In the Muslim divine revelation, the Qur’an, God asks,
Were they created by nothing? Or were they themselves the creators?
Or did they create the heavens and the earth? Nay but they have no firm belief.[3]
The implicit assumption in God’s question is that the universe began to exist, and this has now been proven.
It has also been proven that the universe was neither created by “nothing”, nor did it create itself.
Therefore, the only answer to God’s question is that the universe had an external cause, which we will call God.
Divine attributes derived from the cosmological causal argument
We have reasoned so far that God caused the universe to exist, because He is the uncaused cause of the “big bang”:
- from which time began to exist, and therefore God cannot be temporal and must be eternal
- from which energy and matter began to exist, and therefore God cannot be material and must be immaterial
- from which space began to exist, and, therefore, God cannot be spatial and must be transcendent
First-order divine attributes
I shall call these attributes of the first-order, because they are rationally derived first, namely that God is:
- the uncaused cause or creator
- eternal
- immaterial
- transcendent