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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books God and Physics: From Hawking To Avicenna Main Text The first religious obligation of every intelligent boy who comes of age, as marked by years or by the dreams of puberty, is to form the intention of reasoning as soundly as he can to an awareness that the world is originated.

Abū ‘l-Ma’āli al-Juwaynī (1028-1085)1 Al-Juwaynī thought that an awareness of the originatedness [ hud_th ] of the world necessarily meant a rejection of any claim to its being eternal and led, consequently, to the affirmation that it was created by God. He argues that it is reasonable to hold that the world is temporally finite -- this is what it means to be originated -- and that, on the basis of such an observation, one can come to know that there is a Creator.

Furthermore, knowledge of creation is knowledge of divine sovereignty, which leads one to submit religiously to God’s plan. Discussions about the relationship between physics and theology — between our knowledge of the world of nature and our knowledge of God — are one of the enduring features of Western culture.

Although my remarks will have as their focus developments in the Christian Latin West, we need to remember that in the natural sciences and in philosophy the Latin West was heavily influenced by the work of Muslim and Jewish thinkers. In some of my comments today and in my next lecture I hope to show the nature and extent of that influence. The twin pillars of every civilization are religion and science.

Contemporary cosmological theories, especially discourse about the origins of the universe, reveal the continuing encounter between physics and theology. It is a discourse which interests thinkers of our own age as much as it did those in the Middle Ages. I should like to sketch some of the current discussion in order to suggest how the contemporary world can learn a great deal from mediaeval analyses of the relationship among physics, metaphysics, and theology.

In fact, to go from Stephen Hawking to Avicenna is, in an important sense, to go from confusion to clarity. Recent studies in particle physics and astronomy have produced dazzling speculations about the early history of the universe. Cosmologists now routinely entertain elaborate scenarios which propose to describe what the universe was like when it was the size of a softball, a mere 10-35 second after the Big Bang.