Lecture
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17
Social Justice
Islam, A Coherent Social Justice Tradition | Omar Suleiman | 16th MAS-ICNA Convention
22
Jurisprudence (fiqh)
Appreciating Scholarship: Intro to Islamic Law - Tesneem Alkiek | Yaqeen in NY
26
Islamophobia
How Yaqeen Heals Internalized Islamophobia - Dalia Mogahed | Making Principled Progress
29
Education
How Yaqeen is a Resource for Our Community - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Making Principled Progress
34
General Psychology
Spiritual Personality - Zohair Abdul-Rahman | 2018 Yaqeen/MAS Academic Conference
35
Social Justice
Conflict Resolution: The Line Between Justice and Peace - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Lecture
47
Identity
Keeping Masculinity from Trending Toxic - Dr. Jonathan Brown | Reframing the Gender Question
Atheism: Doubting Your Doubts - Asadullah Ali | Yaqeen in NY
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. I have been privileged today to give a talk on atheism, and I'd first like to thank the host for having us here, and for accommodating us so that we can give these very important talks about some very important topics. Prior to getting into the discussion, I just want to say a little bit about myself. I hold two degrees in philosophy, and one of my specialties has been atheism. In fact, my master's thesis was on atheism. And you're probably wondering, the first question in your mind is, why did I choose a degree in philosophy? And I like to tell myself that the reason I did so is because I wanted to discover the mysteries of humanity and purpose and life. But the reality is, usually I'm just thinking long, deep thoughts about unemployment and other such things, my own existential crisis. That said, I want to clarify that I'm not going to give you guys a long, convoluted argument for God's existence. I'm not going to be presenting any sort of logical deductions or anything of the sort, so I don't want you to worry, for those of you who are not familiar with my field. What I do intend to do, however, is I want to talk about atheism in a way that I feel is really most important to how a lot of young Muslims are dealing with the concept, or dealing with the issue today. And that is from a psychological and pragmatic perspective. And what I mean by those things is not simply emotions, but what it means to experience doubts in today's world, what it means to be entrapped by these doubts and want to move towards atheism.
So I want to discuss not only the motivations behind going towards atheism, but how atheists tend to think about these things, from a psychological and pragmatic perspective, and how we're to deal with them in that way, in that manner. I am not an individual who actually believes that you can convince most people through logical arguments. I don't think it works that way. I've been dealing with atheists for the majority of my life, not the majority of my life, excuse me, the majority of my career. That would be interesting, though. And I have never found, or at least most of the time, maybe 99% of the time, I've never found that atheists are usually convinced by intellectual arguments. It usually has to do with a lot of emotional and psychological issues. So I want to discuss three primary issues today. The first one being the problem of evil, the second being the problem of representation, and thirdly, the problem of belief or knowledge. So with regard to the first one, the problem of evil, what is the problem of evil? Well, it's very simple. People look at the world around them and they see horrible things happening on a daily basis. If you're a Muslim especially, this is nothing new to you. In fact, Muslims, I think, experience more evil than most people today. We look at Myanmar, we look at Syria, we look at Yemen, we look at Iraq. Muslims are constantly faced with these dilemmas, are constantly faced with these issues where they are seeing people dying, starving, or being violated in the most horrendous ways possible. Hence why you also have an issue within the Muslim youth about this particular problem, the problem of evil. And the way it is often addressed is that because there is so much evil and there is such an all-powerful God that exists, apparently,
why isn't he doing anything about it? Why is he just sitting around, you know, just letting it all happen for no reason when he has the power to just decimate all evil within a moment, within just a second, even less than that? Why is he allowing all this to occur? And as a result of that, these questions fill our minds and many people tend to go down the route that, well, maybe he doesn't exist. What evidence is there that he does exist if he has so much power and concern for us? Why is he not doing anything? Therefore, he just, maybe it's just a fiction in my mind. Maybe it's just a myth. But I always found this to be a very curious doubt for many reasons. First off, when we look at the Quran, Surah Al-Baqarah, Ayah 30 in particular, we find that Allah Subhana wa ta'ala, especially, well, at least in the Islamic traditions, but in the Islamic tradition, God is very, very explicit. He's very explicit about why evil exists and also how to deal with it. And very much like humans initially react to evil, the angels also reacted to evil when it was presented to them. They reacted in a very similar manner. They saw it. They saw that Allah Subhana wa ta'ala was going to create something, someone, that was going to create a lot of corruption and bloodshed on the earth. And the angels asked him, why are you doing this? And Allah responded very simply, I know what you do not. Now, that seems like a very simple answer, but it's a very profound answer, one that we should really think about because it has a number of implications. The first of those being that Allah is telling you explicitly that it's not a problem. He's telling you that it's not a problem for him. It's not an issue.
