I want to talk about nothing. No, really—nothing. Specifically, the idea that once upon a time (if “time” even existed then) there was absolutely nothing, and then suddenly… well, everything. It’s a pretty wild concept when you think about it. And trust me, I think about it a lot. As someone who loves pondering big questions, the puzzle of how something could arise from pure nothingness has been knocking around in my mind for years. It’s one of those late-night thoughts that can make my head spin, but I keep coming back to it because it touches on something deeply fundamental: why does anything exist at all?

Most of us have this gut feeling that you can’t get something from nothing by any normal means. I mean, if I reach into an empty jar, I don’t expect to pull out a sandwich. So how could an entire universe pop out of truly nothing? This question has echoed through ages – the philosopher Leibniz famously asked, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It’s a simple question that’s fiendishly hard to answer.

If at some point there was nothing – no matter, no energy, no space, no time – what could possibly change for anything to appear? There’d be no one around to flip a switch, no switches to flip, no “around” to even be in. By definition, nothing does nothing. So, on the face of it, saying the universe just appeared out of absolute nothing is like saying 0+0=1 – it doesn’t add up in my book.

Now, a lot of religious folks (myself included) have a straightforward answer: God did it. Problem solved, right? If you’re a believer in a Creator, the question of “who can get something from nothing?” has a built-in answer: an all-powerful God. In Christianity, they even have a fancy Latin term for it – creatio ex nihilo – meaning creation out of nothing. The Bible paints a picture of God simply speaking the universe into being (“Let there be light,” and boom, light!).

The Qur’an puts it in a characteristically direct way too. It repeats that God says “Be,” and it is (kun fa-yakūn). It even asks: “Or were they created by nothing, or were they the creators [of themselves]?” (Qur’an 52:35). In other words, think about it: can anything or anyone pop into existence without a cause? Can we create ourselves? To a Muslim like me, the answer is clear: existence isn’t a DIY project; it requires an Originator. And the Qur’an is equally clear that creation doesn’t create itself, and that the Creator doesn’t depend on the creation. That’s a distinction worth remembering, but we won’t dwell on it here.

So for a long time I was content with “God did it, end of story.” But if you’re like me, ending the story there only opens up a new mystery, and that’s the concept of infinity. Because saying God always existed and God made everything might solve one riddle, but it immediately raises another: wait, God always existed? Like… always, always?

As in, no beginning at all? 😵 That idea is huge. When I first learned as a kid that God has no beginning and no end, I basically had the “brain explode” emoji face (minus the actual emoji, since we didn’t have those back then). I remember asking, “But if God made us, who made God?” And of course, the answer I got was, “No one. God isn’t made; He’s just always been there.”

That answer satisfied my curiosity for about five seconds before I realized I couldn’t even imagine something just existing forever like that. My little mind was blown. To be honest, my grown-up mind is still blown. Infinity is not something that comes naturally to our understanding.

Let’s talk about infinity for a second, because this concept shows up everywhere when you ponder creation. Either something came from nothing at some point, or something has always existed. If it’s the latter, we’re dealing with an infinite past. And if it’s the former, we’re dealing with some power or law that has infinite capability to create from nothing. No matter which way you slice it, infinity is hiding in there somewhere.

And infinity is a tough cookie. We humans are finite in every way—we have a start, an end, limits. Trying to grasp the infinite is like a fish trying to understand the ocean is endless; the fish’s world is the ocean, but even it doesn’t really get the concept of “endless.”

Some people use visuals like an infinite starry sky to convey infinity. I can’t see the stars (being blind and all), but I don’t need to—I feel the mind-bending nature of infinity just fine without visual aids. For me, it might be imagining a sound that plays forever, or a number line that I could keep counting up without ever, ever stopping. Think about counting numbers: no matter how high you go, you can always add one more. It never reaches a “most final” number. That’s infinity in a nutshell, and it’s headache-inducing if you really dwell on it.

It’s easy to say the words “no beginning and no end,” but truly picturing that (at least in our mind’s eye, if not our literal eyes) is practically impossible. Infinity is more than a number or idea – it’s like a foreign country our brains have never been to and can’t fully visit.

This is where my faith offers both comfort and more to chew on. In Islam, one of God’s names is Al-Awwal (The First) and Al-Akhir (The Last) – basically the One who always was and always will be. Only God has that quality; everything else is created, with a beginning and an end.

I find a strange comfort in that idea. It means I don’t have to figure out “how to get something from absolute nothing,” because there never was a state of absolute nothing – there was always God. The buck stops with Him. There’s always been something (or rather, Someone) rather than nothing, and that someone has the power to create everything else.

