And He also says,
“Indeed, in that are signs for a people who reason,”
“for a people who reflect,”
and similar verses. Each of these points to something particular, just as the sun is the unmistakable sign of the day. The Exalted further declares:
“We have made the night and the day two signs; then We effaced the sign of the night and made the sign of the day luminous, so that you may seek….”

A proof (dalīl) of this sort is stronger than mere analogy (qiyās), for a proof can proceed from one specific reality to another, just as travelers steer toward the Kaʿbah by the Pole Star or other constellations. In the same way, the Qur’anic signs lead directly to the very Being of the Creator, exalted be He, not to some generic attribute He might share with others—because everything besides Him is, in its essence, dependent on Him. Hence, once the world exists, the existence of the Creator Himself is necessitated.

A Discussion on Why Creation Needs a Maker

We have expanded upon this theme in several places—when explaining the paths by which knowledge of the Maker is established, reviewing the methods adopted by most investigators in this quest, commenting on the Muḥaṣṣal, and elsewhere. Later theologians have debated the root cause of a thing’s dependence on an efficient cause, or, if you will, on the Maker: is it contingency (imkān), origination in time (ḥudūth), or the combination of both?

The first view

This is the position of the later philosophers and those who sided with them, such as Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī. They maintain that bare contingency—without temporal origination—suffices to make a being dependent on the Maker, so that a contingent entity could be eternal, not originated, yet still in need of a cause. The overwhelming majority of rational minds, ancient and modern, have agreed that this is false. Even Aristotle, the early philosophers, and their later followers—among them Ibn Rushd the younger—insist that whatever can both exist and not exist must in fact be something originated. It was Ibn Sīnā and his likes who first proposed the contrary, and al-Rāzī and others merely echoed them.

According to these thinkers, a contingent being needs an agent only while it continues to exist, for, in their view, it never had an actual beginning. By treating such a being as contingent, their discourse on contingency became confused, and objections arose that they could not answer—as their major and minor works alike attest, including al-Arbaʿīn, Nihāyat al-ʿUqūl, al-Maṭālib al-ʿĀliyah, the Muḥaṣṣal, and others. We have addressed these issues in detail elsewhere.