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Life of the Prophet (seerah)
Khalid ibn al-Walid (ra): The Legendary Military General | The Firsts
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1539
Acts of Worship
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Identity
Keeping Masculinity from Trending Toxic - Dr. Jonathan Brown | Reframing the Gender Question
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Social Justice
Overcoming Compassion Fatigue, Numbness, and Burnout - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Khutbah
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Acts of Worship
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Ideological Analysis of Atheism | Lecture by Dr. Nazir Khan
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Bismillah, alhamdulillah, wassalatu wassalamu ala rasulullah wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa man wala. Allahumma a'allimna ma yunfa'una wa zidna ilma. Amin. So, jazakumullah khayran for inviting me to join you in this topic and to share with you this discussion. Alhamdulillah, as Shaykh Uthman was mentioning, the research work that Yaqeen Institute is doing is really addressing a lot of questions that many of the youth are encountering on a daily basis. Probably one of the most pertinent issues that people are facing is, well, why do I believe in Islam to begin with? When we are constantly confronted with other ideologies that tell you that religion is backwards, that it has no relevance in society, what's giving me that strength to hold on to my religious identity? And this topic of atheism is one that, it's been a topic that I've been interested in as a research interest for over a decade, looking at it from a philosophical perspective, a psychological perspective, a neuroscience perspective, in addition to studying it from within the Islamic tradition and looking at what does the Islamic tradition have to say about this subject. This is, out of all the different lectures that we've done so far in the series, this is the most complex of the lecture topics, so a little bit of an advanced warning, it gets very abstract, there's a lot of theoretical terminology that we'll go into, but it's, inshallah ta'ala, it's something that should be of benefit and relevant to many people. So, a little bit of background, we know that according to the latest research, there is a crisis of faith within the Muslim community,
I don't think that surprises anyone, you know, there's research indicating that almost a quarter of those people who grew up as Muslim no longer identify with Islam, and this comes on the heels of the rise of a large, very vocal movement, the New Atheist Movement, which really espouses an ideology that is militant atheism. So, what's militant atheism? It's the idea that not only is religion false, in other words, it's anti-rational, it's logically untrue, it's belief without evidence, but religion is also harmful as well, and it's something that we need to eradicate from the world. So, those are kind of the two central ideas of militant atheism, right, it's not only are we against this belief because it's incorrect, but we actually think it's harmful and destructive, and so there's a need for an academic response to this movement and to actually understand it from a theological perspective, but also looking at the history of this movement, the cultural origins of this movement, the ideology behind this movement. There's a lot that can be said on this topic, but I'll just share a few kind of scattered thoughts about what I think are some of the most important aspects to take home from this perspective. So, when you look at the New Atheist Movement, as I said, it's characterized by this very aggressive attitude towards religion, the idea that religion is something abominable, repulsive, evil. So, for example, you see out of the famous ideologues of the New Atheist Movement, Richard Dawkins has this famous statement where he says that teaching your child religion is a form of child abuse. It's worse than being sexually assaulted. So, in other words, just as a person who commits child abuse should go to jail,
the logical implication of what he's saying is that religious believers are criminals because they're inflicting upon their child religious beliefs. Similarly, another one of the New Atheist ideologues says that if I could wave a magic wand, get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. So, that's the level of venomous level of rhetoric that's being directed towards religion. So, the call for the eradication of religion is not new. We've seen these ideas before. Probably the worst manifestation of atheism as a totalitarian ideology, as a militant ideology that resulted in attempts to eradicate religion and religious believers, is in the form of Soviet atheism. So, many of us may not be familiar with the history of what happened under the Soviet Union, but if you look at the history of Soviet communism, a central idea that was espoused by Karl Marx is that religion is the opium of the people. Lenin referred to religion as unutterable vileness. It's just something absolutely disgusting and evil. In the 1920s, actually, the Communist Party created something called the League of Militant Atheists. It set up institutions that were designed to promote the idea that religion was scientifically falsifiable. And Peter Watson is a historian who himself is an atheist, but he writes about this in his work called The Age of Atheism. So, he talks about what was the history of promoting atheism, and he writes very frankly about the aggressive campaign that Soviet atheists undertook to eradicate religion. He says there was a series of crusade-like polemics to suppress religion and replace it with scientific atheism.
Yemelin Yaroslavsky said, It is our duty to destroy every religious world concept. If the destruction of 10 million human beings, as happened in the last world war, should be necessary for the triumph of one definite class, then that must be done and it will be done. So, what happened? So, in 1922, Patriarch Tychon wrote a letter to Lenin. He said thousands of clergy were being killed, more than 100,000 believers had been shot, people who were religious priests were subjected to all sorts of horrific types of torture, basically strapped to the wheel of a steamboat, mangled by rotating blades, buried alive, all sorts of methods of torture were used. And this was directed at the Christian and Muslim communities under the Soviet Union. So, the number of Russian Orthodox churches in a short period of time went from 54,000 just to 4,200. The number of Islamic institutions went from 220 in 1922 just to 7 in 1927. And Stalin himself, he had a lot of virulent rhetoric about Islam. He said Islam was something that had to be destroyed. So, when we hear these statements of new atheists today, they have an ancestry, they have a pedigree. There is this kind of campaign against religion in general, but Islam in particular. And the militant atheist movement, it reserves a special place of hatred for Islam. There's a special animosity that they have towards Islam amongst all religions. So, when we analyze any ideology, you can do it in two ways.
You can conceptually analyze an ideology by looking backwards at its foundations, what is it built upon, or looking forwards at its consequences, what does it result in. Either the usool, the foundations, the asas, or the thamarat, what does it result in, what are the fruits of this ideology. So, if you look at atheism, the foundations of atheism you're going to see is a philosophy of skepticism. And the thamarat, the fruits, the things that it results in, is a philosophy of nihilism. Something that atheists vehemently deny. So, we'll talk a little bit about that, but let's focus, we're going to mainly focus on the philosophy of skepticism and how that's relevant to atheism. So, atheism, the rejection of the existence of God, is really just a particular type of skepticism. Skepticism is a denial, right, it's basically entertaining doubt concerning something. So, the term atheist is nothing other than somebody who is, who entertains skepticism about the existence of God, who believes that the existence of God is not proven. You can have people who are skeptical about all sorts of different things, right. So, you can have people who are skeptical about the existence of good and bad. They're called morality skeptics or moral abolitionists. You can have people who are skeptical about the existence of reality. They're called reality skeptics or solipsists. You can have people who are skeptical about logic and say, well, you know, logical reasoning is nothing more than the operations of physicochemical processes in my brain. Why should I expect that these map onto any ultimate truths about the universe? And so, I should be skeptical that my logical reasoning actually leads to a conclusion, actually leads to truth. You can have people who are skeptical about history or politics and believe in conspiracy theories about everything.
