Why God Is Eternal but the Cosmos Is Not — Ali Shukri Amin
First published on my writing site: www.aliamin.info/2026/09/why-god-is-eternal-but-the-cosmos-is-not/
By Ali Shukri Amin. I first wrote this as a comment on r/MuslimCorner, in the thread “Why do we allow God to be an eternal, uncreated reality, but refuse to allow the universe to be an eternal, uncreated reality? Couldn't the universe simply be the thing that has always existed, and then everything including us came from it?”, copied here as written.
The cosmos (all potential universes) does not exhibit the properties of something that is either eternal or uncreated. The simplest problem with an eternal universe is tasalsul (infinite regression). If we posit that the universe was universal ad arguendo, then an infinite succession of past events is required to reach the present. In such a case, the present will never come about, because there will be an infinitely increasing sequence of required histories before it can happen, therefore defeating the idea of infinite history.
You could argue that matter is eternal and predates the “start of time.” The problem with that is that you would have to concede that the original matter was limited, static, and incapable itself of starting history. So what caused time to begin and matter to start expanding into the visible cosmos?
Regardless, all of this is a problem only with the Kalam cosmological argument. The dependency argument does not have these problems, including the eternality issue.
However belief in Allah is not predicated on these arguments. Belief in Allah is the most intuitive default view which must then be falsified for good reasons. If we start without the belief in Allah, we have some really big fish to fry before we can propose a coherent alternative worldview (solipsism, philosophical zombies, Boltzmann brains, logicial nihilism, etc.).
Posted September 7, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
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