This book is intended to demonstrate rationally and scientifically that God is indeed a reality and that the Quran is the book which he has revealed for our guidance. Here is a sample chapter to give readers an idea of what the book is about, and the manner is which issues are addressed within it. Please note the text below is the original draft and there may be minor differences with the final published version.
CHAPTER ONE:ANSWERING ATHEISTS
Before we proceed to discuss the profound scientific and philosophical reasons to believe in the existence in God, we will concisely analyse some of the common objections raised by atheists about God. As will soon become obvious, every one of these objections is based on fallacious arguments and false presuppositions. Not a single one can pass the acid test of consistency or logic.
Objection 1: God does not exist. If God exists we should be able to detect his existence empirically using the scientific method.
The notion that science is unique in its ability to verify the truth about the natural world is based on a number of assumptions that are essential to the scientific enterprise but can never be proved by experiment or observation. For instance the idea that all natural events must have causes or that human beings have the intellectual means to understand the realities they observe and interpret them correctly. There is also the assumption that nature is consistent and predictable.
If scientists did not believe that all natural events have causes, that natural laws are universal and that human reason can devise and interpret experiments that can provide them with truth about the external world, science would be made totally redundant. So in order to believe in the very reliability of science itself one has to place faith in assumptions that can never be proved scientifically.
This demonstrates that some things can be rationally believed even without scientific confirmation. If one arbitrarily rejects God’s existence on these grounds one is guilty of the fallacy of special pleading. It is only if one rejects each and every belief that cannot be tested scientifically (including the ones referred to here) that one can reasonably maintain this as a basis for refusing to believe in God. This of course is a paradox, since the statement ‘All truths can be demonstrated by scientific means’ cannot itself be verified scientifically.
Objection 2: God cannot be observed using our senses. He does not therefore exist.
Throughout the history of philosophy a fierce debate has raged between those who believe that our senses provide us with an accurate idea of the external world (Materialists) and those who believe that the external world is the product of our non-physical mind, and that our senses just present representations to our consciousness that may not correspond to an actual physical reality (Idealists).
The debate can never be won by either side but the evidence does seem to correspond more closely with the Idealist position. This is because modern science has shown that our picture of the world is essentially the result of chemical reactions in the brain in response to stimuli received by our sense organs. We have no way to ever confirm that these experiences actually correlate to any actual reality.
What this means is that if one’s brain could be kept alive artificially and ‘fed’ stimuli it could create a three-dimensional multi sensory reality (as in the ‘Matrix’ movies) that would be every bit as real as the physical world. In other words, the reality of sense experience and the reality of the world outside the mind are something human beings instinctively and positively believe yet it cannot be proved by any means whatsoever. If the reality of our perceptions is itself far from confirmable or falsifiable, how can we argue that something does not exist because we fail to perceive it?
Moreover the existence of people other than ourselves is only known to us as a result of our sense experiences. As such one cannot confirm the existence of other people by any possible means other than faith in the idea that our brain is not deceiving us. The atheist has no reason to believe that blind chemical reactions should provide him or her with an accurate picture of the world.
The believer in God, however, might argue that God has provided our non physical mind/soul (which resides in the brain for the duration of our stay on earth) with true perceptions of the external world. This provides a much better basis for believing in the reality of our sense perceptions.
In any case, the argument from non-observation has another serious difficulty. All humans believe in things that cannot be observed using our senses but are true nonetheless. For instance, if person X loves person Y, their love may be apparent from their behaviour (although this is not always the case) but nobody (not even the individuals concerned) could ever see, touch, taste, smell, or hear the love which they bear for one another.
Therefore some things do exist which cannot be detected by sense perceptions. There is no reason other than prejudice why God should be automatically excluded from being one of them.
Objection 3: The onus to prove God’s existence rests with believers since one cannot disprove the existence of anything or anyone. There is no more reason to believe in God than the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus or pink hippopotami.
Some 90% of the world population believe in God. My suspicion is that historically the percentage has generally been higher. This is in itself reason to doubt that belief in God is similar to unwarranted belief in teapots orbiting the sun or entities that have not been proved to exist like those mentioned above.
Why do so many people believe in God? They believe he exists because they view God (who cannot be observed) as the best explanation for a wide variety of physical phenomena that can be observed. For instance: the changing of the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun; the design evident in living things, human consciousness and morality. Indeed the very existence of the world and its various features.
Since so many people believe in God as the best explanation for these realities, the onus does not rest on believers but rejecters to convince the overwhelming majority of their fellow humans that there are other (and better) explanations for all these things. The default position of humankind to the order and sophistication evident throughout the world has been ‘God created the world and all things within it’.
