Hi Charlie,
Hope you’re doing well.
Feel free to ask problematic questions, we’ll try to answer in our best capacity.
I have nothing much to discuss about the 97% percent of believers as I agree that it does not necessarily constitute an evidence, but to me at least it makes sense that if God exists (like we believe), he would make it a natural tendency for people to believe in him. So it does mean something to me in the middle of all other evidences; certainly not solid evidence by itself. One interesting research I read related to this topic was about some evidence that children are born believers in God:
It was conducted by Dr. Barrett, a PhD in experimental psychology from Cornell, and a senior researcher of the Center of Anthropology and mind and the institution for cognitive and evolutionary anthropology at Oxford University. You might find it interesting:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...ic-claims.html
Before I could proceed, please allow me to make a couple of comments that will hopefully better help our discussion.
The first comment is as Br. Ibn Alsunnah have mentioned, in a couple of days, our holy month of Ramadan starts in which we fast and focus on more worshiping and prayers. I will try my best to come here, but our responses might be pretty delayed, so I kindly ask you to please be patient with me, or just defer the discussion until after the month.
Second comment is that in the context of you being here to learn our perspective of religion and God, I will try to the best of my abilities to clarify it for you. Feel free to disagree or ask for further clarifications on certain points. My goal is hopefully to convey the message to you and show you how and why we’re convinced about its truth. We already believe in God. You already don’t. So to me from what I understood from your reason of being here, I don’t see the burden of “convincing” you about God on me per say. I only see my job as a presenter to our way of thinking about religion and God especially that you mentioned that you don’t want to believe, you just want to know. Had you said, you would be open to possibly believe in God, I would’ve probably approached it differently. That’s just my perspective and the rest of the brothers, might approach it differently. So I will not consider this a “debate” although I have called it such many times before. Hope you’re ok with this approach.
.
Now Charlie we have to understand that our human mind is great and powerful, but is also still limited. Everything you input in your mind is based on what you get from your senses. Your brain has the power to manipulate things, put things together, separate things from each other, resize things, detect patterns, deduce cause and effect, and so on. All these operations have to be done on raw data inputted by the senses. My favorite example of this is blind people who were born blind. Did you know research showed that these people have no notion of visualization and images? As a matter of fact people who are born blind see dreams in only sounds and feelings/touch format. There are no images. There are no colors. They don’t know what colors are no matter how much you try to explain it to them. If their brain is not capable to even imagine or understand colors, it does not mean that colors don’t exist!
To answer your question now, I do not know how exactly God created the world. As you know we believe that God is all powerful and is dominant. He is certainly powerful enough to create the world. One of our biggest problems is that we always think that rules apply to God like they would apply to us. Human beings can focus on one thing at a time. Their brain is limited like I explained. God has no limits on what he can take care of at a time. As a matter of fact, we believe that he controls and knows every single thing in the world, including every single leaf falling from which tree. So yes I do believe that he controls everything in the world. I actually would NOT believe in a God if he did not possess these attributes. This is part of why I accept Islam vs. any other religion that will tell me God is fire, or God is the sun, or God is a cow, or God gets children…etc. (Another thread can be open on the topic of why Islam vs. other religions).
Not knowing “how” he controls or “how” he created the world obviously does not mean that we wouldn’t know “that” he created the world and “that” he does control every aspect of it.
I have a lot for you, but let me break them apart into different posts to better organize this discussion.