:-)

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:



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.
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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.

Charlie,
Please allow me to summarize our logical evidence of God that Ibn Alsunnah tried to convey to you. This evidence is NOT based on playing with words. It does take deep thinking sometimes. This evidence is based on very basic logical statements that our minds operate on. In other words, refusing any of them means refusing absolute basic logic that we build are very science (and the scientific method) upon. This is about the start of the universe again. Checkout the following statements and read my comments afterwards. All atheists actually believe in the truth of these 3 statements, but the difference comes afterwards as I will clarify.

Statement1: From absolute nothing, you can not get something. (i.e. if you have absolute nothingness, no God, no world, just nothing, our minds completely refuse the idea of something suddenly emerging with no prior energy, no prior power, no prior matter, and boom Big Bang, universe is here. That’s against our very basic logic. Hope you agree with this.

Statement2: Everything we have seen and experienced is based on a cause and effect. You can never see a door suddenly emerge from absolute nothingness (statement1). It has to have come from somewhere. In other words, you can never see a real-wood door and not assume the wood did not come from some tree for example. You can never see a tree and not assume it came from a seed. You can never look at a falling ball and not assume a force pulling down (gravity)…etc. Cause and effect is everywhere and is consistent. The rule associated with this statement is: everything that “emerged into existence” (i.e. did not exist before and now existed), has to be caused (which is consistent with statement1).

Statement3: and infinite chain of cause and effect is logically impossible. This is a tricky one since it might sound counter intuitive for a second and takes sometime to think about. If I say that a door would only exist only if a tree existed (assuming real wood door of course). And a tree would never exist except if some seed existed, and we can go up the chain until we say, and the first seed would not exist unless the first cell existed. And the first cell would never have existed if no atoms existed… if we keep going back in an infinite chain of cause and effect, our door we’re talking about would never exist. Let me further clarify with an example. I will not give a dollar to my son, until my father gives me a dollar. But my father won’t give it to me except if my grandfather gaves him a dollar. But my grandfather won’t give it to my father except if his father gives him a dollar. If we keep going back to INFINITY, I will NEVER give my son the dollar!
That’s why it is logically impossible to have an infinite chain of cause and effect, because if the existence of what we see around us depended on the existence of earlier atoms…and if we keep going back to INFINITY, then the entire world would not have existed. But we know the world does exist, so an infinite chain of causes and effects can not be true. Think about this one for a second and hope it will become clear for you.

So far both atheists and Muslims believe in the truth of the three statements above by the way.

We all agree that absolute nothing can’t bring you something (w/o any external source of energy/matter…etc.). We also agree that everything has a cause and an effect. Finally we agree that you can never have an infinite chain of causes and effects because this world as we know it would not have existed.

What does this mean? This means the chain of causes and effects has to be terminated by a first cause. Don’t be scared by the term first cause since to you it implies God. It does not logically imply it. As a matter of fact here is exactly where atheists will differ with Muslims.
Atheists say: well, the universe as we know it has been ETERNAL because cause and effect only applies “within” the universe, and we do not know if it applies on the universe in totality. So yes we see a new baby born (existed after he did not exist), and based on statements 1 and 2 above, we deduce he didn’t emerge from nothingness; rather he did come from his parents. In other words, the first cause is matter itself as we know it. The first cause is the actual basic intrinsic physical properties to matter. It’s the fact that a negative charge attracts a positive one and here is where we choose to stop in our chain of cause and effects. Whey stop here (atheists say) because if you ask me what caused a negative charge and a positive one for example to be attracted to each other with a particular force, I would say either:

1- “nothing” since we don’t know any better; it’s just like that, or
2- something (which we believe is God), but then that something has to be caused (The who created God question) So if we have to choose where we stop in this chain to be the first Cause, it will be matter and its physical properties for us, and not a God.

Muslims on the other hand say: well we don’t buy the fact that First cause is the mere absolute physical properties of matter, we believe that if you go up the chain one further step, you would see that God created matter with such physical properties. And at God the chain stops to make God our First Cause.

Let me give you an example. If I ask you why your blood is red in color, you would say because of the red cells and hemoglobin…etc. If I ask why is hemoglobin red in color, you would say because… if I keep asking questions like that I will end up eventually asking you about why physical matter behaves as it does with such physical properties. In other words, I will end up asking you: why do two objects attract each other with a force directly related to their masses and inversely to the squared distance? That’s where you will stop and say: that is it. This is the first cause. It’s like that because it’s like that and no one can explain it any better! It’s pure physics.

Now here is the big question, and please do spend some time thinking about it. You decided to stop at the very essence of matter and could not go beyond it. And thus matter ended up being your eternal first cause. We took it one further step and said, but these physical laws even are created and maintained by God and so God in our view is the eternal first cause.