This answers the question on one level and aligns with my intuition that you can’t get something from nothing via normal, natural means. It makes sense to me that a supernatural act – essentially, a miracle – is needed to bridge that gap. And if anyone’s going to pull off a miracle of that magnitude, it’s God by definition.

However – and here’s me being the critical thinker Hanif that I am – I don’t shy away from probing that answer too. Because if I tell my skeptical friend, “The universe came from God,” he might retort, “Okay, then where did God come from?” To which I’d say, “God didn’t come from anywhere. He always existed.” And that’s absolutely my belief. But I’m also honest that this is mind-boggling.

I sometimes laugh at myself: I have trouble conceptualizing a never-ending TV series, let alone a never-beginning, never-ending divine being. It’s supposed to be beyond full comprehension; if I could wrap my brain around God entirely, that wouldn’t be much of a God, right? So I accept that God’s infinity is a mystery. Yet, I believe it’s a necessary mystery – one that makes more sense than the alternatives, even if it leaves me with questions.

Speaking of alternatives, let’s look at what other people have thought about creation and eternity. Not everyone, of course, agrees with the “God made everything from nothing” idea. Throughout history and across cultures, there have been a bunch of different takes.

Some ancient thinkers – like certain Greek philosophers – couldn’t accept the idea of a beginning. Aristotle, for example, reasoned that the universe must have always existed in some form. He introduced the idea of an “Unmoved Mover” (basically a prime cause that itself wasn’t caused by anything earlier), but he still imagined the universe as eternal, just eternally moved by God. To him, and others influenced by that line of thought, the cosmos didn’t need a start – it was always there, changing and moving, guided by a prime cause.

Then you have traditions like Hindu cosmology, which takes the idea of an eternal universe to a whole new level. In Hindu thought, time is basically infinite and cyclic – the universe goes through endless cycles of creation, destruction, and rebirth. There’s no first creation from nothing; it’s more like the universe has died and been reborn infinitely many times. It’s a bit like a cosmic day-night cycle: the world exists for a trillion years or so, then dissolves, then comes back again, over and over, forever.

On one hand, this avoids the whole “something from nothing” issue – since something was always there in some cycle. But on the other hand, it kind of blows the mind in a different way: an infinite loop of universes! Try contemplating that before your morning coffee.

It raises its own questions, like why is there an endless cycle at all, and who or what set that cycle in motion? (Hindu texts have many myths and philosophies tackling that, with gods like Brahma creating in each cycle, but even those gods are within time’s cycles… it’s complex and not a single story.)

Modern science, for its part, tells us that our universe did have a beginning – the Big Bang, about 13.8 billion years ago. At least, that’s the prevailing theory and the evidence points that way. So does that mean there truly was nothing before that? Well, this is where it gets tricky. Physicists like to say that time itself began with the Big Bang, so asking “what happened before?” might be as meaningless as asking “what’s north of the North Pole?”

It’s a clever answer, but it still feels a bit like sidestepping the question. Some scientists have tried to explain how you could get a universe from “nothing” – often pointing to quantum mechanics. For example, you’ll hear about quantum fluctuations in a vacuum that can produce particles out of “empty space.”

There was even a well-known physicist, Lawrence Krauss, who wrote a book called A Universe from Nothing, arguing that given the laws of physics, a universe could essentially pop into existence on its own. That grabbed a lot of headlines, because it sounds like science was saying “Hey, we don’t need God; we have nothingness covered!”

But when I looked into it (as a curious layman, not a physicist), I had to chuckle – the “nothing” they talk about isn’t really nothing. It’s empty space full of vacuum energy and governed by quantum laws – in other words, a whole lot of something, just an invisible something.

Calling that “nothing” is, in my humble opinion, kind of cheating. It’s like if I told you I built a house out of nothing, but actually I had a bunch of bricks and concrete lying around in an invisible dimension. 😏 Even some honest atheists admit that these scientific “nothings” are not the philosophical nothing.

They’re basically saying, “Maybe the universe came from a quantum vacuum, and we’ll just treat that vacuum (and the laws of physics) as given.” But then you’ve just moved the big question back a step: why is there a quantum vacuum with laws at all? Why that something rather than absolutely nothing?

I find it fascinating that at the end of the day, everyone who ponders this hits a sort of wall where something has to be eternal or un-caused. For religious folks, that’s God. For some non-religious thinkers, they might say the universe itself is just the brute fact – it just exists and always has in one form or another.

In fact, I’ve read a cosmologist (Sean Carroll) who basically said the universe might just exist without an ultimate reason, and we should be okay with that. Essentially, “the universe just is”. That line of thinking always makes me raise an eyebrow, because to me it sounds like they’re attributing to the universe the very qualities they deny in God.

