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THE TWO QUESTIONS

Every Honest Mind Asks About God

A Study in Islamic Theology & Epistemology

ForOneCreator | Islamic Education & Da’wah

 

Introduction: The Questions We Are Afraid to Ask

There are two questions that arise in every honest, thinking mind — whether that mind belongs to a believer deepening their faith or a seeker encountering God for the first time:

 

QUESTION ONE: How do we know there IS a Creator at all?

QUESTION TWO: But if there is a Creator — who created Him?

 

These are not questions to be ashamed of. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ himself acknowledged they would arise:

 

لَا يَزَالُ النَّاسُ يَتَسَاءَلُونَ حَتَّى يُقَالَ: اللَّهُ خَلَقَ الْخَلْقَ، فَمَنْ خَلَقَ اللَّهَ؟ فَمَنْ وَجَدَ ذَلِكَ فَلْيَقُلْ: آمَنْتُ بِاللَّهِ

“People will keep asking until someone says: Allah created creation — so who created Allah? Whoever finds that thought arising, let him say: I believe in Allah. — (Bukhari & Muslim)”

The Prophet ﷺ did not say: punish yourself for thinking it. He said: redirect — because the question contains a hidden error that must be gently corrected.

This document walks through both questions in full, drawing on the Quran, authentic hadith, and the scholarship of Islamic theology (‘Ilm al-Kalam).

 

PART ONE

How Do We Know There Is a Creator?

Islamic theology identifies four distinct, convergent sources through which a human being arrives at acknowledgement of the Creator. These are not competing explanations — they operate together, each playing an irreplaceable role.

 

Source 1 — Al-Fitrah (الفطرة): The Innate Disposition

This is the most foundational source, and uniquely Islamic in its depth. Every soul, before entering this world, was directly addressed by its Creator:

أَلَسْتُ بِرَبِّكُمْ ۖ قَالُوا بَلَىٰ

“Am I not your Lord? They said: Yes indeed. — (Al-A’raf 7:172)”

This pre-birth covenant (the Mithaq) means that Creator-acknowledgement is not something we learn from scratch. It is embedded in the soul before the first breath. The Quran commands us to honor it:

فِطْرَتَ اللَّهِ الَّتِي فَطَرَ النَّاسَ عَلَيْهَا

“The fitrah of Allah upon which He has created all people. — (Ar-Rum 30:30)”

Ibn Taymiyyah رحمه الله held that fitrah is not merely a capacity for recognizing God — it is actual embedded knowledge of Allah, which becomes suppressed through environment, culture, and sin.

This explains why, across all of human history and all civilizations, even those without Prophets have arrived at some notion of a Supreme Being. It is the fitrah stirring.

 

Source 2 — Al-‘Aql (العقل): Rational Inference from Creation

The second source is inferential — what the eye observes and the mind concludes. The Quran repeatedly commands observation as a religious duty:

أَفَلَا يَنظُرُونَ إِلَى الْإِبِلِ كَيْفَ خُلِقَتْ * وَإِلَى السَّمَاءِ كَيْفَ رُفِعَتْ

“Do they not look at the camels — how they are created? And at the sky — how it is raised? — (Al-Ghashiyah 88:17-18)”

The rational pathways to Creator-acknowledgement include:

 

Argument

Arabic Term

Core Reasoning

Cosmological

Dalil al-Huduth

Everything that begins requires a cause; the universe began; therefore a First Cause exists

Teleological

Dalil al-‘Inayah

The extraordinary design and order of creation point to an intentional Designer

Contingency

Dalil al-Imkan

All contingent beings require a Necessary Being to ground their existence

Negation of Regress

Imtina’ al-Taraqub

An infinite chain of causes is rationally impossible; the chain must terminate

 

The Quran also uses the method of rational elimination — demonstrating Creator-acknowledgement through the absence and failure of all alternatives. Ibrahim عليه السلام modeled this:

لَا أُحِبُّ الْآفِلِينَ

“I do not love those that set. — (Al-An’am 6:76)”

He observed the star, the moon, the sun — each one rose and set, each one failed, each one depended. Through systematic elimination of every false candidate, the mind arrives at the One who does not set, does not fail, does not depend.

