The question of the first consiousness – how did it come to be? – occurs to me only occassionally but when it does, it stuns me. It stuns me because it seems to be at once a most important and natural question to ask and also an utterly unanswerable one. How did it come to be that there was something or someone before everything and everyone else! Who made the one who allegedly made everything else? And if one wants to say that the first one couldn’t be made and simply just was, how did it come to be something or someone that always is/was? The capacities of my mind to contemplate seem so radically inadequate before such a question. And it does not help me to say that no one made anything. I am still confronted with the question of existence – how is it that things exist? How have they always been? And if they haven’t always been, how did they come to exist? And if nothing exists, how is it that i feel they do?
it is curious that i find myself in posession of (or find myself in the presence of) the notion of ‘firstness’ or ‘thereness’. Something, i find myself realizing, must be there for there to be something. My mind can’t go beyond the idea of somethingness but it also can’t discard it simply because it can’t go beyond it. My mind doesn’t have a ready notion of what that something, something there/first, might be but it is attuned to the neccessity of there being something before anything else.
I wasn’t here and now I am here. I (my reason) can’t accept that i was nothing at all and that nothingness turned into me. This is not reasonable to me. And by the same token it seems (but only by the same token) the idea that there was nothing at all and then that no-thingness turned into something ( a ‘first’ being) called god is unreasonable. As ‘first’ of a second and third and forth etc., no being, including god, is acceptable to reason. Reason asks: but how did the first being come into being? who made the one who made something else? and there is no answer that I have for this simple question and so I call it a mystery. It is a mystery in that reason doesn’t encompass or penetrate it.
If nothingness could not turn into me, what could or did turn me into me? where or what was I before i came to be me, here? Revelation helps reason by proposing an answer – there is a Being whose existence, knowledge, power, wisdom, will and so on, are indicated/evident by the existence of things (including myself) that i see here. Something or someone has made me realize that something cannot come from nothing and must ‘come’ from someone or something. What they are from is called God by revelation. God is presetned to reason as the being, the existence, that precedes and grounds all that I perceive (material and immaterial). I can’t see God’s being in the way I see the being-th4ere of a tree or even as I ‘see’ love and beauty but I can affirm with my mind that a being, a being that must exist and should have knowledge, power, beauty, love, will, providence, foresight that I see necessary for, for instance, a tree or a squirrel to exist. This much reason can follow and affirm. But being a product /creature of that Being (who also must possess reason and intelligence since he could give them to me), reason is not able to access the reality and nature of that Being’s firstness and lastness (lastingness). Reason cannot cross the threshold into knowledge of how that Being came to be and how it came to possess the attributes that reason sees that Being posessing by realizing what must precede the existence of things that I can perceive. What is thus first in the sence of not being of the nature of beings i perceive and know is how i can refer to God. I can be sure that such a first exists without ever understanding how such a first could exist. I dont have the tools to discern why and how the first, God, exists. I have the tools to affirm that each being must come from someone or something that already exists with everything needed to bring that thing into being, to keep it in being and to take it back to itself once it no longer exists in the way/form I knew it to exist when it was still here. The firstness and lastness of God can save me, and all that exists, from 1) the irrationality of nothingness becoming something and 2) from the unbearable pain of something beloved and beautiful, becoming nothing.
The Quran as Revelation 