I know what you do not. I have it under control. Don't worry about it. That's the first explicit answer. The second one is he's saying is that there is a purpose. I know what you do not. I know why I'm doing this. There is a purpose behind that evil. And finally, he's also saying that I know what you do not because I am the only one who can rectify it. I'm the only one who can solve whatever is in your hearts, whatever that problem is. What you think is an issue is not an issue for me because I will deal with it. Maybe not in the way that you want me to, maybe not immediately, maybe not in the manner that you think is appropriate, but I will. That's why I'm allowing it to exist to begin with. And you would think that that would be sufficient, but many people don't consider it to be sufficient. And I always thought that was really weird. Why? Why do people still feel that atheism is a far more rational position to take than to accept that God is there overseeing everything, despite all the horrible things that we see on a daily basis? Because to me, if you adopt atheism, the problem of evil does not go away. It doesn't suddenly vanish from the face of the earth. You still have evil. The moment that you have rid God, the situation is happening in Syria and Iraq and Libya and Yemen. They don't just magically disappear. They're still there. Women are still raped. Children are still starved to death. Innocent men are shot and killed. Horrible things that keep occurring, regardless if God is there or not in your mind. It's still a problem. So what have you solved?
The existential angst that an atheist would feel is still there. He still sees evil. Except now that evil, and here's where it becomes worse, that evil is no longer rectified and it no longer has a purpose. You no longer have a God saying, I'm going to deal with it. You no longer have a God saying, it's going to get solved. That woman stays raped. That child stays starved. And that man stays dead and murdered without any justice for all of eternity. That seems a far more depressing standard for the problem of evil than when you bring God into the equation. But then when I bring this up to a lot of atheists, they tell me, well, we can solve the problem because I can make my own meaning and I can make my own purpose for what evil means and how to solve it. And you hear this a lot from atheists. We make our own meaning and our own purpose. And I always found that very curious as well. Really? So you reject religion for being a man-made myth, but you're willing to make more myths? Then why even become an atheist to begin with? If it's all the same, stay a Muslim. Because in the end of the day, it's still a myth, right? Theoretically, it makes no sense. Economically, it makes no sense in an intellectual standpoint. You still get the same results at the end of the day. You're still making a problem. But of course, as Muslims, we believe these things to be true. But the atheist admits to having to make up his own truth in order to compensate. I find that to be a very weak position to hold. But you know what's even more interesting about the problem of evil?
If the problem of evil is actually a problem, then we should hypothesize something. We should hypothesize that those who suffer the most should be the most susceptible to not believing in God. However, we find the opposite. The people in Syria, the people in Iraq, the people in Libya, the people in Yemen, the people in Myanmar still look up to the sky and say, La ilaha illallah, despite the fact that they've lost their families, their homes, that they're refugees, that they're starving. Because that is the only thing that gives them any sort of hope. It gives them any sort of willpower to keep moving forward. You would think that because they are suffering the most that they would be the first to leave it. But they do not. It is the only thing that keeps them human. And you see, the only people who tend to be complaining about the problem of evil are those individuals who live in relatively lucrative homes. In other words, a bunch of fedora-tipping trolls who have nothing else to do with their time than complain on Facebook, on the Internet, about the problem of evil, problems that they have never experienced themselves. Fascinating. Fascinating problem that you've never dealt with. But others have, and yet they still call out to God. Something to think about. This moves on to the second point that I want to bring up, which is the problem of representation. And what does that mean? People have a tendency to accept or reject beliefs based on the representatives. So for example, people see ISIS and they assume that this is somehow representative of Islamic teachings. You have a lot of individuals who will experience a traumatic event
through either their family members who happen to be Muslim or others around them who happen to be Muslim, and then they go, this must be the religion. As a result of that, I have to leave. This cannot be something that I can follow because other people are following it and they're doing bad things. But this has always seemed like a very curious position to me, a very curious problem. First off, how do you determine an ideology based on what people say about it or act in its name? Let me give you an example of why I find this to be absurd. Does anybody know what the formal name of North Korea is? The Democratic Republic, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. They are the ISIS of democracy. But nobody uses them as a standard to judge democratic principles. Why? Why? Why is that? Is it convenience? Perhaps. Does anybody judge the United States Constitution based on right-wing politics? No. At least no sane individual does. Does anybody judge policies of socialism based on China? Based on what they're doing, what they used to do? No. But only when it comes to Islam, somehow, individuals all of a sudden become representatives, become the actual manifestation of Islamic teachings, which I find to be a curious double standard. Likewise, a similar double standard is that these same individuals who tend to have doubts about Islam never look at history. They always like to be enamored with the West. They like to look at Western technology and science and their stability within the domestic realm,