This method of arriving at the Creator through the absence of any other viable creator is itself a Quranic epistemological tool — and it is embedded in the very structure of the Kalimah itself:

لَا إِلٰهَ إِلَّا اللّٰه

First: La ilaha — the negation. No god. No creator. No necessary being. All candidates eliminated.

Then: Illa Allah — the affirmation. He alone remains.

 

Source 3 — Al-Wahy (الوحي): Divine Revelation

The third and most authoritative source is Prophetic Revelation. While fitrah plants the seed and ‘aql grows it, Wahy alone provides precise, unambiguous, and binding knowledge of the Creator.

وَمَا كُنَّا مُعَذِّبِينَ حَتَّىٰ نَبْعَثَ رَسُولًا

“And We would not punish until We had sent a Messenger. — (Al-Isra 17:15)”

This verse is theologically decisive: fitrah and ‘aql establish basic awareness, but the completing of the hujjah (the proof that makes a person fully accountable) requires Wahy through Prophets.

Wahy does what the other sources cannot: it corrects the distortions that fitrah suffers through environment; it provides knowledge of the unseen that pure reason cannot reach; it names and describes Allah ﷻ with certainty rather than inference; and it establishes the legal consequences of acknowledgement and denial.

 

Source 4 — Al-Wijdan (الوجدان): Experiential Awareness

Some theologians, including Imam al-Ghazali in his Ihya Ulum al-Din, identify a fourth source — the direct experiential awareness of the Divine available to the purified heart.

This is not Wahy, which is specific to Prophets. It is the capacity of the heart (qalb), when cleansed through worship, dhikr, and taqwa, to perceive what the mind alone cannot articulate. It is best understood as fitrah reignited — the pre-birth knowledge of the Creator surfacing again through proximity to Him.

 

PART TWO

Who Created the Creator?

This question arises naturally once the mind has accepted that a Creator exists. It is not a sign of disbelief — it is a sign that the mind is working correctly, following causality wherever it leads. The error lies not in asking, but in applying the wrong category.

 

The Hidden Error in the Question

The question ‘Who created Allah?’ sounds grammatically valid. But it contains a concealed assumption — that Allah ﷻ is the kind of being that requires creation. This assumption is the error.

The question ‘Who created X?’ is only valid to ask about contingent beings — things that:

 

Begin to exist in time | Depend on something outside themselves | Are bound by cause and effect

 

Allah ﷻ by definition possesses none of these characteristics. Asking who created Him applies a rule that belongs to creation to the Creator Himself — like asking what is north of the North Pole. The question sounds valid but points to nothing real.

 

The Attribute of Qiyam bi al-Nafs — Self-Subsistence

Islamic theology establishes that Allah ﷻ possesses the attribute of Qiyam bi al-Nafs — absolute self-subsistence. He does not depend on anything for His existence. Everything else in existence is contingent; He alone is necessary.

Theologians classify all of existence into three categories:

 

Category

Arabic Term

Meaning

Necessarily Existent

Wajib al-Wujud

Cannot not exist — His non-existence is rationally impossible

Possibly Existent

Mumkin al-Wujud

May or may not exist — requires a cause to exist

Impossibly Existent

Mumtani’ al-Wujud

Cannot exist — self-contradictory by nature

 

Allah ﷻ is Wajib al-Wujud — Necessarily Existent. The question ‘who created Him?’ falsely places Him in the second category. It treats the Necessarily Existent as though He were merely Possibly Existent — as though He might not have existed, and therefore needed something to bring Him into being.

This is the category error at the heart of the question.

