(Publish from Houston Texas USA)
(By: Mian Iftikhar Ahmad)
Modern humanity lives in a profound and unsettling paradox. It possesses the most powerful scientific technologies in history, the most precise observational instruments ever created, and mathematical tools capable of mapping the vastness of the cosmos, yet its most fundamental existential questions have become more intense, restless, and unresolved than ever before.
We know that the universe emerged approximately 13.8 billion years ago in an event commonly described as the Big Bang. We know that it has been expanding ever since, and we also know that what we observe is not the totality of reality but only the observable universe, bounded by the speed of light and the limits of human perception.
Despite this unprecedented scientific clarity about how the universe behaves, the deepest question remains untouched: why does the universe exist at all, rather than nothing?
Contemporary atheism often claims that modern science, particularly cosmology, has rendered the idea of God unnecessary, arguing that if time itself began with the Big Bang, then the concept of a Creator becomes meaningless. This claim, while frequently presented as scientific, is in reality a philosophical leap rather than a scientific conclusion, because science describes the beginning of observable time, not the ultimate origin of reality itself.
The observable universe does not represent the totality of existence, but a limited domain defined by physical constraints, and beyond that domain, science remains silent. That silence, however, is not evidence of nonexistence but a clear boundary of human knowledge, a boundary that atheism often converts into a declaration of absence, while intellectual honesty demands that claims should end where evidence ends. This is precisely where the revealed worldview asserts itself, consistently reminding humanity that its knowledge is limited and that reality extends far beyond human measurement, placing science and faith not as enemies but as complementary domains that define each other’s limits and prevent intellectual arrogance.
The Big Bang explains that matter, energy, space, and time appeared at a specific moment, but it does not explain why that moment occurred or why the laws of physics were already in place to govern that emergence. Atheism attempts to dissolve this problem by declaring questions about “before the Big Bang” meaningless, yet this response is more defensive than logical, because if time itself is a created entity, its cause cannot logically exist within time. Confining causality to temporal frameworks is a habit of the human mind, not a necessity of reality. The revealed perspective emphasizes that a Creator would not exist within time but would be the originator of time itself, making the question not whether God existed before the Big Bang, but why time exists at all.
Quantum physics has further complicated the atheist narrative by revealing that empty space is not truly empty, but a dynamic field in which virtual particles constantly appear and disappear without classical causes, suggesting that “nothingness” is in fact a structured realm of possibilities governed by laws. This shifts the core question away from how the universe came into being and toward why existence-permitting frameworks exist at all. Here, atheism encounters a deep internal contradiction because it simultaneously claims that everything is the product of chance while acknowledging an extraordinarily precise set of physical constants and mathematical relationships without which atoms, stars, chemistry, and life would be impossible.
Chance is not an explanation for such fine-tuned order but a linguistic substitute for ignorance. Modern science openly acknowledges that the universe operates according to mathematical laws and that reality can be described with astonishing precision through equations, from the motion of galaxies to the behavior of subatomic particles. Yet the real mystery is not that mathematics can describe the universe, but that the universe appears to be written in the language of mathematics at all. If mathematics is a human invention, why does the universe obey it, and if mathematics is discovered rather than invented, where did these abstract truths exist before the universe itself?
Atheism typically remains silent at this point, asserting that the laws of physics simply exist as brute facts, yet when religion makes a similar claim about a transcendent source, it is dismissed as unscientific, even though laws without an underlying grounding principle are philosophically incomplete. Consciousness presents perhaps the greatest challenge to materialist atheism, because while neuroscience can describe neural activity, chemical signals, and electrical impulses, it cannot fully account for subjective experience, self-awareness, intentionality, free choice, or the human hunger for meaning.
If consciousness is merely an illusion produced by matter, then truth, reason, science, and rational inquiry themselves become illusions, since all of them rely on conscious judgment. In this way, atheism begins to undermine its own foundations. The revealed worldview, by contrast, regards consciousness not as a byproduct of blind matter but as a fundamental dimension of reality, which explains why the universe is intelligible and why the human mind is capable of understanding it. The emergence of rational consciousness from a purposeless and indifferent universe remains an unresolved paradox for atheism.
Despite presenting itself as belief-free, atheism rests upon several unprovable assumptions, including the uniformity of natural laws, the reliability of human reason, the intelligibility of the universe, and the meaningfulness of ethical judgments. These assumptions are accepted before scientific investigation and are not derived from it, demonstrating that atheism, like religion, operates within a framework of foundational beliefs.
Ethics further exposes this tension, because if reality is the result of blind physical processes, then moral values are nothing more than evolutionary conveniences or social agreements. Yet humans instinctively regard justice as better than oppression, truth as superior to falsehood, and sacrifice as meaningful rather than absurd. Such moral intuitions are difficult to reconcile with a purely accidental universe but align naturally with a worldview that grounds values in a higher moral reality.
Modern cosmology, therefore, has not eliminated the question of God but has intensified it, pushing humanity to confront deeper layers of existence rather than closing the debate. Science explains how the universe behaves, not why it exists, and atheism attempts to bridge this gap with chance, speculative future discoveries, or infinite regressions, while the revealed worldview connects existence, reason, morality, and consciousness into a coherent and meaningful whole. The ultimate question is not whether science or religion will triumph, but which framework offers a more comprehensive, coherent, and humanly satisfying account of reality, one that treats the universe as a meaningless accident or one that recognizes it as an intelligible, purposeful, and morally significant existence. This unresolved question remains alive, pressing, and central to the human condition, and perhaps it is this very question that defines what it truly means to be human.