And no amount of evidence that you give them would ever change their mind because they've already decided on a conclusion. And they will entertain radical skepticism about everything that disagrees with that conclusion. So, in popular culture, there's many examples of this notion of reality being fake. So, the reality skeptic is somebody who says that, you know, the world around me is an illusion. The world around me is fake. It's not what I see it to be. And that's called solipsism in philosophy. Raise your hand if you've heard of solipsism before. Okay, so quite a few people have heard of solipsism. So, solipsism means that everything around me is just nothing more than like a dream or an illusion or a hallucination. Nothing exists other than my mind. So, we have several variations of this. One variation is the idea that our brain is plugged into the matrix. Okay, it's plugged into a machine that is feeding it certain images and sensations. And so, right now, it's like I think I'm sitting in front of you in this masjid delivering this lecture. But really, I'm nothing more than a brain in a jar that's plugged into a bunch of wires. And I'm getting all these different stimuli that makes me feel like I'm here. But it's not actually happening. So, that's one way of looking at it. Another example is, you know, the idea that we're living in a dream world. And you could simulate a dream world that's so lifelike and so vivid that a person is unable to distinguish between that and between reality. And Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali actually talks about a thought experiment, how you would actually know that you're living inside a dream world if you existed in it. And he comes to the conclusion that there is no philosophical proof you could give somebody to actually take them out of that. So, if somebody says, 100%, I am a solipsist, nothing you can say would ever convince them that you exist. If an atheist comes to you and says, prove to me God exists, the first thing that I do is I say, prove to me that you exist. Okay, prove to me that you exist. That catches them by surprise, right?
What do you mean? Well, let's say I'm a solipsist and I don't believe in the existence of anything other than my own mind. Prove to me that you exist. And when they think about that, then they realize that what you really need to do is you have to have an understanding of what constitutes proof to begin with. And if you haven't decided what constitutes proof, then you're going to dismiss anything and everything that is a proof because you already have a preconceived conclusion. And the third example of the idea of a fake reality is the idea that our memories could be artificially constructed. So you could have your memories implanted by some program or process, and everything that you think is real, your identity, all your memories of growing up in one place, they may be all fake. You know, and you're somebody else that you don't know you are. Now, none of us are in a crisis of faith concerning any of this, right? None of us are going home and saying, oh my God, I don't know, does reality exist? How do I know I'm not living in a dream world? Why doesn't the Athenian Institute publish something about this? How are we going to tell our youth that we're not living in a dream world? Nobody is worried about this, right? We're not entertaining skepticism about this because we're not living in a society where people are constantly questioning this. So the culture matters. Now, if you're living in a society where people are entertaining that kind of radical skepticism about God, then that's going to be something that you're going to question, and you're going to want to know what constitutes proof for the existence of God. So the God skeptic and the reality skeptic are really no different from an epistemology point of view. Epistemology is how do I know what I know? Okay? How do I acquire true knowledge? So from an epistemology point of view, the idea of looking at whether my beliefs are justified or not, the atheist says, prove to me God exists. The solipsist says, prove to me that you exist. Both of them have already defined proof in a way that they will never accept the conclusion. What constitutes proof? Who gets to decide?
Do you have a coherent system of establishing knowledge? How would you recognize proof if you saw it? These are not questions that are contemplated or considered. And so, you know, when people ask, does the Quran address the phenomenon of atheism? The Quran actually doesn't address it at a superficial level. It addresses what's the root of it, which is skepticism, radical skepticism. So the Quran has numerous passages that talk about this underlying epistemology of how we establish knowledge. And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala mentions in Surat Al-Hijr, If we were to open up the gates of the heavens for them, and they were to ascend up into the heavens, in another tafsir they saw the angels ascending up into the heavens. What would they say? They would say, our eyes are hallucinating. Somebody has cast a spell on us. We're bewitched. They still wouldn't believe. And, you know, initially when you read that verse, you think, wow, how could anyone actually be that extreme in their skepticism that they deny everything, no matter what kind of proof, that they even see the gates of the heavens opening up to them, and they still won't believe. But there was actually a debate many, many years ago between an atheist and somebody who is a theist who is also a psychologist. And, you know, the psychologist said to him, well, what would you accept as proof to believe in the existence of God? And the atheist said, well, I'd only believe in God if I actually saw God myself. Okay, if I actually personally witnessed God, then I would believe in Him. And he says, really? Would you actually believe in Him then? And he says, well, after a minute of thinking, he says, well, you know what, actually, I would probably think I'm having a bad hangover. And so I still probably wouldn't believe in God. So in other words, you've already decided the conclusion. You're not actually open minded to understanding, is there something beyond this reality?
You've already decided that you're going to define proof in a way that you're already satisfied with that conclusion. And the Qur'an, by the way, mentions that as well. Bani Israel, وَقَالُوا لَنُؤْمِنَ لَكَ حَتَّى نَرَى اللَّهَ جَهْرًا We're never going to believe in you until we see Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala directly. That's already mentioned there. So that same pattern of thinking is described in the Qur'an. So does the Qur'an address atheism? Absolutely. It addresses the root of it, which is the epistemology of skepticism, manhaj-ush-shak, the methodology of trying to use doubt as the basis for establishing knowledge. The amazing thing about the Qur'an is that the Qur'an doesn't present us with philosophical proofs. What the Qur'an does is it draws the human being's attention back to the most important foundations. It allows the human being to develop the tools to think and understand and reason about life in a way that will allow them to achieve spiritual, intellectual, and moral growth. As a person is reading through the Qur'an, the Qur'an is developing layers upon layers of meaning. It is reconfiguring the conceptual architecture within the human being's mind that allows them to extract meaning from their experiences in order to come closer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, in order to be a beacon of virtue in their society. So what is epistemology? As we mentioned, this is how do I know what I know. Turq al-ma'rifah is one way of saying it, the paths towards knowledge and recognition, or usool al-'ilm, the principles that underlie knowledge. So what we're going to talk about is the history of this philosophy of skepticism. Where does it actually come from? Is skepticism an adequate epistemological foundation to confirm or deny anything? Can it actually establish knowledge? Now, the narrative that many atheists actually present is that, particularly militant atheists, that religion is something backwards.