 

Surah Al-Ikhlas — The Complete Answer in Four Verses

The Quran answered this question fourteen centuries ago, with extraordinary precision, in four short verses:

قُلْ هُوَ اللَّهُ أَحَدٌ ۝ اللَّهُ الصَّمَدُ ۝ لَمْ يَلِدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ ۝ وَلَمْ يَكُن لَّهُ كُفُوًا أَحَدٌ

“Say: He is Allah, the One. Allah, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor was He begotten. And there is none comparable to Him. — (Al-Ikhlas 112:1-4)”

 

Verse

Arabic

What It Answers

1

أَحَدٌ

He is One — no plurality requiring assembly by another

2

الصَّمَدُ

He is As-Samad — eternally self-sufficient, everything depends on Him, He depends on nothing

3

لَمْ يَلِدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ

He was not born — He had no origin point, did not emerge from anything

4

وَلَمْ يَكُن لَّهُ كُفُوًا أَحَدٌ

Nothing is comparable to Him — no category that applies to creation applies to Him, including the need for a creator

 

The Prophet ﷺ declared this Surah to be equal to one third of the Quran — precisely because the question of Who is God is one of the three foundational questions of all existence.

 

The Philosophical Dimension — The Regress Problem

Philosophers across traditions independently arrived at the same conclusion. If the Creator had a creator, that creator would need a creator, who would need a creator — infinitely. This is called an infinite regress of causes.

But an actual infinite regress is rationally impossible — because it would mean nothing ever actually started, yet things clearly exist. Therefore, the chain must terminate at an Uncaused Cause: a being that exists necessarily, from itself, without prior cause.

Aristotle called this the Unmoved Mover. Aquinas called it the First Cause. Islamic theologians called it Wajib al-Wujud. The difference is that Islamic theology goes further: this Necessary Being is not a cold philosophical abstraction. He speaks. He commands. He loves. He is, as the Quran says, closer to you than your own jugular vein.

 

Ibn Taymiyyah’s Precision

Ibn Taymiyyah رحمه الله identified the precise nature of the error: the mind that asks ‘who created Allah?’ is applying the law of causality to something that exists outside the causal order.

Causality is a feature within creation — within time, within contingency, within the universe. Allah ﷻ is not within the universe subject to its laws. He is the author of those laws.

It is like asking a novelist: which character in your book wrote you? The novelist is not in the book. The laws of the book do not govern the novelist.

 

Synthesis: The Journey of the Honest Mind

What makes these two questions beautiful is their natural sequence. They mirror the journey Ibrahim عليه السلام himself took — not stopping at the star, not stopping at the moon, not stopping at the sun, until every false candidate was eliminated and the One who does not set, does not fail, and does not depend stood alone.

 

Source

Role

Limitation

Fitrah

Plants the seed — pre-cognitive knowledge of God embedded before birth

Can be suppressed by environment and sin

‘Aql

Grows the seed — rational confirmation through observation and inference

Cannot reach the unseen, specific divine commands, or precise descriptions of God

Wahy

Completes and corrects — authoritative, precise, binding knowledge from the Creator Himself

Requires acceptance of Prophethood

 

Conclusion

The honest mind that asks these two questions — How do I know there IS a Creator? and Who created the Creator? — is not a doubting mind. It is a thinking mind. It is doing precisely what the Quran calls it to do.

The Quran does not ask us to stop thinking at the boundary of the Divine. It asks us to think more carefully — with better categories, cleaner logic, and a heart that has not closed itself off.

The journey from the first question to the second question to the resolution is the journey of Ibrahim عليه السلام. It is the journey of every honest seeker. And its destination is not a cold philosophical conclusion — it is:

 

آمَنْتُ بِاللَّهِ

“I believe in Allah.”

 

Not a belief imposed from outside. Not a belief inherited without examination. A belief arrived at — through the fitrah that God planted in you before you were born, through the ‘aql He gave you to observe His signs, through the Wahy He sent to complete what the rest could not reach, and through the heart that, when all the false gods have set, finally rests in the One who never sets.

 

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