You are a being. If you attribute yourself to the Pre-Eternal All-Powerful One, He creates you at a command through His infinite power out of nothing in an instant, like striking a match. If you do not do this and rather attribute yourself to physical causes and nature, then since you are a well-ordered summary, fruit, and miniature index and list of the universe, in order to make you, it would be necessary to sift with a fine sieve the universe and its elements, and to gather in precise measure from all the corners of the universe the substances of which your body is composed. For physical causes only gather and join together. It is confirmed by people of reason that they cannot create out of nothing what is not present in them. Since this is the case, they would be compelled to collect together the body of a tiny animate being from every corner of the cosmos.
Now understand what ease there is in unity, Divine unity, and what difficulties lie in misguidance and attributing partners to God!
Secondly, there is an infinite ease also with regard to Divine knowledge. It is like this: Divine Determining is an aspect of Divine knowledge; it determines a measure for each thing, which is like its particular and immaterial mould; the determined measure is like a plan or model for the thing's being. When Divine power creates, it does so with extreme ease in accordance with the determined measure. If the thing is not attributed to the Ail-Powerful One of Glory, Who possesses all-embracing, infinite and pre-eternal knowledge, as was described above, not only thousands of difficulties appear, but hundreds of impossibilities. For if it was not for the determined measure which exists in Divine knowledge, thousands of material moulds with external existences would have to be employed in the body of even a tiny animate being.
So, understand one reason for the infinite ease in unity and the endless difficulties in misguidance and ascribing partners to God. Realize what a veracious, correct, and exalted truth is stated by the verse,The matter of the Hour shall be but as the twinkling of the eye. or even closer.
THIRD QUESTION
The former enemy and now rightly-guided friend then asked: "Philosophers, who have made many advances these days, claim that nothing is created out of nothing, and nothing is annihilated and goes to nothing; there is only compostion and decomposition, and this makes the factory of the universe run. Is this correct?"
The Answer: Since the most advanced philosophers who did not consider beings in the light of the Qur'an saw that the formation and existence of beings by means of Nature and causes was so difficult as to be impossible—in the manner proved above, they diverged into two groups.
One group became Sophists; abdicating reason, which is exclusive to human beings, and falling lower than mindless beasts, they found it easier to deny the universe's existence, and even their own existences, than to follow the way of misguidance, which claims that causes and Nature have the power to create. They therefore denied both themselves and the universe and descended into absolute ignorance.
The second group saw that in misguidance, according to which causes and Nature are creator, the creation of a fly or a seed, even, entails innumerable difficulties and requires a power unacceptable to reason. They were therefore compelled to deny the act of creation and to say: "Nothing can exist out of nothing." Seeing total annihiliation also to be impossible, they declared: "What exists cannot go to nothing." They fancied an imaginary situation in which combining and decomposition, gathering together and dispersion, occur through the motion of particles and the winds of chance.
Now, see! Those who consider themselves to be the most intelligent are the most profoundly ignorant and stupid. Understand just how ludicrous, debased, and ignorant misguidance makes man, and take a lesson!
Indeed, a Pre-Eternai Power created the heavens and the earth in six days, every year creates four hundred thousand species simultaneously on the face of the earth, and in six weeks every spring constructs a living world more full of art and wisdom than the world itself. Thus, it is more foolish and ignorant than the Sophists, the first group above, to deny the act of creation and deem it unlikely that, like a chemical that when applied shows up invisible writing, Pre-Eternai Power should give external existence to beings, which, though externally non-existent, exist as knowledge, and whose plans and measures are determined in the realm of a Pre-Eternal Knowledge.