We used to believe in religion, and then now we're more advanced with the advancement of science and technology, and so atheism is intellectual progress. We're enlightened to think of those old myths and believe in religion. But far from representing intellectual progress, the ideas of atheism are not new. In fact, we find that the roots of this epistemology of skepticism are found in the Hellenistic period in ancient Greek philosophy. So in this early period in ancient Greek philosophy, all of these same principles and ideas were already being discussed. So, for example, you have the three most famous of the Greek philosophers. You have Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Plato is Socrates' student. Aristotle is Plato's student. And Socrates has a famous statement where he says, The only thing that I truly know is that I know nothing. The only thing that I truly know is that I know nothing. That kind of radical skepticism is embodied in that idea. And Aristotle, of course, has this idea that everything should be based on the syllogism. Raise your hand if you've heard of a syllogism. A syllogism is a logical deductive argument. So in Arabic it would be called something like qiyas al-burhani, or qiyas al-shamuli. This is the idea that you need to have a logical deductive argument in order to establish certain knowledge. If you don't have that kind of philosophical argument, your belief is unjustified. So Socrates had the idea that in order to have true knowledge, you need to have a solid definition. So Socrates, one of the things that he used to do, he would go around in Athens and he would encounter different people. And he would just get into arguments with them. So he'd see a poet talking about the virtues of justice, and he'd bump into them and he'd say,
Well, you don't know anything about justice. And he'd say, Give me a definition for justice. And then when the person starts struggling to come up with a definition, he would say, See, you don't actually have any knowledge. So he'd actually be called an ultimate internet troll if he lived today. He would be the kind of guy who just trolls everyone. That was his career. So he'd be going around, you know, arguing with people and telling them you don't have a definition and therefore you don't have knowledge. Now, Sh. Osamie binti Mia takes up this idea in his work, Nabd al-Mantawiyah. In his work, Nabd al-Mantawiyah, a critique of Greek philosophy, he takes up the idea that you need to have a rigorous definition in order to know something. And he gives 16 arguments proving why that idea is false. 16 arguments. I'll only mention two of them for the sake of time. So one of them that he says, he says, If you need a definition for everything, how about the person who came up with the definition? In order to come up with the definition, he had to already have a concept in his mind of what he wanted to define. And if he did have that concept in his mind, then he already knew something before he even defined it. Okay. Secondly, he says, If everything needs a definition, what about the words that make up the definition? Do they also need to be defined? And if so, you would need to have a definition for all of those words. And the words in those definitions, you need to have a definition for those. So you have this infinite regress of definitions. And so if you look at a dictionary, a dictionary is finite, right? Every word is defined in terms of other words. Nobody has a dictionary that's infinite, right? That's filled with an endless number of definitions. And according to that, that means that if you really believe that everything needs to have a definition, then nobody could possess any knowledge whatsoever. Those are just two of the arguments. Now, in the Hellenistic period, which is basically 322 BC to 31 BC, according to many historians,
we have multiple medaheb, okay, multiple different schools of thought amongst the ancient Greeks. So you have the skeptics, like the Pyrrhonians, the followers of Pyrrho of Elis, and the academic skeptics or the skeptics of Plato's Academy. You have the rationalists, which are the followers of Aristotle, the peripatetics. They're called peripatetics because the way he would teach, he would walk and they would walk alongside him. And then you have the empiricists, and those are the Epicureans and the Stoics. So rationalists believe that all knowledge has to go back to a logical argument. Empiricists believe that all knowledge goes back to an observation. So today we have the same debate between rationalists and empiricists. The scientists are the empiricists, the philosophers are the rationalists, and both groups, they're attacking each other and saying, no, you don't have true knowledge. No, you don't have true knowledge, right? Now, the interesting thing is that skepticism is actually at the heart of all of these methodologies. Even though formally we say that the Pyrrhonians and the academics of Plato's Academy are the skeptics. By the way, the academics of Plato's Academy, like Arcus Aelaeus, they had methodological skepticism. They used to argue for the sake of argument. But the Pyrrhonians, they had radical skepticism, and we'll get into exactly what that is. But if you look at these other groups, the rationalists and the empiricists, they also had skepticism implicit in their methodology. So, for example, the followers of Epicurus and the Stoics, what it implies is that they're skeptical about anything that can't be established by observation. By the five senses, by sight, smell, hearing, touch, whatever. Anything that can't be established by that, they're skeptical about its existence. So that's a type of skepticism as well that may be unwarranted.
Ibn Taymiyyah responds to that by saying that empirical investigation is appropriate for learning about the dunya, about the matters of this world. In an observable world, when it comes to matters of the natural world, yes, of course, use empirical investigation. But don't make the mistake of assuming that there is absolutely nothing outside of the natural world, that there's nothing that goes beyond our empirical lens. There's absolutely no justification for that assumption. That is a metaphysical claim that has no evidence. Because if we were to espouse that, then we would reject morality. We would reject metaphysics. We would reject anything that can't be studied with the empirical lens of science. So for example, this is something I mentioned two nights ago as well. When it comes to morality, there's philosophers like Richard Garner who say that because we don't have any empirical evidence for it, we should get rid of the category of good and evil. We should get rid of this notion that there's such a thing as morality. We should be moral abolitionists. We should abolish the concept of good and evil because we don't have any proof that it exists. Nobody has ever seen the concept of good and the concept of evil. We all operate according to these concepts, but according to him, since we have no empirical evidence that they exist, we should reject it. And he calls on fellow atheists to abolish the belief in morality just like they've abolished belief in the existence of God. Similarly, even science itself as a methodology requires belief in many things that are beyond the empirical lens. It requires the belief in metaphysical concepts that cannot be proven through physical observation. So Paul Davies is a cosmologist, astrophysicist, who wrote this article in the New York Times in 2007.
And it created a big stir because he said that in reality, we take science on faith. When we believe in science, we actually – science only works because of certain metaphysical assumptions that we have. So the idea that the universe is not playing a trick on us, that the universe is operating according to a regular pattern, according to a natural order, that the laws of physics are going to be the same tomorrow as they are today, that is an assumption that underlies all the scientific experiments that we do, and it is a metaphysical assumption that you cannot prove through science. But if you try to get rid of it, science doesn't work. So you need that in order for science to work. Similarly, the idea that our human mind can even understand the universe to begin with, where do we get that assumption from? Why would we even expect that this three-pound blob of cells within a biological organism has the capacity to unlock and unravel the mysteries of the universe? There's no reason to expect that to be the case, but in order for science to work, we have to assume that to be the case. And he explains that the language that's used in science, like laws of nature, actually comes out of the thought of religious believers, like Isaac Newton, who talked about the idea, he says Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. And in fact, if you study the history of science in the Islamic world, you actually see that the scientific revolution happening in the West, with people like Copernicus, was influenced by the work that Muslim scientists did to liberate science from Greek philosophy. So previously, science was a branch of natural philosophy. It could only make progress by making these kind of logical deductive arguments using Aristotle's metaphysics.
And people like Abu Rayhan al-Bayrouni, in the field of astronomy, he said, it doesn't make sense to take Aristotle's metaphysics and just assume that everything in astronomy works according to them. Like if you look at Ptolemy's models, Ptolemy is trying to explain the observation of planets and stars, and he's trying to explain all of that by reference to Aristotle's metaphysics. So when you start noticing that, for example, Mars, it seems to be going in one direction, and then because the Earth is in motion, it starts moving in the other direction, so that's called the retrograde motion of Mars. That makes sense to us now because we believe that the Earth is also in motion. But for them, part of Aristotle's metaphysics was believing that the Earth was stationary. And so how do you explain that now? So then they have to come up with these more and more complex models where these planets and stars, these celestial objects, they're going around the Earth, but they're doing things in their motion that don't seem to correspond to simple cycles around the Earth. So then they explain, well, they're actually going around in epicycles. So they're going around in little circles on a bigger circle called the deferent, which is going around the Earth. And it's getting more and more complicated because they're trying to fit everything in the world of observation into Aristotelian metaphysics. And one of the reasons why scientific progress was made is that the Muslims came along and they said, well, why are we trying to make everything fit Aristotelian metaphysics? Let's go with the observations that we have. Let's come up with an astronomical model that actually fits the observations. So Abu Rayhan al-Bayrouni was one of those individuals. Ibn al-Shatir was another individual. His role was actually a timekeeper in Damascus, of the Grand Mosque in Damascus. And if you think about a timekeeper, that seems like kind of a trivial job. It's a guy who stands up after Salah and says, OK, brothers and sisters, the time for Fajr tomorrow will be 5 a.m. And the time for this is this.