So we have two options here: we say God is the eternal first cause, atheists say: matter and its properties are the eternal first cause.

Why did we choose God over matter? To be continued in a different post.
Hope you’re starting to get a better idea of how we think.
Stranger

Charlie,
Keep in mind we’re still discussing only one evidence (the logical evidence) for God’s existence. We have many more, but let’s take them one at a time. Please do forgive my long posts as once I start writing, I try to maintain my train of thoughts so I don’t forget my ideas.
Going back to our critical question of why Muslims believed in God rather than matter to be the eternal first cause. Here are the basic answers for that important question (please take your time to think about them):

1- To the best of science’s ability so far, science believes that best theory to explain our universe is that it started at a particular point in time (Bing Bang). They gathered many evidence including the background radiation detected by the couple that won the noble prize for it as you know. And also including the research on red shifts which proved that the universe is currently expanding (side note: our Quran states that universe is currently expanding and we do consider this a scientific miracle in Quran). The Big Bang theory has as much evidence as evolution. They both follow the same logic. They both explain things that happened in the far past in the light of different evidences that support the claims for these theories. In both cases, we never saw how it started. In both cases we have associated evidence that makes scientist believe they happened. So based on BB, our universe had a start point. So it emerged into existence after not existing. Per statements 1 and 2 above, it has to have a cause! Can we say the same about God? Did he emerge into existence after he did not exist? We believe no. We believe that God ALWAYS existed and thus is eternal. Since he always existed, and is thus eternal, his existence does not depend on any external cause. He’s is the ultimate end of causes. This also answers the “illogical” question of who created God. Why do I say it is illogical? Because the question assumes that God is not eternal. It assumes he emerged into existence after he did not exist, and so we asked what caused him. The answer is nothing caused him. He was eternal. Can we say the same about our universe? No because to the best of our knowledge it is not eternal, but rather started at some point in time.

2- Atheists claim that matter is eternal. We don’t believe in that. Why not? One important key difference between matter and God is that matter changes its attributes. The universe is in a constant change all the time. We believe that God is not the same. We believe that God is eternal in himself, but also that his attributes are eternal. Nothing changes about him. What does this mean? Logically change is a sign of a starting point. I’m claiming that if you change, you can not be eternal. How so? Let me clarify with an example. Let’s take the universe. It’s changing all the time. Let’s take a fixed moment in time (now). With this moment there are certain positions to objects/ parameters, and even every single atom. These positions can not be where they are right now, unless they were where they were in the previous moment. So the previous moment is a prerequisite for the current moment for where every single atom is right now. But in the previous moment, the positions of all atoms in the world depends on where all these atoms where in the moment before it. Each moment depends on the previous one as far as the position of every single atom in the universe. The current positions to all atoms would have never occurred if previous chain of positions within moments of time did not occur. What does this mean? This means if you claim this universe existed for eternity; it would never be the way it is right now at a single moment of time. It’s again the impossibility of an eternal chain of cause and effect per statement3 above. So we choose God to matter because matter changes all the time, but God is eternal in his existence as well as his attributes.

3- Assuming this universe is eternal leads us to a contradiction to thermodynamic laws. As you know the laws state that heat flows from hot to cold objects. In other words the sun is emitting light and heat (energy) all the time. This light and heat are will even out through the entire universe if you give it a very long time. If we take the sun as an example, the sun will keep emitting heat and light until it dies (in 4 billion year according to some scientists). Why would it die? Because energy will keep flowing from the hotter object (sun) to the colder (everything that receives this heat in our galaxy) including earth. If we claim that sun existed for eternity, per the thermodynamic laws, the Milky Way galaxy would have reached heat equilibrium by now and the flow of energy would have stopped. Scientists realized that this violates established laws, and this was an additional evidence to believe that Sun did not exist forever. Same argument applies to the universe. If our universe has existed for eternity, by now heat would have reached and equilibrium and the entire universe would have been at the same temperature (which surely leads to no life!). We either have to break these established thermodynamic laws, or deduce that there must be some external power/ external factor that started the universe (whether you want to believe it to be God or not). Again this makes us further believe that God exists since he is eternal, but universe is not.

