, it would not have had a nature that is peculiar to it; and if it did not have a special nature, it would not have had a special name or definition. (Tahafut Attahafut, 782-3)