But this guy actually plays a massive role in the history of science because he looks at, you know, observations of the timings and the pattern of movement of the planets and stars. And he starts noticing, well, things aren't adding up with Aristotelian metaphysics and we need a better system. So his observational evidence that he's collecting as just and he's just a timekeeper and he's collecting observational evidence that ends up, you know, influencing the Copernican model. Same thing with Ali al-Khushji, another Muslim astronomer who said, why are we bringing Aristotelian metaphysics into this? And there's now historical evidence that his works influence people who influence Copernicus. So this was a major move in the history of science, actually liberating science from Greek Aristotelian philosophy. If we applied radical skepticism in science, we'd have made no scientific progress. OK, so that's that's one of the areas where you clearly see the failure of radical skepticism as a methodology. Now, skepticism is not only problematic for empiricism. It's also problematic in, you know, in Aristotelian rationalism. So Aristotle, remember his his his theory is that everything has to be established based on a logical deductive argument. And so his view of the existence of of God is just this this unmoved mover. And this is what they philosophize as a movement took in the Muslim world. They took this idea of God as just the unmoved mover. He's just, you know, this the first cause behind everything, the cause of all things. Well, that that ideology that Aristotle had, it led students in his his method, in his school of thought, like Strato to to be quasi atheist and say, well, you don't really need God in that picture of the universe.
You can have a mechanistic picture of the universe where everything's operating autonomously as under certain causes. And God is not even needed in that picture of the universe. And so atheists today think they've come up with some new way of looking at the universe. But it existed, you know, thousands of years ago with Strato. And these these are ancient ideas. They're not any by any means that some kind of new intellectual discovery or new intellectual progress. So it was skepticism. Skepticism was prominent in Aristotle's thought. But it was one other ancient Greek philosopher who really took it further. And this is the guy who really shows the damage of skepticism. OK, this is Pyrrho of Elis, died 270 BC. He served under Alexander the Great. And there's legends about him. Lots of different stories. One of the stories is that he traveled to India and he learned skepticism from India and brought it back to Greece. And I like to imagine that the Indians were just playing a practical joke on him. And he was trying to tell them about how great Greek culture was. And they're like, how do you know? How do you know? How do you know? And he's and he got so confused. How do I know anything? And then skepticism became a whole practical joke that Indians played on Western civilization, which till today they haven't recovered from. But the idea that that Pyrrho had is he distrusted his own senses. OK, he said, how do I know that what I see and what I observe is real? And it was to the extent that his students, according to these legends, they they had to prevent him from walking into wagons or walking off cliffs. They had to prevent it. They had to rescue him from walking into dogs because he'd say, I think it's a dog. But how do I know it actually is a dog? So, you know, there's a thought experiments that people give of what it would be like to live your life as a Pyrrhonian skeptic. So this is one from Rational Wiki where they say, when you wake up in the morning, you say, did I really just wake up or am I just imagining it?
How do I know I ever slept in the first place? How do I know that sleeping and being awake aren't actually the same thing? You get out of bed and you say, how do I know this is actually a bed? How do I know I'm standing? I could be sitting or lying down for all I know. How do I know I was ever in this so-called thing that that's named a bed to begin with? You look around the room, you say, how do I know this is even a room? How do I know it is mine? How do I know I am actually doing an action called looking? I may not even have eyes. And how do I know that eyes are even able to perform the action that is supposedly called looking? So with this idea of radical skepticism, can you come up with anything firmly grounded in knowledge? No, right? You will be so confused about everything. You'll be in doubt about everything. And the Qur'an mentions that it's this kind of continuous state of doubt that a person gets trapped into. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, وَارْتَابَتْ قُلُوبُهُمْ فَهُمْ فِي رَيْبِهِمْ يَتَرَدَّدُونَ Their hearts chose to be in a situation of doubt, and so in that doubt they will perpetually waver. And a rabe, it's doubt combined with a type of fear and anxiety. And in the lecture that we gave on the psychology of doubt, we talked about the role of the amygdala in doubt as well. It's not just a dispassionate way of thinking about the evidence. It's actually an emotional processing that a person has regarding doubt as well. And so we mentioned that this slogan of atheism has always been, we will never believe until. So Bani Israel, they say, لَنْ نُؤْمِنَ لَكَ حَتَّى نَرَى اللَّهَ جَهْرًا We will never believe until we see Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala directly. The Quraysh, they come to the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, and in Suratul Isra, it's mentioned all these different miracles that they're demanding from the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. We're not going to believe until you make a spring come out of the ground, until you make a book descend from the heavens in front of us. All of these different demands. Who gave you the right to make these demands?
What gives you the right to define proof in a manner that's just consistent with your own whims and desires? Where's the rational investigation? Where's the rational contemplation coming here? And we see the futility of skepticism. It fails to establish any new knowledge. And in fact, the philosopher Tony Vogel Carey, he mentions that philosophy progresses only by destroying old arguments, doubting current knowledge, or redefining concepts. It can't actually come up with new knowledge. And science, as we mentioned, really began to make progress when it was liberated from philosophy. Radical skepticism stems from a mentality of distrust. An idea that, how do I know this is something that is true? And we talked about that in the Psychology of Doubt lecture, where you can take distrust to a pathological level. You can apply it to anything. You can be paranoid about anything that's out there. You can be distrustful about your personal relationships with others. You can think that everybody is trying to deceive you and cheat you or mistreat you. You can be skeptical about everything that's happening and think that there's a conspiracy behind everything. It's a negative psychological attitude. People selectively apply it to religion. And they're just distrustful of anything that is mentioned about religion. And if you ask them, well, why aren't you also applying that to something else, like morality? Why aren't you a moral abolitionist? Why aren't you a solipsist? Why don't you exercise that skepticism about the existence of reality? They won't have any justification for that. So it's inconsistently applied. The other thing that's interesting is, let's say somebody says, OK, I want to be consistent. I'll be skeptical about everything, absolutely everything. Anything that's out there, I'm going to entertain doubt concerning it. Well, if you actually follow that to its logical consequence, then even the thoughts that you have, you have to be skeptical about whether those thoughts actually carry meaning or not.