The atheist must explain why the default position is no longer tenable. For instance in his bestselling book ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ the biologist Richard Dawkins accepts that living organisms appear to have been ‘designed with a purpose’. His whole book is an attempt (failed, in my view) to demonstrate that this appearance is an illusion produced by random evolution coupled with natural selection.
Nevertheless, the fact that he was compelled to write such a book proves that the onus to turn human common sense on its head and assert things are not made by God even though they seem to have been so, rests firmly with the small and vocal minority of non-believers. I should add reversing the burden of proof is no help for the atheists. The positive evidence for God proves his existence anyway.
Objection 4: All arguments for God are ‘God-of the gaps’ arguments. These exploit temporary gaps in scientific understanding and fill them with the explanation ‘God did it’. All things happen in nature without God. We should wait until a natural explanation can be found for things we don’t understand. The whole history of science shows that supernatural explanations have been cast aside as scientific research has found perfectly natural reasons for why things happen as they do.
There are numerous reasons why the criticism of theism that claims belief in God is sustained by temporary gaps in scientific knowledge that will one day be filled naturally, is unacceptable to the point of absurdity. Firstly, there is no possible objective reason why such a presumption should be made. It may be true that certain things which were wrongly attributed to the supernatural intervention of deities in ages past, that we know with the benefit of scientific advancement occur by ‘natural processes’; yet this by no means implies that other things that as yet do not yield themselves to a naturalistic explanation will also succumb to the same fate.
This is especially so since scientific progress has opened certain gaps for ‘divine’ or teleological explanation even as it has appeared to close one or two others. For instance, the classical view of the nineteenth century scientific establishment that the universe has no beginning and thus requires no creation (or creator) has been rejected in favour of the big bang theory that clearly implies all matter, time and space being created ex nihilo – out of nothing. Needless to say this theory has religious implications that are quite repulsive to many naturalists.
The origin of life is another area where intelligent intervention by a supernatural intelligence appears more likely than previously assumed as a consequence of progress in chemistry, molecular biology and geology which serve to underline the massive obstacles to even the most basic self-replicating molecule forming without a miraculous event of one kind or another. These are many other areas of science (especially quantum physics) where materialist and naturalist explanations appear increasingly unconvincing and supernatural intervention seems more likely to the impartial observer, than they used to be.
The dogmatic claim that science will eventually fill all gaps that could suggest divine agency in nature is a statement of faith completely void of scientific support, which can only be attributed to deliberate ignorance, breathtaking arrogance or a fatal combination of both.
Secondly, it is crude oversimplification and very often a purposeful distortion of scientific history to present religious believers as always believing in direct divine action as the cause of natural phenomena; when theists have always believed that whilst miracles can occur this in not the way in which God ordinarily governs the world.
It is true that many ancient polytheistic religions attributed each aspect of nature to the action of gods, for instance the Vikings believed that the thunder occurred when the god Thor struck a cloud with his hammer. On the other hand, the monotheistic faiths have generally believed that God uses repeating patterns of cause and effect relationships to control the universe.
Moreover, the belief that God governs the universe through laws and had also endowed man with the wisdom to understand those laws was one of the great motivating factors behind the progress that theistic scientists (especially Muslim and Christian) made in medieval times and the seventeenth and eighteenth century respectively. Therefore simply discovering that something has occurred due to observable and understandable patterns of cause and effect does nothing to suggest that God is not involved in this process.
Indeed the very existence of these regularities, as well as the fact that they are amenable to human efforts to study them, poses serious difficulties for the atheist. Why? Because what we ordinarily call the laws of nature are not laws at all, but rather descriptions of how a particular cause will usually produce a particular effect. This leaves out the important question, why? Why will the momentum lost by the ball that hits another on a snooker table (to borrow an analogy from C.S Lewis) be gained by the ball it hits? Why do magnetic fields operate as they do? Why is the law of gravity as it is? To this the naturalist has no answer, and most likely feels the questions are themselves ridiculous. Yet they are perhaps the most significant questions one might ever ask. The answer to them surely, is that the laws of nature do not cause anything at all. Rather the laws of nature describe the sequence in which events will usually occur when something sets them into motion. C.S Lewis brilliantly illuminates the irrationality of thinking that science will ever discover a naturalistic cause for the existence of the laws of nature:
Where does an event come from? Each event comes from a previous event. But what happens if you trace this process backwards? If (the stream of events) had a beginning we are faced with something like creation. If it had not we are faced with an everlasting impulse, which by its nature is opaque to scientific thought. Science when it becomes perfect will have explained the link between each link in the chain and the chain before it. But the actual existence of the chain will remain unaccountable. We learn more and more about the pattern. We learn nothing about that, which ‘feeds’ real events into the pattern. If it is not God, we must call it destiny – the immaterial, ultimate, one-way pressure that keeps the universe on the move.1
Indeed if the universe was really an unsupervised accident, the existence of cause and effect, of regular orderly patterns and of beings sufficiently intelligent to observe and understand these patterns would almost certainly have not occurred. The fact these patterns do occur, and unfold in an orderly and purposeful manner is robust proof that it is God and no other who is responsible for their occurrence.
