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How Literally Can We Understand Quranic Language About God’s Knowledge With Time
I have been thinking about something which becomes more difficult the deeper I go into it.
This is not a question about whether God is capable of doing something, nor am I questioning God’s knowledge, power or the truth of what He has revealed.
My question is about something more fundamental:
How should a finite, time-bound human being understand the language the Quran uses to describe a Creator who is not like His creation?
Take a verse such as:
“His command, when He intends a thing, is only that He says to it, ‘Be,’ and it is.”
— 36:82At the normal human level this is perfectly understandable: nothing can resist God’s command. If He wills something, it happens.
But when I think about the wording philosophically, another question appears.
What does “when God intends/wills something” actually mean?
For a human being, wanting or deciding normally involves sequence.
I may be sitting at home, something occurs to me, and I decide: “Let me go somewhere,” “Let me build something,” “Let me do this.”
There was a state in which I had not decided, then a thought or intention arose, and afterward I acted.
But surely we cannot simply transfer that psychological process to God.
Otherwise we would be imagining that at one moment God had not decided something, then a new intention appeared, then God acted upon it.
That sounds like the functioning of a created mind experiencing successive states.
So when the Quran says “when He wills”, is it describing God’s actual mode of willing, or is it expressing something incomprehensible to us in language that a human mind can understand?
The same question appears elsewhere.
The Quran says:
“He created death and life to test you as to which of you is best in deed.”
— 67:2Again, “testing” is easy for us to understand.
But a human tests because he does not yet know the result.
A teacher gives an examination to discover what the student knows. A scientist performs an experiment because the outcome needs to be established.
But if God already knows everything — including what I will choose tomorrow and where every human life will ultimately end — then God’s “test” cannot mean acquiring knowledge that He previously lacked.
The test must therefore mean something from our side of reality: that we actually live through our choices, our actions become manifest, we develop or fail, and accountability becomes real for us.
But then the ordinary human meaning of the word “test” cannot be transferred literally to God.
The same difficulty occurs with verses containing language such as:
“And wait; indeed, We are waiting.”
— 11:122What is “waiting” for God?
I wait because something has not happened yet.
Tomorrow is unavailable to me.
I am trapped within a sequence called time: past → present → future.
But if God knows the ghayb completely, does “tomorrow” exist for God in anything resembling the way it exists for me?
Can God literally be “waiting” for an outcome He already knows?
Obviously the Quranic expression communicates something meaningful to us. But what is the reality behind that expression?
This also applies to descriptions of God becoming pleased, displeased, angry, responding, forgiving, watching, testing, deciding and willing.
For human beings these words normally describe changes in our mental or emotional state.
Something happens.
I observe it.
I react.
My condition changes.
But if we apply that process literally to God, we risk imagining God as another consciousness moving through time alongside us — only infinitely more powerful.
And that cannot be what “there is nothing like Him” means.
This is also why the concept of ghayb fascinates me.
We say that God “knows the ghayb.”
From our perspective this makes sense because there are things hidden from us.
But sometimes our imagination unconsciously turns the ghayb into something like a hidden database of future information which God alone has access to.
Yet surely the ghayb is ghayb to us.
We are the ones who do not know tomorrow.
We are the ones who cannot see what is hidden.
So what does “knowledge of the ghayb” actually mean from God’s perspective, where nothing is hidden from Him in the first place?
Perhaps even our categories of “known” and “unknown,” “before” and “after,” “waiting” and “completion” belong primarily to created consciousness.
This makes me cautious whenever we construct very detailed pictures of God’s reality.
For example, we might say:
“God planned everything from the beginning.”
That sounds reasonable.
But what exactly does “from the beginning” mean for a Being who Himself has no beginning?
Or we say:
“Past, present and future are all present to God.”
Again, this may be an excellent philosophical explanation.
But is that something revelation explicitly describes, or is it a model we construct because our minds need some way of reconciling complete divine knowledge with time?
Likewise, there are statements we sometimes make about creation:
God prepared Earth for us for billions of years.
We were somewhere waiting for our turn to be born.
Earth is an insignificant planet in an enormous universe.
There may be perfectly reasonable arguments behind some of these statements, but how much do we actually know?
Science currently provides extraordinarily strong evidence that Earth formed billions of years ago and that the universe is much older. I have no problem accepting that.
But there is still a difference between:
“According to our best scientific evidence, Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old,”
and:
“God spent billions of years preparing Earth specifically for us.”
The first is a scientific conclusion.
The second has added a theological interpretation of God’s purpose.
Likewise, the Quran gives us passages such as 7:172 concerning humanity’s testimony that God is their Lord. Someone may understand this as indicating some form of pre-earthly reality.
But does the Quran actually tell us that conscious souls were sitting somewhere for billions of years “waiting for their turn to be born”?
I don’t think we have enough information to describe that unseen reality with such confidence.
And the same applies to the universe itself.
Our Earth is physically tiny compared with the observable cosmos. But does physical smallness mean insignificance?
Do we know whether there are other worlds containing life?