So when you say, I believe in meaninglessness, I believe that my thoughts don't carry meaning because I'm skeptical about the meanings that my thoughts carry, even that statement is an affirmation of meaning. You're affirming that there's something that's true rather than false. So even saying that is in fact an affirmation of meaning and a rejection of skepticism. So it is impossible to be a consistent skeptic. So somebody will say, but isn't there a type of reasonable skepticism? And the answer is, of course. The reasonable skepticism is when you're skeptical about those things which conflict with what we know to be true, those things that conflict with our common sense understanding of reality. For example, people are like, well, why don't we also believe in Santa Claus or unicorns or leprechauns? And they make these different analogies to the existence of God. And the reason why those are totally different is that these are physical entities posited within the material world. And as soon as you do that, you say, well, do we have any physical observation of that? It conflicts with the way that we construe the material world. But when it comes to belief in the existence of God, God transcends the universe. God is the ontological foundation that makes everything else rational and meaningful. So it's like denying the existence of cause and effect. Cause and effect is not a physical entity in the world. It's an ontological foundation that allows you to make sense of the world. Let's say you deny that there's such a thing as cause and effect. And now I knock this cup of water over and I spill the water. You can't make sense of anything, any process that happens in the world, without the idea that there is such a thing as cause and effect. And if you say, no, give me proof. I want philosophical proof that there's such a thing as cause and effect. Or I want to experiment that proves that there's such a thing as cause and effect. You wouldn't be able to do it. Now, somebody will say, okay, well, you've really given skepticism a pounding. We've demolished the idea that skepticism is a way to establishing knowledge,
and I'm convinced of that. But what's the alternative? You have to have some way of having justified beliefs. Well, now we come to Paranic epistemology. What does the Qur'an outline for us as our methodology to understand that something is truth rather than falsehood? What does the Qur'an outline for us as our methodology to understand how we acquire knowledge about the world? And when you study the Qur'an, you study the vocabulary that's used in the Qur'an, this is a massive field of knowledge. This is an area that there's so much that you can extract from. There's so many profound concepts that the Qur'an articulates. Of them is the concept of the fitrah. Of them is the concept of hidayah. Of them is the concept of haq. Even the concept of tawhid, how we conceptualize the world, all of this is connected to Qur'anic epistemology. And I've done an entire course on these different concepts, which I'm going to try to just give a very brief glimpse for tonight's lecture. So let's take one concept, the concept of haq. The concept of haq, which is the Qur'anic term for truth. It's very important. It's interesting that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala uses the term haq in the Qur'an, not just to convey truth, but also to convey that something has a purpose. خَلَقَ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضَ بِالْحَقِّ Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala created the heavens and the earth in truth, meaning with a purpose. And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, وَمَا خَلَقَنَا السَّمَاوَةِ وَالْأَرْضَ وَمَا بَيْنَهُمَا بَاطِلًا We did not create the heavens and the earth and everything that is between in falsehood, meaning without a purpose. So from the Islamic perspective, there is a teleological dimension to truth. In other words, truth is something that also has a purpose to it. It serves a purpose in rendering something meaningful in our understanding of reality.
So this is something that only recently people in Western philosophy have started to think about seriously. And so philosopher John Whitaker, he mentions, the point of presenting religious beliefs as revelations is to present them as conceptual truths, as practical axioms of life, as ruling principles that frame new conceptions of worth, happiness, and selfhood. And this puts them into a different logical category than the basket that holds hypothetical claims. When we say, I believe Allah exists, I believe that Allah is Al-Haqq, we're not just saying that I believe in the existence of God as a theoretical proposition, the way I believe that, for example, Mars is the fourth planet from the sun, or that water is composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. It's not a theoretical affirmation. When you say, I believe in Allah, it means that Allah is my sole priority in my life, that everything that I do in my life is for the sake of pursuing Allah's happiness. I derive meaning from my experiences in life out of my pursuit of the divine. Imam Ibn Al-Qayyim, he says, وَلَيْسَ التَوْحِيد مُجَرَّدَ إِقْرَارَ الْعَبْدِ بِأَنَّهُ لَا خَالِقَ إِلَى اللَّهِ وَأَنَّ اللَّهَ رَبَّ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ وَمَلِيكَةً كَمَا كَانَ عُبَادَ الْأَسْلَامِ مُقِرِّينَ بِذَلِكَ وَهُمْ مُشْرِكُونَ He says, Tawheed is not just this theoretical affirmation that God is the creator of all things and the controller of all things. Because the Mushrikun amongst the Quraysh, they believed in that. The idolaters, they believed in that. بَلِ التَّوْحِيد يَتَضَمَّن مِن مَحَبَّةِ اللَّهِ وَالْخُضُوعِ لَهِ وَالذُلِّ لَهِ وَكَمَالُ الْإِنقِيَادِ لِطَاعَتِهِ Rather, Tawheed entails humility before Allah, reverence of Allah, the perfection of love of Allah, submission and surrender to Allah.
Tawheed frames all of our conceptions of worth and meaning in this life. It frames our intellectual, spiritual and moral journey. It's not just some abstract theoretical belief where you say, I believe in the existence of God, the way I believe that Mars is the fourth planet from the sun. It's a belief that is operating on a meaningful level in our lives on a daily basis. It's a belief that is operating in every one of our pursuits in this life. قُلْ إِنَّ صَلَاتِي وَنُسُكِي وَمَحْيَايَ وَمَمَاتِي لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ Say, verily, my prayers, my sacrifices, my very life and death are for Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, the Lord of the Universe. لَا شَرِيكَ لَهُ وَبِذَلِكَ أُمِرْتُ وَأَنَا أَوَّلُ الْمُسْلِمِينَ That he has no partners. This is what I have been commanded. I am the first of those to surrender and submit to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. So a revealed truth is more than just a simple theoretical proposition. It presents us with a paradigm for interpreting reality as meaningful. And the questions that a person should ask themselves when they're pursuing truth is, how does this particular idea or concept impact my view of reality? How does it make sense of my existence and experience? What does it teach me? How does it make me a better person? How does it guide me in life? What does it lead me towards? These are the ideas that a person can think about and reflect on in order to pursue a path of truth. The Qur'an is very clear that it's not argumentation that leads somebody to truth. If somebody thinks that the way that they're going to get towards truth is through, you give me your logical arguments and I'll give you my logical arguments and it's a game between who has the better arguments. Well you're too busy thinking of how to refute the other person before they've even made their argument. What it really comes down to is tafakkur, contemplation, reflecting on reality, reflecting on life, reflecting on my role as a human being in this world.
