Studying Atheism
Faraz sahab 1. I couldn’t unpack it to understand what you really mean. 2. This is by design. Science relies on “observations”. It’s quite natural that all “sciences” seem to be in agreement with an ideology that restricts their worldview to only the empirical domain. 3. Although some scientists would like us to believe this, it’s far from being true. 4-6. These are only concerns because of not understanding epistemology, which within itself has been long debated in the world of philosophy without reaching any conclusions. When we understand the Quranic viewpoint in this regard ‘in the context’ of such debates, I think that things begin to fall into place pretty quickly. I conclude by suggesting that you may want to reconsider the goal of your study. There’s nothing wrong with a ‘believer’s heart’, as you put it. In fact it is a natural state of human existence. Quran makes it very clear right in the beginning verses that it’s a book meant to provide guidance for those who are conscious of God. In verse 30:30 God equates His religion with the innate / natural disposition. With that, I think that a better approach would be to understand the fundamental arguments of religion on an objective basis, however insisting that religion could be understood without having a believer’s heart would not only be an unnatural discourse, but one that won’t yield any useful results. To the contrary, one should investigate atheism with a certain degree of skepticism because it requires us to go against our natural tendency to believe. This is precisely the reason why I suggested in my previous response that having a good grasp of the constraints posed by human knowledge is a necessary pre-condition to arriving at any useful conclusions.
Please also refer to the video below from 43:12 to 48:59 https://youtu.be/I25CRFs4S4s?t=2592
Brother Faisal, I agree with you that a having a believers heart is nothing but natural state of being. The point you made about not understanding epistemology, could you suggest any way to understand it? like a book or lecture series or way of thinking Main objective of the study is to see what led human beings to conclude that there’s no God. We believe that God is eternally merciful and He has placed evidences of His existence everywhere and yet there is evidences, patterns in this physical world of ours that conclusively (to a very large no of humans) prove non-existence of God. I am not interested in people converted to atheism because of what they saw religious people do or politics or any such thing involving human-human interaction. But my concern is how to conclude existence / non existence of God when human being looks out to the physical world and within him self (i.e. looks at universe outside and working of his brain or “self” inside). Religion was the natural way throughout history with few outliers. But for the past 2-300 yrs, most educated among us chose to be atheist or agnostic or their concept of God is much different than 3 monotheistic religions. I want to understand the origin of this shift of ideas and why? Brother Wudud, thank you for your answer I could not understand what you meant by laws of nature and Surah Ikhlas, please explain There’s no such thing as law of cause and effect, cause and effect emerge at macro level only. Doesn’t mean thing do not cause other things but it does not happen every single time but appear as such. Innate nature is a highly debatable topic, science and established history has yet to prove its existence. Innate nature has to be same in all humans but it doesn’t seem that way so far. All we have in common in consciousness and ability to reason. I am not denying innate nature’s existence but I can’t use it as an argument for tauheed. I made the point earlier that history has to be established by some form of physical evidence.
Thank you brother Umer 1st video: agree with Ghamidi sahab. Science doesn’t know how matter is formed, or how lifeless matter became alive but religion also doesn’t offer an explanation of these facts either but claims that God did that 2nd video: that’s exactly how I want to study atheism. Understand the root causes. 3rd video: Ghamidi sahab is true that if we do not believe in God then we have to believe in laws of physics to be eternal. This was the idea in Lawrence Krauss’s book, Universe from nothing.
A few comments I thought might be useful: “The point you made about not understanding epistemology, could you suggest any way to understand it?” You might have to go all the way back to Socrates and then move forward in the history of Philosophy through Post Modernist times in order to understand various viewpoints about truth. This can be beneficial in understanding the Farahi Theory of Knowledge and Ghamidi sahab’s viewpoint in this regard. “ But for the past 2-300 yrs, most educated among us chose to be atheist or agnostic “ Atheism and agnosticism have always been around, but the atheistic ideology has taken a stronger foothold only after Wallace and Darwin in the 19th century and more so in the 20th century. In my understanding the cause is very much political in nature. In the last few decades since 9/11, New Atheism has become popular and it has its own reasons. You might want to checkout a documentary on Youtube called “ Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed “. A point worth mentioning here is that neither was Darwin nor any of the biggest scientific minds in the history of humankind, including Newton and Einstein were atheists. “Innate nature is a highly debatable topic” Apart from pop-science, in my knowledge it is not seriously contested in the academia. It’s very difficult to contest something that’s already common knowledge with everyday empirical evidence anyway. It might be useful if one draws a distinct line between pop-sci and academics right from the beginning in order to avoid confusion caused by two different and often opposing domains.
True, no one claims as such but by claiming “natural selection” they imply it. Whether natural selection is intelligent design or not is irrelevant as it’s not human domain to judge the creator’s decisions particularly when one insists there is no purpose of creation. I am just trying to highlight the core of the disagreement as per my understanding without going into the theists vs atheist debate assuming we already know it.
bhai gusha na khhaoo. i’m not good at explaining things in a single attempt so just bear with me. By analogy of windows, what i am trying to explain is that science can only help us form a plausible theory about existence of God but not prove it as God exists outside the domain of natural laws. Let’s say we task a team of high caliber people (to replace AI) to study windows and try to figure out the creator. They might conclude that it’s a great salable software and whoever is the creator must be a rich person. In the 2nd phase of the research they find only Bill Gates is rich he must be the owner of windows. You can see the role of science here is so limited (yet important) to reach the truth. Similarly, we can study the universe both at macro and micro level and conclude that it a gigantic creation machine. Then we can infer the Owner must be someone who loves Creation. This is how science can probably help “prove” God in a best case scenario.
“If science can’t explain something doesn’t mean religion can” You are missing a point here and that is “ladder of inference”. Let’s say i am a scientist but I don’t know how to cure my ahead ache. A friend of mine refers me to a doctor. I interview the doctor to evaluate his ability and past success stories and agree to be his patient. He asks me to walk in the morning for 40 minutes and that would cure my headache. I can’t find any link between the two but the idea works. This is how religion help reach the truth. You first appreciate the divine wisdom through verifiable data points and then place a trust or belief on the rest. This is also referred to as ladder of inference. “In world of reason, conjecture/belief is not evidence of any sort.” You are refuting your own argument here. You are confusing reason with science – both are two different things. Reason is logic, rational and “sanity check” as a branch of philosophy. Science is a tool to find out and collect data on how the natural laws work. Truth is always inferred sometime with 100% certainty and sometimes less. The five sense that science is based on are incapable of proving any thing true or false on their own without “reason or sanity checks”.
I never said god of gaps. Twins in their mother womb can argue all 9 months regarding existence of their mother, one can infer from her voice and movements and other without ability to infer can go in the state of denial and keep looking for irrefutable evidences but he can’t find one until he comes out of the womb – not even if he’s a Harvard graduate with a zillion year work experience at Nasa. It is not moving so lets end it here. I am gonna hit the unsubscribe button. See you in another discussion next time.