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Contemporary Ideologies

Atheism and the Crisis of Faith

How do we know that God exists? Why do we need faith to be good people?

Imam Tom Facchine invites Dr. Nazir Khan to break down the arguments for atheism and address the most fundamental questions about the Divine, religion, and faith.

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Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
God is more worthy of you to have certainty in Him. Your certainty in God is actually the basis for having certainty in everything. You can start to apply radical skepticism to every single thing out there. How do I know that my reasoning that is generated by these three pounds of organic matter in my skull has any ability to latch onto ontological truths about the nature of the universe? And the only escape from that kind of radical skepticism is to have a foundation that allows you to have certainty in all of these other things. And that foundation is belief in Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Salaamu alaikum and welcome back to Dogma Disrupted. Today we're talking about atheism and the crisis of faith. And just a quick reminder for everybody, if you're not already subscribed to email notifications, then please do so, so you're able to catch all the episodes as they are released. Now to talk about atheism and the crisis of faith, we have a very esteemed guest with us here, Yaqeen Institute's own Dr. Nazir Khan. Dr. Nazir Khan, in addition to being the president of Yaqeen Canada and the director of research strategy at Yaqeen Institute, he also has many other hats besides that. He is a neuroradiologist and a professor at McMaster University. And he is somebody who has extensive expertise and experience in the Quranic sciences and Islamic theology as well. So somebody who combines some very important fields and thus a tremendous asset to Yaqeen Institute being able to sort of put reason and science and faith and theology all in conversation with each other, which will be essential to our conversation today. Welcome Dr. Nazir. Jazakallah khair Imam Tom and wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah. Thanks for having me. So let's get right into it. We have a sequence or a series of questions that kind of walks people through maybe the most fundamental things that they might wonder when they're
considering the supernatural, the divine, you know, religion and faith. And the first one that is just a perennial question that comes to me and every other Imam out there, and I'm sure you as well. How do we know that God exists? Right. Okay, so that's a huge topic of discussion. And, you know, there's a lot of resources on Yaqeen related to this. But one of the things that I want us to do is just take a step back and try to build a framework. So when somebody says, how do we know that God exists? The important question to go back to is how do we know anything at all, right? And that's the topic of epistemology. Epistemology is how do we know the things that we know? And there is a Quranic epistemology. The Quran provides us with a framework of how to establish knowledge. And when we encounter somebody saying, you know, prove to me God exists, the important question to first ask is, well, how do you understand proof? How do you know that you haven't already encountered proof, but you've defined proof in a way that already excludes the possibility of God's existence from the get go. So to give you an example of this, you know, I remember once seeing a debate between a theist and an atheist. And the theist asked the atheist, you know, you know, what would you have to see in order to believe that God exists? And the atheist said, you know, I really wouldn't believe that God exists until, you know, I saw him directly. And he spoke to me. And then the theist said, okay, if you saw that, would you then accept the existence of God? And the atheist thought about it for a moment and said, actually, probably I would think I'm just having a bad hangover. And I'm just hallucinating. And that's very interesting because the Quran describes that attitude. So the Quran mentions in Surah Al-Hijr, the 15th chapter of the Quran,
Even if we were to open up the gates of the heavens for them, and they were to ascend up into the heavens, or they witnessed the angels ascend up into the heavens, according to another tafsir, they would still say, our eyes are hallucinating, you know, we're hallucinating, we've been bewitched, right? So even in that context, they still wouldn't accept it. So that's the problem that the Quran is pointing out. It deals with atheism by identifying the underlying problem, which is the problem of radical skepticism, you have to have a coherent epistemology, you have to know how to establish knowledge in order to first go about the conversation of discussing the existence of the Creator and our purpose in our lives. And that's really significant for, for several reasons, one of which I think I encountered, I'm sure you do too, is once you kind of shine the light on, well, how can we talk about knowledge at all? How can we talk about proof at all, you're able to hold people to some sort of coherence and consistency. And what we usually find is that atheists or radical skepticism, it's not coherent, and it's definitely not consistent. What we find is that people when it comes to certain areas of their life, when it comes to believing in countries that exist that they've never seen before, or been to, or believing in things that happened in the past, or believing in certain, you know, let's say, accepted or received scientific information, they're not nearly as skeptical, and they don't nearly have the level of skepticism, or they don't demand the same level of evidence for those sorts of claims. And yet, when it comes to the divine, when it comes to the life after death, when it comes to anything that even approaches spiritual or religious, all of a sudden, the skepticism is ramped