That's what leads me to the haq. That's what leads me to truth. So the human being has to ask themselves, what is the best answer to life? To the reality that we find ourselves in life. We need a way to give a meaningful account of the essential elements of human existence. So every human being, they have three dimensions to their life. The intellectual, moral and spiritual dimensions of life. And I mentioned this in some of the previous lectures. So the intellectual journey of life is the idea that I have a mind. I have an intellect and I'm able to understand things. What am I supposed to do with this intellect? What am I supposed to do with my mind? What am I supposed to acquire knowledge of? Why is the universe comprehensible to me? Why is it that my mind is able to make sense of the truths of the universe? The moral aspect of life is that we have questions related to good and evil. That there is such a thing as moral values. And therefore the way that we behave in life should have some significance to it. And if there is a fact about how we should behave in life, then how do I acquire the spiritual, moral discipline in order to behave in the right way? How do I inculcate within myself the moral virtues in order to pursue that path? In order to be in a position where if I'm faced with a moral dilemma, I know that I can make the right choice. I have the strength to make the right choice and to suppress my selfish desires that would lead me to making the wrong choice. You need to have an answer to account for that. The spiritual journey is the idea that life is worth living. That my existence matters. There's a point behind my existence. There's a point behind the existence of the universe. You know when Richard Dawkins, whenever he was asked this question, he would get very angry. And his face would become red and he'd say, what gives you the right to ask this question? Don't ask questions about what is the point behind the existence of the universe. You shouldn't ask such questions. Well, isn't the whole point of science that we're rational about the search for meaning and intellectual,
and we pursue intellectual answers for questions? And if you don't have a meaningful answer to a question, then there's a serious problem with the paradigm that you're presenting. So you need to have a way of incorporating all these dimensions of life into a meaningful answer. The psychologist Robert Emmons, he talks about spiritual intelligence. He's a positive psychologist who talks about just like we have an IQ, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, there is such a thing as spiritual intelligence. The capacity of a human being to extract meaning from their experiences. The capacity of a human being to see their life as part of a larger journey. To see that they're heading somewhere in life. And that's important as a coping mechanism and it's associated with a variety of positive mental health outcomes. And not having that is associated with a variety of negative mental health outcomes. So all of this is explained through the Quranic foundation of Tawheed. So the Quran gives us this picture of Tawheed where human beings are in this journey towards Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And as we build our love for Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, and we come closer in our relationship with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, we recognize the importance of mastering our own desires and developing within ourselves moral virtues that make us a better human being in our relationship with all of those around us. And the entire journey of human life is a journey to come closer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala by purifying the soul, by serving the creation of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, by developing the attributes of mercy, compassion and justice to bring us closer to the one who is the most compassionate, the most just, the most merciful. All of this comes under that Islamic view of Tawheed, the Tawheedic paradigm. And so the Tawheedic paradigm accounts for the intellectual journey. Life is a journey to understand the natural and scriptural signs of God. Ayatul Qawniya and Ayatul Qur'aniya.
The signs of God embedded in nature and the signs of God embedded in scripture. And as we acquire that, as we use our intellectual faculty to do that, we grow in our appreciation of the divine, we grow in our relationship with the divine, and we grow in our ability to serve the creation of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. It accounts for the moral journey. As we develop our relationship with others, we develop our relationship with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. وَاللَّهُ فِي عَوْنِ الْعَبْدِ مَا كَانَ الْعَبْدُ فِي عَوْنِ أَخِيهِ That Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is helping the servant as much as that servant is striving to help others, striving to help his or her brother. So Tawheed really is that all-encompassing narrative, that story that makes everything in life meaningful, gives everything a sense of worth and value in life. On the materialist paradigm, everything ultimately boils down to what? Material particles, right? Atoms, particles, subatomic particles, Higgs boson, neutrinos, right? Everything in the universe boils down to quarks and gluons. And everything that we think is meaningful, ultimately, on the subatomic level, it's nothing more than the interaction of different particles. So on the materialist paradigm, where you say there's nothing else other than the particles in the universe that exist, that means that every experience that the human being has of hope, fear, love, every act of virtue, every act of self-sacrifice and kindness and generosity, ultimately, it's just the interaction of different particles on that subatomic scale that just happen to interact in a particular way. And so you take the thing that seems the most meaningful in your life, and ultimately the universe doesn't care about it. It's just because particles happen to accumulate and amalgamate and interact in a particular way rather than another way. And why was it like this rather than that? There's absolutely no reason whatsoever.
It just goes back to fundamental forces of physics at the atomic and subatomic level. So the most meaningful thing becomes the most meaningless. But on the Islamic paradigm, even the most trivial thing becomes the most meaningful. So not a leaf falls without Allah's will and pleasure. Every single interaction you have in your life is meaningful. It has been intended by Allah. Allah is Al-Latif Al-Khabir. He is the one whose kindness reaches us in the most subtle of ways, ways that we can never imagine or anticipate. He is Al-Khabir. He is the one intimately aware of everything that goes on in our lives. And everything in our lives is divinely orchestrated by Allah. So when you see your life in that context, everything acquires the ultimate significance. Even something that's the most seemingly trivial, it's like why did Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala cause me to bump into that person today? And what was the significance behind that? What's the hikmah that I can learn from that? What is the opportunity that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is giving us? He is Al-Fattah. He is the one who opens possibilities. He opens opportunities for us to come closer to Him. Every single thing that we have in life is an opportunity to come closer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Whether it's a situation of prosperity or a situation of calamity, it's a means to come closer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. That's why the Prophet ﷺ said, عَجَبًا لِّيَمْرِي الْمُؤْمِنُ The situation of the believer is amazing. For verily his situation is always good. وَلَيْسَ ذَكَلْ يَحَدٍ إِلَّا لِّلْمُؤْمِنُ And that's only the case for somebody who has that state of iman, where they look at life with that level of meaning. So we see the Qur'anic concept of haqq. We see the Qur'anic concept of tawhid. Now there's another Qur'anic concept that I want to get into. But in order to get into it, I have to explain a deep philosophical problem. And that is the problem of Munchhausen's trilemma. Raise your hand if you've heard Munchhausen's trilemma before.
Okay, nobody's heard. One person has heard of it, masha'Allah. So Munchhausen's trilemma is considered an intractable problem in the history of Western epistemology. So this is a problem that philosophers looking at the subject of epistemology, they get confused and they're like, there's no answer to this. Why is it called a trilemma? It's a dilemma with three options. So dilemma has two choices, trilemma has three choices. Why is it called Munchhausen? There's this story, this fable that's made up about this guy, Baron Munchhausen. So Baron Munchhausen, he's riding on his horse and he gets stuck in a pool of mud, quicksand actually. And the horse starts sinking into the quicksand. And so he's telling this tale at the dinner table. And he says, there was nobody there and my horse was sinking into quicksand. And it's like, okay, then why are you here? How'd you get out? He says, well, there was nobody to help me. So what I did is I pulled on my own hair or I pulled myself out. And I myself happened to pull myself out without anyone else's help. Right. So obviously defies the laws of gravity. Right. It doesn't make any sense. But the reason why this is called Munchhausen's trilemma is that when you get stuck in this quicksand, it seems like there's nothing to pull you out. So what is the trilemma? This is how it goes. So let's let's say I ask you, how do you know something? Okay. This is this is what Munchhausen's trilemma is. How do you know something is true? And you tell me, oh, I know this is true because this is my proof. Okay. Well, how do you know that's true? Give me your proof for that proof. And then you say, well, I know that's true because of X, Y and Z. And then I say, well, give me your proof that those things are true. So now there's three options. Okay. The first option is that the proofs go on forever. Okay. That's called the Tassal Sul. The proofs go on forever. That's called infinitism in English. Right. That there has to be an infinite number of proofs. And since nobody possesses an infinite number of proofs, nobody can know anything. Okay. That's option one.