and they tend to say, well, this must be because of Western or secular liberal ethics. But 100 years ago, that was not the case. 100 years ago, secular liberal ethics led to numerous genocides. And 100 years ago, the Muslim world was still one of the most powerful empires that existed. So it seems to me that these same individuals would have 100 years ago become Muslim as a result of the situation being reversed, which is very strange how to pick a standard of belief based on these constant changes. Likewise, what I find interesting about this problem of recognizing people psychologically is how they never seem to think about their own standards and how they view, for example, Western societies. And I find this among Muslims especially. I'm sure all of you have heard this platitude before, because when I first converted to Islam, this is the first thing that I heard as well. When you go to Muslim countries, you find lots of Muslims, but no Islam. But when you go to Western countries, you find no Muslims, but you find Islam. And I thought that was very clever at first, and then I thought about it. And it ended up not being very clever, because what are you talking about? I used to ask a lot of these uncles who told me this, and they said, well, if you go to the West, you see a lot of stability, a lot of stability in technology and progress and things like this. I said, OK, but what about how the West treats other nations? What about the fact that they're slaughtering other people overseas? Is that also part of Islam? Is that something you have conveniently forgotten? A civilization is not simply based on how it treats its own members, but how it treats others.
The sort of logic that is employed there is no different than praising a serial killer for being a good family man. Oh, you know, Bob, he slaughtered half the neighborhood, but you should see how he treats his mom and his parents and his family. He's a great guy. Nobody thinks that way. But for some reason, when it comes to Western societies, we seem to only adulate how they treat its own members, rather than looking at it as a whole. So I find it very curious why people are drawn to atheism or opposed to religion on the basis of looking at it as representatives of other cultures. There's a lot of double standards there. Now for my third point, and I think this is the most important one, is the problem of belief. Today you have many people, especially within atheist intellectual traditions, that will suggest that everything requires evidence. Everything requires a rational standard of belief, especially science. Science is the primary standard. You often hear this, especially online. And I find this a very curious position. And why do I find it very curious? Because 90% of the things that make us human are not proven scientifically. One of the things I often ask atheists when they tell me that I need to prove God through scientific reasoning is, Do you believe in human rights? They say, Yes, I do. And then I ask them, Can you give me a peer-reviewed scientific journal that proves the existence of human rights? They say, No, I cannot. And I say, Then why do you believe in it? They usually give me a different reason. I say, Okay, fine. I say, Do you believe in love? Yes.
Can you give me a scientific peer-reviewed paper that proves that love exists? No. Okay. Do you believe in beauty? Yes. Same question. Same answer. No. Do you believe in trust? Do you believe in loyalty? Do you believe in human willpower? Do you believe in freedom? Do you believe in everything that makes you a human being? Yes. Why? And it's always a different answer. It's always something different from a scientific standard. Why is that? I think that's very curious. Yet, when it comes to the existence of God, I have to validate all of my beliefs, including all of my religious beliefs that are alongside that, through scientific evidence. It's interesting. Not to mention the fact that the very standard itself, that science is required to believe or to justify a particular belief or evidence, scientific evidence is required to justify a particular belief, is in and of itself a belief that is not justified through scientific evidence. A little philosophical conundrum for all of you out there who want to think about that. I think that's very fascinating. But seeing all these double standards made me realize that atheists, or generally the doubts that people have about God's existence, are not usually rooted in intellectualization of their own beliefs or any sort of rational argument. Have there been rational arguments proposed by atheists in the past? Yes, of course. But generally, the climate today seems to be that many atheists, or many people who doubt religion and the existence of God, tend to do so primarily through these reasons.