Objection 5: If God is omnipotent and also good, why would he allow suffering and evil to exist in this world? This means one of two things. Either he does not exist, or else he is not good.
God exists in all times and at all places simultaneously. He is able to hear the rustle of the leaves and the motions of the planets concurrently. He is able to see micro-organisms and galaxies in the same field of vision. He holds in his knowledge all that is, all that was and all that will be. He even knows what might have been and was not, and how it might have been. How can humans with limited vision and limited reason possibly hope to comprehend all of God’s decisions?
Nevertheless, by looking at the answers of the various religious traditions of the world we can go some way towards resolving questions like the above. Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and other Karmic traditions teach that all suffering is the result of one’s bad deeds in previous lives. Christianity teaches that suffering and evil are a result of Adam’s fall. Judaism, Christianity and Islam teach that there is divine wisdom between all that occurs even if we struggle to understand it.
In Islam all good and bad fortune is seen as a test from God. Passing the test requires holding fast to endurance and faith in difficult times and showing gratitude to God and generosity to fellow creatures during good times. The result of doing so is an eternity of bliss after the brief interlude we call life is over. The Quran also states that some suffering is meted out to us as a result of bad deeds, so that we are spared more severe punishment in the world to come.
Having provided a summary of the responses of the main world religions to the problem of suffering a few more points need to be considered. Firstly, evil inflicted by humans upon others is a question of free-will. God has given people free will to use or abuse, and will judge them on what they did with it after they die. If he intervened before then free-will would be completely pointless. Secondly, the whole concept of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is relative. We have no basis but individual likes and dislikes for saying something is right or wrong, unless we believe an omniscient being such as God exists, who can define what is absolutely right and what is absolutely wrong. Therefore to say ‘God is not good’ makes no sense.
Third, if strong evidence indicates that the Supreme Being exists (and it does) the existence of suffering and evil does not in anyway disprove, refute or even bring into question that evidence. Therefore the question of suffering indicates nothing about the existence or non-existence of God.
Finally let us look at an imaginary scenario to clarify some of our earlier points:
Sana is girl in a famine-stricken country in Africa. Both her parents died early in her life. She is 11, struggling to survive and is fending for herself and her five year old brother who is blind. They often go without meals for days and are forced to drink contaminated water that may have caused the boy’s blindness.
Now imagine she continues to struggle through life in misery and manages to live out a terrible, painful existence for 60 odd years. If she then dies, and having kept her faith in God and his goodness, is then rewarded with an eternal life with the best of foods, the most luxurious of palaces, the most breathtaking of gardens and all that her heart could ever desire, how long will she remember her trails? What are 60, or even 100 years compared to eternity. It is but a mathematical point, if indeed that. What I mean by this argument is that we humans are caught in the here and now. God’s eye is that of eternity. The eternal eye sees the good that comes out of suffering. The human eye is blind to it.
Objection 6: Ockham’s razor is an accepted principle of science and philosophy. Positing God as the cause of an event or process we don’t understand violates this principle.
Ockham’s razor is the principle that in evaluating competing explanations of a matter, one should prefer the one that posits least entities or makes least assumptions. So (the atheist might argue) if it is possible to explain the existence of the world without God, one should not assume his existence to explain anything.
My response to this consists of two points. First, Ockham’s razor is a useful tool in science and philosophy but is itself not definitive in proving that one explanation is true and another false. For instance it is simpler to explain the existence of mental illnesses as the result of demon possession rather than a multitude of different medical conditions. But if there is no reliable evidence for demon possession in a person, and there is such evidence for the presence of illness we must follow the evidence even against the rule of simplicity.
In the same way, if it was possible to explain everything that we observe without reference to God than Ockham’s razor would apply. But as we shall later see, the existence of the universe and the laws of nature cannot be accounted for without God. As such the positing of God is necessary to any explanation of these things, not a superfluous add-on that can be shaved off by Ockham’s razor. Additionally if it is accepted to be highly improbable for the world to be as it is without God, and that God’s existence would raise the probability of things being as they are, then reason demands that the explanation that makes the improbable (even impossible) probable be preferred to an explanation that makes less assumptions but would massively decrease the probability of the observed facts of life being as they are.
Secondly in some cases, atheists are forced to make more assumptions than theists (believers in God) in order explain certain things. Thus the scientist Martin Rees has come up with the ‘multi verse’ explanation of why the universe appears to be fine-tuned to ensure the existence of life. His explanation assumes the existence of a possibly infinite number of other universes and further assumes that our universe is the one that is randomly suited to life.