Option number two is that the proofs have to support one another in a kind of circle. So A proves B and B proves C and C proves A. Okay. And that's called a Deur. It goes in a circle or in English it's called coherentism. This idea that you have to have this mesh that goes around and it seems deeply unsatisfying because, well, it's completely arbitrary how these proofs are going to go around in this circle. There seems no justification whatsoever for this. And then the third option is the idea that the proofs go back to some unquestionable belief. Okay. The proofs go back to a proof where you say that, okay, this is the answer. And don't question me about that. Don't ask me for that proof. Because that you just have to accept without thinking. And so there's this called foundationalism and there's two options. One is rationalism, the idea that everything goes back to logic. And if you ask me how do I know logic is true or how do I know rationality is true, I don't have an answer. You just have to accept it. The other option is empiricism. Everything goes back to our worldly senses. And if you ask me how does that, how do you know that's true, don't ask me, just accept it. And there's a lot of criticisms of those, both of those methodologies. And it seems like it's completely arbitrary which one you choose. All three of them don't seem to work. So this is a big problem, right? How can we have knowledge about anything? It's a massive confusion. Now, the interesting thing is, did our Muslim scholars talk about this? Yes, they did. We have this discussed in our intellectual tradition. Are we familiar with those responses? No, we're not. This is part of the issue that the Yaftin Institute is doing. It's reviving our understanding of our intellectual tradition, building upon that. So this is my research looking at how Sheikh Osama bin Taymiyyah actually dealt with this in his work Rad'a al-Mantiqeen and in his work Naqt al-Mantib. And I found, you know, he actually discusses this. And he has a very interesting discussion.
And what he mentions, I'll get to what he mentions in a moment. But one thing I want to show you is that if you think about Munchausen's trilemma, you'll notice that there's something very sneaky about it. There's something very dubious about it, which is that all three of these options, foundationalism, coherentism, infinitism, they all assume something to be the case. They all presuppose certain concepts. What are the concepts that they assume? They assume that there is such a thing as truth, and that there is a belief that is true and a belief that is false. They assume that there is such a thing as proof, and that something can be proven. They assume that there is such a thing as justified belief. They assume that there are mental states that are true and mental states that are false. There are all sorts of assumptions that are already worked into Munchausen's trilemma. In order to presuppose the trilemma, you have certain assumptions to begin with. Where did you get those concepts from? That's the question to ask. Where did you get those concepts from that you use in order to even pose the trilemma? And the answer is that you got them from your fitrah. You got them from your fitrah, that natural human primordial state. Your fitrah comes pre-programmed with certain ideas and concepts. And this is what Ibn Taymiyyah says, he says, وَهَذَا مِمَّا اَعْتَرَفُوا بِهِ هُمْ وَجَمِيعُمْ بَنِي آدَمٍ He's talking about the philosophers who discuss this. He says, أَنَّ مِنَ الْتَصَوَّرُ وَالتَّسْدِيبِ مَا هُوَ بَدِيهِ لَا يَحْتَاجُ إِلَى الْكَسْبِ بِالْحَدِّ وَالْقِيَاسِ وَإِلَّا لَلْزِمَةَ الدَّوْرَ وَالتَّسَلْسُلِ There are certain conceptualizations, تصوّر, and certain affirmations, تصدير, that are بديه. They're just primordial. They just come from the human fitrah. They don't require, they don't need any acquisition by definition, which is what Socrates claimed, or by logical syllogism, which is Aristotle's idea. And if you try to do that, it would result in Munchausen's trilemma.
It would result in الدَّوْر, coherentism, or التسلسل. An infinite regress of proofs. So, when you talk about the fitrah, you realize that there are certain concepts that the human mind comes pre-programmed with in order to make sense of reality. And if you try to get rid of those concepts, and you try to say, well, those concepts need to be proven, then you get involved in this epistemological quicksand, and you're sinking like Baron Munchausen. And there's no way to pull yourself out. So, amazingly, Islam solves the epistemological problem that's intractable in Western philosophy. With the concept of the fitrah, it completely solves that problem, revolutionizes the entire discussion. So, the fitrah, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says in the Quran, فِتْرَةَ اللَّهِ لَّتِي فَطْرَ النَّاسَ عَلَيْهَا It's God's chosen fitrah, the constitution upon which He has created the human being. So it's the natural way human beings, the natural way that human beings incline as they grow up. It doesn't mean all of these concepts are present at birth. A human being does not have all the concepts of the fitrah at birth. What it means is that the human being naturally acquires them. Left unimpeded by other influences, the human being naturally acquires these tendencies. So, the human being naturally acquires understanding that there is such a thing as good and bad. The human being naturally acquires language concepts, which is also really interesting. It's something that Noam Chomsky talks a lot about and did a lot of research on, the idea that there's this poverty of stimulus. The idea that you take a human child and with almost no instruction... whatsoever, children have this amazing ability to make sense of the rules of grammar. And there's no reason why they should be able to learn language, but they are. They have the rules of grammar already pre-programmed into their mind. The idea of numerical order, that one is half of two.