Primarily through emotive, psychological reasons, that when you examine them as I have, you find so many double standards that it's more absurd to go down that path than to continue with your own intellectual traditions. Now, Islam also has a view of atheists. I'm not just going to express my view, but also the traditional view of atheists. And it also has a way of dealing with atheism in the same way that I've kind of told you just now, in a psychological and pragmatic fashion. In the Islamic tradition, there are a number of arguments for the existence of God. But generally, they have been used only with regard to particular philosophical positions. Like, for example, the Kalam cosmological argument, if you've ever heard of this, like the first everything that comes into existence as a cause. That was really promoted simply to argue against Aristotelian philosophers who were saying that the universe was eternal. It was never really against atheists per se, because most Aristotelians believe in God. But Islam has generally, and Islamic scholars have generally viewed atheism as so nonsensical that it didn't even require an actual argument to go against. And they generally approached it in psychological manners. So in the Islamic tradition, we have something called the fitrah. And this is the predisposition to belief, or believing not just in God, but everything in general, in reality. And the fitrah basically tells us that there is a purpose. We see things with purpose. We see things with design. We see things with order.
We see things as having a certain goal. We see ourselves in the same manner. And this fitrah doesn't prove God's existence, believe it or not. It doesn't prove the existence of God. But what it does is it sets up a rational standard within the mind of the human being to infer that there is one. It is a default, as it were, a default position. And human beings are actually forced to think this way. We don't voluntarily look at the world as having purpose and design and things like this. We just do. And this has actually even been proven in a number of ways. A lot of psychologists and even neuroscientists have made several studies showing that belief in the supernatural in general is actually something that we can't control. It's something that we just naturally do. And a lot of people have tried to explain this in a way suggesting, well, it's an evolutionary byproduct of what our ancestors had to go through and things like this. They had to see purpose and intention in order to survive. But it's very curious that the natural world would impose such a standard in our minds that we would come up with something so absurd, quote unquote, and that we would continue to have this sort of inclination. It seems to me even that if the natural world was all that existed, it would be impossible that we would even have this belief to begin with. Let me explain what I mean by that. Any of you have fish? Does anybody like fish? I like fish. I like fish. I'm weird, then? All right. OK, so I used to have a fish tank, a 55-gallon fish tank. I used to have these little freshwater fish called cichlids. And they're vicious creatures.
They eat meat. Just put it that way. But they're beautiful, which is why I kept them. But I never put my hand in the tank. And they're quite intelligent. But they're not so intelligent that I think that they would be able to construct mathematical models or anything or think beyond their fish tank. They have this 55-gallon fish tank. This is all they know. When they swim around the fish tank, I don't think they're thinking to themselves, am I in a living room? I don't think they're thinking to themselves, am I in a city? I don't think they're thinking to themselves, is there anything beyond my fish tank? I don't think they think that way. They're not capable of doing so. In the same way, though, I think humans also have that same limitation. We live in the world, in the natural world. This is all we see. This is all we are. We don't have any reference points. There's no sign saying God. I can't just reveal him on the stage here. There are signs, indeed. We'll talk about that. But there's nothing explicitly telling me that there's God there. God is beyond our world. So I like to ask this question, why are we thinking about him? If we can't see anything else but what we perceive in here and in our own minds, then why is it he comes into our heads? Why does that conception even exist in a world that apparently doesn't have him as part of his existence? To me, that doesn't make any sense, much the same as it doesn't make any sense to me that a fish would think that he's anywhere else but a fish tank and that the fish tank is all that exists. The same way, I don't think humans can look at the world and logically conclude from that, if the world is all there is, that there is a God. So I find all this rather curious.
And I'm wondering, after asking all these questions and bringing all this to your attention and these problems from a psychological and pragmatic perspective, if you find all these things curious as well. In a world where God is a natural tendency, in a world where humans cannot be without God, in a world where everything is made coherent because God exists, in a world where hope and will are derived from that one simple belief, in a world where most things we believe in don't require the very evidence that atheists are always asking for, and yet it still functions, it still works, in a world where humanity has built civilizations around this one idea, and I have yet to see an atheist one ever exist as a result of having, lacking a belief in the supernatural. By the way, there is no atheist civilization that has ever existed long enough to declare itself as a result of lacking a belief in something. They have all ceased to exist within a matter of decades. In a world where God is so necessary to the human condition, I wonder, is it necessary to ask, does God exist? Thank you very much. Jazakallah Khair. Wa Rahmatullah Wa Barakatuhu.
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