4- Here is my favorite one and I ask you to really ponder upon it a little bit, so God may guide you to him. I will claim that laws can not exist without someone establishing and maintaining them. Let’s start with an example. If you see a computer right now that has running programs. They run with a certain behavior and follow a particular law. To use the computer and see the great things it can help us with, we would not hesitate to think that somebody was behind designing this computer and programming the different programs that run on it. If I really did not initially know much about computers or how they work, and I asked: how does this computer internally work? If I open up the computer and see a hard disk, RAM chips, motherboard, and see how they are connected and detect electric signals on how the different components communicate: will I say: I found out why we see for example the picture on the screen. It’s simply being loaded from the RAM to the monitor through the VGA cable. That’s why we can see the screen. What does this mean? Does this mean that no body designed this computer and programmed it just because I detected its behavior? I never explained why it behaves like that. All I saw is an observation or a particular behavior and guesses on why and how it works based on certain laws. I never explained why the laws work the way they do! I can’t say there does not exist a designer for the computer because these “laws that govern computers” just exist with no reason. They exist because there was some INTELLIGENCE behind them! This is exactly the biggest problem in how people think that science negate the existence of God. Old human beings maybe never knew how rain fell. Now science observed more and noticed that sun produced heat that vaporizes sea water and then this was carried in form of clouds that will eventually rain. This is exactly saying: we know how it works, but we can never explain why it works like that. Why do water particles vaporize like that when exposed to heat? Why do atoms behave in such a manner that maintains life on earth? Does this mean there is no “designer” or “intelligence” behind it just because we observed “how” it works? This is the greatest atheist fallacy in my opinion. Why do human beings survive? Because the heart keeps bumping blood. Why does it do so? Because it gets electric signals to bump like that. What triggers the electric signals? Nothing it just happens like that!!!
How do we comprehend things and have consciousness? Our brains have neurons and they get fired to represent different things and make us have our consciousness. But why at a random point in time does it trigger these neurons? What’s the key behind these laws? Don’t know, it’s just how the brain works. No: there is a great design and intelligence involved we say. If you carefully read all the questions above, you would see that it will always boil down to the same main question: why does matter behave the way it does right now and how does it with simple rules come up with such marvelous complexities (truly beyond description) of our current world. Both believers and atheists absolutely believe that there are a lot of amazing “fine-tuning” of parameters in the universe to allow matter with its own properties to become our universe as we see it. Dawkings admits to this too, and the best answer he can come up with is proposing a very mind-stretched multi-universe theory that has absolutely no support or evidence. Just anything to deny God vs. even exploring the possibility that he does exist!!
So my question for you and all atheists, that I never got a convincing answer ever so far, is: How do atoms randomly explode and have certain physical laws (like forces of attractions…etc) come up with such a marvelous universe randomly? Don’t tell me about evolution, I’m talking about before the first cell was composed. I’m talking about how earth rotates around the sun in just exactly the right speed and distance to support life. How did this greatly-finely-tuned universe come about the way it is right now with such amazing uniformity and organization out of a random explosion? This violates the second law of thermodynamics further (entropy). Natural tendency of matter as we know it goes from organization to chaos (unless an external force/factor is involved). This is by the very basic laws of physics. Don’t even attempt the (random chance) argument. Mathematically I can prove to you that the probability that from a random explosion of matter we can get what we see today in our world is way beyond even the possibility that 14 billion years will suffice for such a probability to occur. Did you think about the first cell? Did you think about the fact that to see life on earth, that first cell didn’t only have to exist, but also had to have the absolute correct (programming) of DNA that would enable the cell not to only survive, but to also have a mechanism to reproduce? Not only that, that DNA has to have information about how after the cell reproduces, it communicates with other cells! Not only that, it should also have mechanism to group together to form tissues and eventually organs. Not only that, it should have programming for these organs to communicate and work on the one goal: survival of the entire biological structure. Did you know when a cell reproduces to generate two new cells the DNA get’s split and a corresponding copy of the DNA (AT/GC) bonds is made. Once that copy is made did you know there are enzymes in the cell that goes to the new cell and checks the copying process to make sure it was copied correctly, and even correct wrong bonds!!!!! We see new “biological laws” emerging from pure “physics laws”. How did it emerge? Did all this occur randomly? I’m not even talking about evolution yet. All this is really right before evolution takes place. Did you notice that there is always a tendency for organization and survival!!! As if everything is being prepared “on purpose” for life to exist the way it does right now!!! To me my friend, the conclusion is inescapable, there has to be not only physics laws: there has to be some kind of “INTELLGENCE” and “DESIGN”. This is why Muslims choose God over matter. God has this required intelligence and design which is far beyond description. Matter as we know it today does not!

Sorry again for the long post, but once my fingers start typing, I just can’t help stopping!
I pray for you to see this and understand that we’re not simply ignorant people that don’t think about such major decisions about life. We do have a lot of evidence that make us very convinced of what we believe on (more to come). I’m not too worried if I make a mistake and believe when I should not have. I would be much more worried if I make the mistake of not believing when I should have, and carry the “eternal” burden of the consequence of such a decision. That is not to say that we’re not positive about God’s existence, but as a way for you to reflect upon the importance of why we take such matters very seriously.
Best of luck,
Stranger