Ibn Taymiyyah gives that example. This idea is already pre-programmed into the human mind. And of course, also pre-programmed into the human mind is spiritual reasoning, the idea that there's a purpose behind things, the idea that life is about something, the idea that there's a creator and sustainer to the universe. So, Imam Ibn Taymiyyah, he mentions in his work Madarij al-Sadiqin, he talks about this a lot, he mentions that knowledge of God, according to them, is innate rather than something that requires proof. This is why none of the messengers were ever sent to their nation in order to prove the existence of a creator. Rather, their calling was to devote yourself to the Creator, and their calling was to recognize the unity of the Divine, to recognize Allah's Tawheed, to recognize that Tawheedic paradigm. The messengers did not come with some philosophical proofs to prove the existence of God. That's something that's already there. The messenger said, is there any doubt concerning God, the creator and sustainer of the universe? That's not what their purpose was. Their purpose was to teach us as human beings how to live that Tawheedic paradigm in our lives. And he says, how can the proof for God be valid if his existence is itself more obvious than the supposed proof? This is a problem. If you say, well, this proves the existence of God, this philosophical argument proves the existence of God, then he asks the question, well, are you more certain about the philosophical proof or the thing that the dalil or the madloul? You're more certain about the dalil. That's why you're using the dalil, the evidence, the proof, in order to establish the madloul. But Allah's existence, that is the ontological foundation for us. That is the thing that is more certain for us than anything else. So that is the foundation that makes everything meaningful. That's why you don't need this kind of philosophical argumentation to come to the existence of God. And that's why the average Muslim growing up, they're countering these arguments and they say, wait a minute, am I not a good believer
because I don't have philosophical arguments to prove the existence of God? No, because it's something that comes from the fitrah. And now there's actually a lot of research in developmental psychology about this as well. So this is an interesting book. And by the way, a lot of these points that I'm mentioning in this part of the lecture, you can find them on Yafin's website, described in more detail in one of our articles, In Pursuit of Conviction. There's part one and part two. This stuff is from part two. In Pursuit of Conviction, humanity needs God. So we talk about Munchausen's trilemma, we talk about all these different things. So in this book, Justin Barrett, he talks about born believers, that human beings are born as believers, and he says that natural belief in God is present in childhood. And he calls it the hypersensitivity, hypersensitive agency detection device, HADD. It's a fancy term for the fitrah. Okay, we just call it the fitrah. And when he wrote this book, he said, I don't understand why I was getting emails from all these Muslims telling me that I'm talking about something that they already know about. I'm not saying that people are born believing in Islam or the Prophet Muhammad. I'm just saying that people are born with a natural inclination towards God. And that's exactly what Muslim theologians say as well, right? So he's like, why are people telling me this is the fitrah? Because it is the fitrah. One of the experiments that he talks about is very interesting. Not only do children have a natural understanding of God, but they have a natural understanding of some of the attributes of God as well. So as young as three years of age, children know that God never dies and that God sees and hears all things. And you can do certain experiments. So he has one experiment called the cracker box experiment, okay? So you show a child this cracker box, and you say, what's in the box? And they say, crackers. And you open the box and you show them inside, there are actually crayons. And then you say, if I were to call your parents into the room and ask them what's inside the box, what would they say? And they say,
well, they would probably say that inside the box are crackers, right? They wouldn't know that there's actually crayons in the box. Okay, if I was to ask God what is inside the box, what would God say? God would say that they're crayons. So God knows all things. They have that instinctively written in. And he's done those experiments even on the children of atheists. And then they're getting all the answers right. And one of the parents, she's an atheist, she turns to her kid, she's like, Johnny, do you believe in God? Like, what is this? You're answering all these questions about God. And he's like, of course, mom. And he starts laughing. And so he mentions that in the book, which is very interesting. So this idea that children have a natural tendency to do it to believe in God. And somebody will say, well, this is just a childish desire and belief, and we should do away with it. We need to establish belief in God through philosophical proof, and otherwise we're not going to accept it, the whole skepticism, right? Now, if you wanted to get rid of it, you couldn't even get rid of it. Because the concepts that are embedded in the fitrah, if you try to get rid of them, you're not going to be able to make sense of reality. And that's exactly what Ibn Taymiyyah says in one of his other works, Daru'ta'arud al-aql wal-naqal, refuting the contradiction between revelation and reason. So he mentions that when something is established in the fitrah, it is embedded in one's nature. It is imprinted in one's mind, such that one cannot withstand discarding it, nor is it even possible to discard it from oneself. So if you try to get rid of the idea of cause and effect, reality becomes uninterpretable. If you try to get rid of the idea that the universe has a point to it, that we're more than just the accumulation of particles, then you can't have a meaningful construal of reality anymore. Reality itself no longer becomes meaningful. In order to have a meaningful understanding of anything, of even your own thoughts, in order for your thoughts to have meaning, then there has to be some ontological foundation, something that grounds meaning in reality. And that's exactly
what we believe in Islam. And that's the understanding of meaning that comes from, as I mentioned in one of the other lectures, when Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala uses the term nur in the Quran. Nur is not just physical light, it's also conceptual light. Nur conveys meaning. And Allah says about this verse, the example of his light in the heart of the believer. So it's the ability to extract meaning from the fitrah and from wahi. Wahi, the revelation, allows the human being to use their fitrah and develop it in a way that they have the conceptual architecture in order to extract meaning from their experiences. So the example I give, you might say, okay this is all so confusing, you've used about 50 billion terms that I don't understand. No. Let me give you a very simple example. So you have your phone, right? You have your smartphone. And let's say somebody says, okay well, I want to start from scratch. I want to delete all the apps on my phone and start from scratch. The phone is not going to work unless you use the basic apps, the pre-programmed software that comes on the phone. If you try to delete the phone app, you try to delete it, it doesn't let me delete it, right? You can't delete the phone app, you can't delete the settings app, you can't delete the App Store, because there are certain basic pre-programmed software that allows you to accumulate other software as well. So the human mind is like that. The human mind has certain software that it comes with. It has a morality software package, it has a spirituality software package, has intellectuality software package, and you need to use that in order to make sense of everything else. If you try to get rid of that, nothing works, nothing makes sense. Okay, so those are the basic concepts that you start with. So that's what we mentioned about the fitrah. Now, very briefly, the
Quran also talks about the a'apl. In fact, there are over 750 verses in the Quran that call upon the human being to use one's intellect, to develop one's intellectual reasoning, to discipline the mind, and to use it to extend one's knowledge and understanding. So when atheists talk about blind faith, they say that, oh, faith by definition is belief in the absence of evidence. That's not what we believe in Islam. In Islam, faith is that which conforms to the fitrah, and is constructed upon the use of the intellect, disciplined by spirituality in the service of revelation. Okay, so faith is not just some blind belief in the absence of evidence. Faith is constructed with rationality, using the dictates of the fitrah, disciplined by the spiritual path established in the revelation. So the intellect and al-his, the faculty of observation, of sensorial perception, they allow the person to grow in knowledge. And then there's the concept of meaning as well. So when we look at the universe around us, we want to see the ayaat of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. We want to see the universe as meaningful, rather than seeing it as just aimless interactions of particles. And so the difference between those two things is like looking at a screen that's just static noise. Okay, like looking at... can you see the mouse? No? Okay. So looking at the image on the right, where it's just static noise, okay, and the reason something is a black pixel here rather than a white pixel there, is there's absolutely no rhyme or reason to it, right? It doesn't really have any significance, it doesn't have any relevance for us, okay? But when you look at the signs, what does it mean to say that something is ayaat, right? This is part of Quranic epistemology as well. When you look at a signal, it conveys a meaning behind it, okay? So all of the different occurrences in the universe all of a sudden become filled with meaning. And so the issue is not that there isn't a proof that
the atheist has found that's convincing for the existence of God. The issue is that we haven't made our minds open to the proofs. We haven't acquired the proper epistemology to recognize the signs of God. And that's why Allah says in the Quran, كَأَيِّمْ مِّنْ آيَةٍ فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ يَمُرُّونَ عَلَيْهَا Right? How many are the signs of Allah in the heavens and the earth? They pass right by them. وَهُمْ عَنْهَا مُعْرِدُونَ And they just turn away from them. So we have to acquire that spiritual perception to see the ayaat of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala in the universe around us. So this gives us an understanding of what is the epistemology of atheism grounded in skepticism and what is the Quranic alternative. Now most people are totally unaware of this because we don't talk about this. We don't study this stuff. And so this is where Yaqeen Institute is doing this research to revive our understanding of our intellectual tradition. How do you explain this to kids? That's one of the questions that the Muslim parents ask about, right? Very simply, the fitrah, the amazing thing about the fitrah is that there are certain things that are just naturally understood very easily. So just presenting the tawhidic paradigm, presenting the idea that life is a journey to come closer to Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, it naturally appeals to the human being. It appeals to their fitrah. So insha'Allah I'll conclude it there and there's more that could be said but we'll stop there insha'Allah. May Allah bless our Prophet Muhammad and his family and companions.
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