And His words:

“Do you not see that Allah drives the clouds along, then brings them together, then piles them one upon another, whereupon you see the rain emerge from their midst?”

[Surah al-Nūr: 43]

The word wadq means rain. Exalted is He also says:

“Allah is the One Who sends the winds, which stir up clouds; then He spreads them across the sky as He wills and makes them into fragments, whereupon you see the rain emerge from their midst.”

[Surah al-Rūm: 48]

He thus states—glory be to Him—that He spreads the clouds across the sky. This makes clear that by “sky” here He did not mean the celestial spheres, for clouds are not spread across the celestial spheres. Rather, people see the clouds spreading through the air. A person may be in an elevated place—on a mountain or elsewhere—with the clouds spread below him, rain descending from them, and the sun above him.

Al-Rāzī (1) does not consistently adhere to [a single] (2) position. Rather, he continually champions one view here and, elsewhere, a view that contradicts it, for reasons that lead him to do so.

Many people understand the Quran to mean something it does not indicate—an unsound meaning—and then set that meaning in opposition to reason. We have explained this in a separate work, Averting the Conflict (3) between Reason and Revelation. Therein, we discussed nearly all the rational arguments they invoke against the Book and the Sunnah, and demonstrated that such a conflict arises only when what is deemed rational is unsound—which is overwhelmingly characteristic of the discourse of the people of religious innovation—or it may be (4) that what has been attributed