You don’t want God, so you say the universe is eternal and self-sustaining. Well, congratulations, you’ve just given the universe a promotion to “god-like” status (minus personality perhaps). It’s like they’re skipping the middleman and deifying the cosmos. I say, if something’s going to be eternal and uncaused, I’d rather it be an all-knowing God with a purpose, rather than aimless matter. But hey, that’s me.

Another angle is the philosophical argument that an infinite chain of events (or causes) is impossible – therefore, there had to be a first cause. This is an old argument that was refined by medieval Muslim theologians (go Kalam Cosmological Argument! 🎓) and later picked up by others.

It basically says if you had an infinite regress – cause before cause before cause, forever – you could never actually reach now, because you’d be stuck counting down an infinite timeline to get here. Something had to start the dominoes falling. I find that argument pretty compelling. It’s one reason I lean strongly towards the idea that time and the universe did have a beginning (which, conveniently, matches up with Big Bang cosmology too).

And of course, I believe that the “starter” of it all is God. But I acknowledge not everyone buys that argument; some say, “Why can’t there be an infinite past? Maybe actual infinities can exist in reality.” This topic gets technical fast (and frankly above my pay grade), but it underscores that whichever way you turn – an infinite past, or a one-time creation from nothing – you’re staring at a concept that our normal brains struggle with.

So where does all this musing leave me? Honestly, it leaves me feeling both humbled and oddly satisfied. Humbled, because these questions remind me of how limited my knowledge is. I can’t fully comprehend infinity, and I’ve made my peace with that.

I’ve had to say, “Alright, some things are just beyond me. That’s okay.” In Islam, there’s the concept of accepting ambiguity in certain matters – we call it bila kayf in theology, meaning “without [asking] how.” I take that approach with the nature of God’s existence. God is there, uncreated; I don’t know how that works, but I believe it and I don’t lose sleep over the mechanics.

At the same time, I’m satisfied in a sense because my faith gives me a framework: the universe isn’t a random fluke from nothing; it’s an intended creation by an infinite Being. That means existence has a purpose and a source, even if I don’t know all the details. It’s like having a reassuring outline even if a few chapters of the book are too advanced for me to grasp.

And you know what? I actually enjoy this not knowing completely. Sounds strange, but the mystery itself is kind of beautiful. The fact that we’re even able to wonder about “nothingness” and “infinity” is, to me, a sign that we humans aren’t just robots going through the motions – we’re seekers.

I believe God gave us curious minds for a reason: to search, to ask, to marvel. In the Qur’an, there’s an encouragement to reflect on the creation of the heavens and earth, and it says people of understanding will say, “Lord, You did not create all this in vain”. That resonates with me. When I contemplate these grand questions, it ultimately strengthens my sense of awe.

I feel a bit like a traveler standing at the edge of a vast canyon (pardon the visual imagery, but you get the idea of scale!) – I might not see everything down in the darkness, but I can tell it’s deep and significant.

Before I wrap up, let me just acknowledge: some days, thinking about these things does make my brain hurt. I have moments where I’m like, “Okay, I need to go watch some silly cat videos or listen to a cricket match to normalize my mind again,” because infinity and nothingness can be too abstract. And that’s fine.

We’re not meant to walk around in a constant state of existential pondering – we’d never get the laundry done, right? But I’m grateful that once in a while, I get to dive into these thoughts and discuss them with you here. It’s like exercise for the mind and soul, even if we end up with more questions than answers.

So, can something really come from nothing? My answer in a nutshell: Not by itself. Either an unfathomable God brought everything into existence, or you’re positing an unfathomable something-else that was just there. I’ve chosen to put my trust in the God answer – and to embrace the fact that I won’t understand all of that until maybe, just maybe, the afterlife (where I have a long list of questions for the Almighty!).

Until then, I’m comfortable living with a bit of confusion. It keeps me humble. It keeps me asking. And it keeps me grounded in the knowledge that reality is bigger and more mysterious than what’s for dinner or what’s the latest tech gadget (though I do wonder that too – I’m blind, not ascetic, I still love a good gadget 😄).

If you’ve stuck with me through this ramble, thank you. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do these questions intrigue you, scare you, bore you? There’s no right or wrong feeling to have. For me, it’s a mix of wonder and “whoa, that’s heavy.” But I believe discussing it, even in our imperfect human way, is part of what makes us human.

We’re tiny specks in a vast existence, yet we can think about the whole cosmos and what might lie beyond. How cool is that?

Till next time, stay curious and stay grounded. And don’t worry – I won’t be offended if you read this and immediately go seek out those cat videos to recuperate. Some infinities are best handled in small doses. 😉