An act of God

Three weeks back I wrote about an experience I had while traveling on the new Kano-Kaduna superhighway. In the course of expressing myself within the context of a harrowing crash, I came across, I made mention of the fact there is such a thing as an act of God.

I happen to also believe that parts of the Abrahamic religious consciousness is at times misconstrued to create a simplistic, humdrum understanding of what God is. Many people found reasons to confront me on that “act of God” statement. One of my friends even accused me of reactionary reasoning, and that people like myself happen to be the source of the material backwardness the Muslim world finds itself in.

I think part of it comes from being too lazy, or at best, too complacent when it comes to using the mental faculties God gave us as human and berates us to put to good use in the Qur’an through such quotes as “afala ta’qiloon”—“do you not reason?” We have become too reliant on “superterrestrial hopes” to explain things we don’t have a handle on, and the consequences of that is the decay of the Muslim cognitive imagination.

Islam is a religion of learning and erudition, and we know that with learning and erudition, you can do anything. You can even beat supernatural forces to the punch with knowledge and we see this in the story of Solomon when he tasked his spirits to bring the Queen of Sheba together with her throne to him.

But what is God? We can only answer that if we are willing to severely anthropomorphize that idea and we end up thinking of God as a being up above in the heavens perched on a throne. And that’s where the problem starts off.

Some years back, the late British cosmologist, Steven Hawking, received a media lynching because he wrote in that the traditional idea of what we think God is, is utter nonsense. God does not exist he said; there is only gravity, and by itself, gravity can spontaneously trigger the Big Bang that created and sustains this universe.

I happen to agree with Hawking on that.

But let’s take a look at the medieval Franciscan monk, Thomas Aquinas and his seminal work ‘Summa Theologica’. In it, he presented his “Quinque Viae” or the “Five Ways”. That is basically an imaginative exercise that underpins the definition of God and then proving his existence in five ways. The First Way is Motion, and that translates into God being an “Unmoved Mover”. The Second way is Efficient Cause, which means that God is an “Uncaused Cause”. The Third Way is Possibility and Necessity which argues that God is an “Independent Contingency”. The Fourth Way is about Gradation, meaning that God is “Climax of Existence”. The Fifth Way is “Design”, and that has to do with “Teleological Reality”.

Being from a wealthy family, Aquinas received privileged education in Islamic universities in Andalusia. And even though the primary inspiration from Islamic materialist school of thought is Aristotle, there is a decidedly Islamic flavour in his thought process. Now, what does this augur to the argument of what God is? It means that anything that passes the five criteria he outlined can be called God. So does gravity fit that profile?

Well, gravity is perhaps the primary fundamental of nature. It can move things but it cannot be moved itself. The Big Bang Theory posits that gravity was the cause of the Big Bang, and since no one knows how to explain reality before the Big Bang, the chain of causality terminates at the Zero Hour preceding the explosion. Human reality can only be expressed in terms of cause and effect. Every phenomenon, and every occurrence is contingent on the cause/effect loop, and any existence outside that loop can be called God. As the supreme master of the universe, God is transcendent of anything a human being can imagine, being the climax of being.

In the Qur’an, an-Nahl, verse 79, God says: “Have they not seen the birds obedient in mid-air? None holdeth them save Allah. Lo! herein, verily, are portents for a people who believe.”

“Do you not see when you look at a bird aloft in the air, what holds them up there other than the merciful”.

What sustains airborne motion is a combination of the Bernoulli Principle of fluid dynamics and Newton’s Third Law of Motion. There are four forces acting on an object in flight divided into two categories. The first two are the active forces: lift and thrust; the other two are reactive forces, which are drag and weight.

The verse quoted above says that birds midflight are “obedient”- that is obedient to the will of nature as materialised in the four forces mentioned. Then it said too that what holds them aloft is God.

So, you see, that actually means that nature is an expression of God, and since everything obeys the laws of nature, it follows also they obey God by extension. That means Islamic theology can actually accommodate the type of arguments people like Hawking make about the existence of God and His control over nature.

Hawking said God does not exist, but then says that gravity is the supreme force of nature. That is at all not controversial. The implication of what he said is that our conception of God is fundamentally defective, and since no one really knows or can describe what God is, he argued that the traditional idea of God is nonsense.

Looking at it from that angle, an act of God might actually translate to an act of nature.

Einstein said that “If you cannot explain it, then you do not understand it”. No one can really explain most of the paranormal phenomena that confound us—and because we don’t understand them, we try to make sense of them in terms of our religious value systems. A thousand years ago, the only way to explain how two people from two ends of the world can communicate in real-time is by paranormal logic. One thousand years ago, human beings cannot conceive the wave dynamics that make real-time communication possible. They don’t understand it, meaning they cannot explain it and the standard practice of human consciousness is to associate anything they can’t explain with the supernatural, or God.

Because I could not explain the wheres and the wherefores of the road accident in question, I called it an act of God. And an act of God can be anything—something that can even be explained by experts who are more competent than I am in the technical sense of the subject of discussion. Who knows… it can even be something that can only be explainable materially in the shadow of future advances in learning and erudition.