Ockham’s razor would prefer the following explanation: ‘God designed the universe in a way consistent with his aim of producing intelligent creatures such as human beings’. This explanation makes only one (rather justified) assumption rather than dreaming up billions of entities (universes) that can never be observed.
Objection 7: If God made the universe, who made God? Furthermore, if we use God as an explanation of biological complexity, there must a designer who designed God because God must be more complex than all that he has designed.
God is a timeless entity. He exists outside of time. Time is itself created by God simultaneously with the universe in the event known as the ‘Big Bang’. God exists outside of time and space; as such he does not have a material body, because matter is a phenomenon that exclusively exists within space-time. No physical body means no requirement for biological complexity. Instead God is pure consciousness, pure spirit or pure mind. This is the simplest form of existence imaginable. He also did not have a beginning, since anything that exists outside of time must be eternal because the act of coming into existence (from non-existence) only happens in time.
No beginning, means no creator. It is therefore wholly preposterous that some have claimed this infantile objection to God’s existence demonstrates why God ‘almost certainly’ doesn’t exist! Since its two basic premises are fundamentally wrong and must stand rejected, we can safely assert that this argument is not even tenable let alone a serious threat to belief in God.
Objection 8: If God exists, why is his existence not completely irrefutable? Why would God hide from our senses and force us to use deductive reasoning (that can always be questioned) to accept that he does exist?
Unlike some plainly disingenuous arguments to avoid the unpalatable reality that is God, this objection appears at least to be genuine and reasonable.
It is perfectly natural to wonder why God has not made his existence absolutely apparent to all of us to the point where nobody but a madman could deny it. The answer once again is free-will. Michael A. Corey explains this extremely well:
The “epistemic distance stipulation” in theology lends further support to this contention, for as John Hick has pointed out, the world must superficially appear as if there is no God for human freedom to remain intact. That is to say, if the Divine Reality was blatantly obvious to everyone, our behavioural freedom would necessarily be short-circuited by our direct perception of God’s great glory, and this is something that is generally deemed as incompatible with our existence as free-willed beings.2
Objection 9: Belief in God is the motivating factor behind wars, terrorism and many other unspeakable crimes. Religion is a dangerous, intolerant force that we are all better off without.
The greatest murderers of the twentieth century were atheists. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao collectively massacred more people in the course of a few decades than religious fanatics have probably killed during the whole of human history. That is not to say that atheism in itself leads people to commit such crimes. It is more accurate to say that people can commit outrageous crimes against their fellow humans whether or not the ideology that they are committed to involves religious belief – or condemns it. All that is required is blood-lust, greed, vengeance and a propensity to brutality.
Any group of people who share these characteristics will indulge in evil. Whether they are Catholics and Protestants burning one another at the stake, or whether they are Nazi officers meting out the ‘final solution’. Furthermore, as previously noted the idea of ‘evil’ has specifically religious and theistic connotations. Good and evil mean nothing unless they are absolute. The only way to have fixed, universal and absolute moral standards is to derive them from an Omniscient Creator who is good in his very essence. So atheists are themselves using morals derived from religion to criticise religion. Otherwise, what basis other than that of expediency and personal preference do they have to condemn it? Hardly solid grounds to dispose of God, one might conclude.
Objection 10: Just because each player in a football team has a mother does not mean that the team itself has a mother. In the same way simply because everything in the universe has a cause does not mean the universe itself has a cause.
To assume that a football team has a mother because each player has a mother is a category mistake. It assumes that sporting teams can share the property of being reproduced in the same way as human beings and other biological organisms do. We know that it is impossible for a football team to have a mother. However, it is certainly not impossible for the universe to have a cause. Indeed, there is no logical reason why we should presume that the universe itself is exempt from the cause-effect relations we observe everywhere within it.
Most people instinctively know that it is impossible for anything to come from nothing. If the whole universe could be the product of nothing, why should we assume that X is the cause of Y? Could it not be that David Hume was right in arguing that we can never be certain that cause and effect relationships actually exist? They may just be ‘habits of the mind’.
If one starts going down this road of arch-scepticism we will end up not only without true knowledge. We will be compelled to accept anti-knowledge which supposes that all human common sense is utterly worthless and all endeavours to learn truth lead us down the blind alley of ignorance. Thus we would undercut the very basis of science, philosophy and religion. I would contend that it is far better to go along with the basic truth that we humans are born knowing.
That is, everything happens for a reason. If the universe came into being, it could not have ‘just happened’ anymore than a football team will just happen, or a person will ‘just’ come into existence without rhyme or reason. The football team argument fails because it assumes that the causation of the universe is impossible or at least highly implausible. In fact, the non-causation of the universe is so absurd as to be unworthy of any further consideration. And, as we shall now see, the Big Bang theory clearly implies a divine, transcendent force behind the creation of the universe.