How To Account For Allah Controlling Events When We Know About Natural Laws
But if we take the opinion that he was an angel as some scholars of al mawrid say then we don’t see walls magically rebuilt or ships having holes made in them supernaturally. All things still follow the natural chain of cause and effect. I agree with your reply to miracles they are not to be accounted for of course under natural terms. But then if miracles cannot be accounted for nowadays then dua would be pointless for worldly gain except that which relates to the nafs perhaps. If I make a dua that ya Allah please don’t make it rain tomorrow then how would my dua ever be accepted given that whether it will rain or not was decided by the velocity and trajectory of the Big Bang billions of years ago? We may not be able to predict weather but true randomness cannot exist- there is. as far as I am concerned, a causal chain for every incident. And if my dua did cause it to rain (or if the dua was for something that we ate 100% certain in predicting)- then it would be no less then a miracle for it to be accepted. Again this is if you don’t take divine occasional ism. And if you say that it was in fact set out from the Big Bang then that could be interesting because you would be saying Allah knows all the duas that people will make and he has made a sort of ‘if then’ code for them being accepted in a predetermined matter which is almost deism
I think it’s fair to say that the Prophet (SAW) didn’t ask for rain just for the sake of rain. My point was if one pray for an A to be happened with a purpose of X, then if God fulfill such prayer by providing B (instead of A) with the same effect that one can achieve the purpose of X. That’s a prayer answered, we shouldn’t differentiate A from B so long as X is attained. And God being the all-wise and most merciful, logically B is a better alternative for whatever reason befitting to His grand scheme of things. The problem is when we quantified God’s ability to answer our prayer that the only way He can answer our prayer of A is by giving us the A. Looks like we’re putting God in a box here. Whether one subscribes to the vision of God as synthesized by occasionalist schools or by Avicennan model, God remains in the equation. Therefore, either view can be grounded to the attributes of God described in Qur’an.