The Quran speaks of the heavens and “of the earth the like of them” (65:12), and also speaks of creatures dispersed in the heavens and the earth (42:29).
I am not claiming that these verses prove extraterrestrial civilizations. That would be exactly the kind of leap I am questioning.
Maybe there are other conscious beings.
Maybe there are not.
I don’t know.
And increasingly I think those three words are important.
There seems to be a distinction between:
- What God explicitly reveals.
- What we discover about creation through observation and science.
- What we philosophically infer in order to connect everything together.
All three have value.
But they do not necessarily have the same degree of certainty.
This is ultimately the question I am trying to ask.
The Quran has to communicate with human beings using language human beings can understand.
We know what willing means because we will.
We know what waiting means because we wait.
We know what anger means because we become angry.
We know what testing means because we test.
We know past and future because we experience time.
But does it follow that when these expressions are connected with God, their underlying reality operates in the same way?
I increasingly think the answer cannot be that simple.
Maybe revelation gives us true information about God without giving us the capacity to comprehend God’s mode of existence.
“There is nothing like Him” (42:11) may have implications far beyond God’s physical appearance.
Maybe God is not merely something unimaginably large, powerful or intelligent.
Maybe the very categories through which our consciousness understands existence — time, sequence, thought, intention, reaction, location, matter, energy, before, after — cannot simply be projected onto the Creator of those categories.
And this is where my mind reaches its limit.
I believe in the Creator.
I can understand what He tells me sufficiently to live, choose, worship, reason and be accountable.
But when I ask what God’s “willing,” “knowing,” “waiting,” “testing” or even “existing” actually means at the level of God Himself, I am no longer sure that human language or imagination can take me there.
So my question is:
Are these Quranic descriptions meant to tell us something true about God in terms accessible to human consciousness, without necessarily describing the actual mechanism or mode of God’s existence?
And if so, where should we draw the line between understanding revelation and unconsciously turning God into a human-like mind operating on an infinitely larger scale?
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4 Replies
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How Literally Can We Understand Quranic Language About God’s Knowledge With Time
updated 4 days, 8 hours ago
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Are these Quranic descriptions meant to tell us something true about God in terms accessible to human consciousness, without necessarily describing the actual mechanism or mode of God’s existence?
Yes
where should we draw the line between understanding revelation and unconsciously turning God into a human-like mind operating on an infinitely larger scale?
Quran is very clear
In Surah aal imran it discusses mutashabehaat and says that true believers do not indulge themselves in quranic verses they aren’t designed to comprehend.
This is gods message, he authored it as he WILLED. Our job is to extract and understand as much from it as we can. We are not forced to make sense of everything.
Moreover, these metaphors are used to give humans a sense of “what does it mean to have a god”, so that we behave accordingly. These are not necessarily accurate descriptions of a god that exists beyond the extents of matter itself
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This reply was modified 4 days, 9 hours ago by
Karamat Chaudary.
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This reply was modified 4 days, 9 hours ago by
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Thanks Karamat I think your last paragraph is actually very close to what I was trying to get at. Appreciate it brother.
If these descriptions are meant to give humans an intelligible sense of God, without necessarily describing the actual mode of God’s existence, then that is precisely the distinction I was struggling with.
My only hesitation is with saying that the Quran is “very clear” about where that line is.
3:7 certainly warns us about mutashabihat and about forcing meanings from ambiguous verses, but I am not sure it means that we should simply stop thinking about them. The difficulty is more subtle: how do we know when a description is telling us something directly about God, and when it is language adapted to human consciousness?
For example, “God wills,” “God waits,” “God tests,” “God is pleased,” “God is angry” etc. all of these are meaningful to us because we know what willing, waiting, testing and reacting mean in human experience.
But if, as you say, these are not necessarily literal descriptions of a Being beyond matter, time and human psychology, then the question becomes:
How far can we legitimately build theology from those words before we start imagining God in created categories?
That is really the boundary I was trying to understand.
So I think we agree on the larger point. I am only less certain that the boundary itself is always as clear as we may think.
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For me what works is when discussing god, I take these metaphors as worldly impact of whatever god is.
So god is something that is beyond my imagination, but that something has an effect kn some other thing that I can observe. My concern is just restricted to the impact, rather than the actual reality itself.
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This reply was modified 4 days, 9 hours ago by Karamat Chaudary.
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This reply was modified 4 days, 9 hours ago by
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Yes this makes sense to me, and I think it gets very close to the point I was trying to reach.
So, for example, when the Quran speaks of God being pleased, angry, willing, testing, responding, etc., we may understand what those things mean for us and their effect within creation, without assuming that they describe an internal psychological process in God similar to the one we experience.
In that sense, “God is angry” tells me something real about my relationship with God and the consequence of certain (my) actions, but it does not necessarily tell me how anger exists in God, if that is even the right way to formulate the question.
I would only hesitate to call all of these descriptions simply metaphors, because they may still communicate something genuinely true about God. The distinction for me is between knowing what the description means in relation to us and claiming to know the mode or reality of that attribute in God Himself.
That distinction actually resolves much of what was troubling me.
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