By Dr Nazir Ahmad
Zargar
November
20, 2020
Prologue
Youth, including mostly the university and
college students very often ask intriguing questions about ‘religion’, ‘faith’,
science, reason etc. I try my level to convince them. But then it is not
possible to reach out to each one of them who are caught in the intricacies of
mind and help them out to see the other end of the dark tunnel of uncertainty.
That is the reason for this write-up which, Allah Willing, will follow many
such write-ups.
Let me
admit honestly that having first been a student of science and then studied
religion, I had to suffer from so many intellectual and psychological
complexities in my early youth. I have tasted the poisonous fruits of
uncertainty as a sceptic for some time and also as an agnostic for some time so
much so that I became a patient of chronic duodenal ulcer. But I have never
experienced atheism for that assumes a position from the very outset and is as
dogmatic as blind faith itself. In fact atheism is also a belief without
evidence but arrogance and the jargon it tries to monopolise makes it something
worth discussing among the people of less knowledge.
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Also Read: Islam, Science and the Muslim Predicament
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I wondered
in wilderness of uncertainty; I lost meaning, hope. In fact there was no reason
behind reason. Somehow I met a spiritual master who at the first sight
diagnosed my disease. He said nothing to me. He did not guide me. He did not
give me a sermon. He simply lit the light and the darkness was gone. Then I
came to know that darkness is no entity, it is just absence of light. Those
people who are caught in the oblivion of darkness need someone to light a
candle for them. The master brought me to the court of the holy Prophet
(sallallahu alayhi wa sallam), not through any book but by example.
My Iman and
my identity as a believer owes to the personality of Rasulullah (Sallallahu
Alyhi Wa Sallam) who always acted as nucleus to my conviction and action. I
have briefly pointed to this fact in my previous couple of articles. To me
trust in the Prophet is quite reasonable because before trust comes integrity
which has always been there so far as the whole life of the Prophet is
concerned. And that is what the Qur’an convincingly invites the non-believers
to ponder before they accept the claim of Islam. Anyway, let me come to the
point I want to discuss in this piece of writing.
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Also Read:
Science and Religion
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There is a
myth that reason and Iman are parallel to each other, having no meeting point
—while reason necessarily leads to a logical negation of God and is thus
scientifically explained, Iman is simply blind trust that cannot be reasoned
out.
The
argument that to be rational means to not believe in God or, in other words,
the more rational and scientific you are, the more liberal and nonreligious you
become, is the argument which is considered more rational and scientific than
the ‘inflexible’ and ‘blatant’ claim that “I believe in God.” The case of God
becomes more confusing when the believer sometimes exclaims: “I believe in God,
not in science; when I believe in God, I have to kill the intellect.”
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In this
article I will try to explore the extent to which either of the arguments can
be accepted or rejected justifiably.
Finding out
the science of denial
When a
rationalist argues that existence of God cannot be proved on the basis of
reason, some rational questions arise inevitably:
Does it
mean that the person has positive arguments in favour of his negation?
Does it
mean that the disbeliever is not convinced by any argument from the believer?
There can
be one more case. That is the disbeliever simply dislikes God. That is his
choice. We have nothing to discuss with him. So our concern is the first two
conditions.
Let’s begin
with the first question, and see how scientific the claim has been?
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So far as
our question no. 1 is concerned what does this question mean? It means that the
person who says that Iman is not rational, has himself rational knowledge in
support of his claim that there is no God. Since this is in itself a claim, it
needs a rational evidence in its support.
In fact we
human beings are not intellectual robots. There are so many emotional,
psychological, social and spiritual factors which determine which worldview we
adopt. So far as my meagre knowledge of atheism based upon my study of books
and watching of debates of famous new atheists, the deniers of God adopt
‘Philosophical naturalism’ as a worldview.
‘Philosophical naturalism is the view that all phenomena within the
universe can be explained via physical processes.’ Hence there is no room for
any ‘supernatural’ in this view. And if at all there is something then that
does not interfere with the physical. But all deniers do not subscribe to this
view. There are some who affirm the non-physical phenomena.
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In the
beginning of the twentieth century, the advancement in science inspired
‘logical positivism’ which says that statements can only be meaningful if they
can be verified empirically. That means whatever is beyond the reach of the
senses is nonsense. So the followers of this worldview declared that denial of
God is the default position for His existence cannot be verified by physical
experience. They hold that the universe has popped into existence out of
nothing without any reason.
But the
view of ‘logical positivism’ couldn’t stand its own test and as a result the
beginning of the second half the twentieth century saw the death of ‘logical
positivism’. The reason was it could itself not be verified via physical
experience.
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The reason
for the death of logical positivism was science itself. The scientific
discoveries of the mid-20th century came up with the theory of ‘Big Bang’ which
postulates a cosmic beginning to the universe. The Big Bang proved very
disastrous to the conventional thinking that the universe was eternal and
needed no creator. Some years later many other scientific discoveries in
genetics explicitly demonstrated that the natural laws were designed and finely
tuned in such a way that clearly suggested that there is a conscious creator.
As for the
second question, my previous two successive write-ups need to be revisited.
What does the question itself mean? It means that if the person is provided
with any convincing argument, he must accept that.
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It would
suffice here to point to a few instances regarding the rational approach of the
Islamic scholars towards the problem of the followers of unaided reason. Imam
Ghazzali terms the deniers of God as reductionists who do not have a holistic
understanding of the universe and its purpose. He asserts that they are like
ants on a piece of paper that cannot lift their eyes from the ink or the pen
they see before them, and fail to see who is writing.
The
foundation for the Islamic argument can be best understood by reading the
Qur’an where it refers to celestial objects, the alternation of night and day,
vegetation, animals and other physical phenomena. Allah created all of these
things with a divine precision:
“And He has
subjected for the night and day and the Sun and Moon, and the stars are
subjected by His command. Indeed in that are signs for a people who reason.”
(16:12)
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If
everything going on around us is meaningless and we ourselves do not have any
meaning; then what meaning will our reason lead us to? And what is the meaning
of reason?
Note: In my
previous article there had crept in an inadvertent mistake which went like
this: “All men of reason [may be] men of heart also like the philosophers but
all men of heart are men of reason at the same time like the Awliya Allah”
instead “All men of reason may [not] be men of heart also like the
philosophers….”
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Dr Nazir Ahmad Zargar, Department of Religious
Studies, Central University of Kashmir
Original Headline: Does science deny the
Creator?
Source: The Greater Kashmir
URL: https://newageislam.com/debating-islam/when-rationalists-argue-that-existence/d/123524
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