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This lecture provides perspectives on historical and
contemporary Muslim views on God, creation, and cosmology. It first examines the
data in the Qur’an on creation of the cosmos, and the cosmos as the locus of the
signs of God; considers the historical Muslim investigations of philosophical
and scientific cosmology within the disciplines natural philosophy and theology,
and how these two disciplines had opposing views on the role of God, creation ex
nihilo, and causation; and it touches on how these historical disciplines
engaged in the interpretation of scriptural data. Next it examines contemporary
views, first the literalist readings of the Qur’an which are presumed to show
the miraculous nature of the Qur’an by presciently describing features of Big
Bang cosmology; and then the entirely opposite perspective of the Nobel
physicist Dr. Abdus Salam who drew personal inspiration from the Qur’anic
concept of nature as locus of the signs of God, but yet upheld the legitimacy of
the science as a secular enterprise.
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