way up. And now we have the most demanding and stringent sort of requirements to believe in anything. So can we talk maybe about being consistent with your epistemology? What sort of are some, maybe if we're holding other people to task, why should they consider sort of an epistemology other than the one that they are currently espousing? How is the epistemology of atheists inconsistent? And what would it look like if it was consistent, maybe? Right. So on that last question, what would it look like if it was consistent? There's actually an article by an atheist philosopher, Richard Garner, who calls on fellow atheists to be moral abolitionists. And what is a moral abolitionist? It's somebody who denies the existence of morality or abolishes morality. Somebody who believes that good and evil do not exist. And his argument is, he's like, look, we as atheists, we deny the existence of God because we say we have no empirical evidence of God. We can't see him or hear him or perceive him directly. We should, for the same reasons, deny the existence of moral good and moral evil. And he's not a theist making this argument to atheists. He's genuinely arguing that it would be philosophically consistent for atheists to do this. And that raises a larger issue, which is going back to the topic of radical skepticism. One of the things that's very interesting that Shaykh Husayn ibn Taymiyyah mentions, one of the famous Muslim theologians, he talks about this phenomenon in Arabic, the term that they used was safsata, which is, you know, to correspond to radical skepticism, sophistry. And he says people tend to apply this in one domain of their life, but they don't, you'll rarely find somebody who applies it in every domain. And another example of that is, you know, there's a philosophy called solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that nothing exists other than
my own mind. And you see this in examples in popular culture, like the idea that you're plugged into the matrix, right? You're just in a machine, everybody else around you is a computer simulation. You know, that is a manifestation of solipsism. And it's, you know, it's philosophically irrefutable. If you were to say that I'm not going to believe the world exists until somebody gives me a convincing philosophical argument to refute solipsism, you'd remain a solipsist. And yet, at the end of the day, the majority of people go on living their lives on a day to day basis without this kind of existential panic about whether the external world exists or not. And why is that the case? Well, Muslim theologians would argue that the reason that's the case is because we have the fitrah. We have a natural way of processing the world in a way that's meaningful, right? And we have a natural inner constitution. Part of that is the inner disposition to believe in Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and to worship Him alone. And part of that is looking at the world and understanding that there is such a thing as good and bad. There is such a thing as cause and effect. The external world is real. All of these things are given to us through the fitrah. It's that pre-packaged software that the human mind comes with. And that is necessary in order for a person to make sense of reality. Now, that's fascinating. And that's also bore out by history. I mean, the English language, you know, just a few hundred years ago, we used to refer to somebody who was sort of a deviant in moral terms as an atheist without necessarily that having a connotation of a specific program of theological beliefs. There was an understanding that your theological beliefs created capacity or hindered capacity for moral action. And so if you don't believe in the foundations of morality, then you can't be moral in the first place, which is something that is extremely significant and uncommon wisdom these days when we're saying, I think
the mantra of one of the many mantras of our times is that it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you're a good person. And what you're saying and what I'm saying is the opposite, that actually you can't be a good person. You can't even define what goodness is if you don't have some sort of theological belief and that the atheists that are more consistent and more sort of rigorous and coherent actually take it to their logical conclusion, which is that, well, you can't believe in any morality and therefore everything is just a human construct. Maybe this dovetails in with postmodernism and things like that. That is very, very fascinating. So a lot of atheists, would you say these days, the ones who don't take it to its logical conclusion, what's going on there? How can we account for it? Is this just sentimentality on their part? Is it just culture? Why do we find that most atheists aren't willing to take it to that level of logical consistency that they claim that they can still be moral and claim that they still sort of adhere to these things? Yeah, that's a really good question. And one thing that occurred to me as you were describing that relationship with morality and belief, it's so expansive actually. There's multiple ways in which faith and morality intersect, right? So just to touch on that before I get to that question that you mentioned at the end, moral ontology is one aspect of the relationship between faith and morality. So the idea that in order to affirm that there is such a thing as good and bad, we need to have belief in the creator, right? Belief that there are certain actions that lead us towards him and certain actions which distance us from him. Otherwise, if the universe is just a collection of particles, then there's just different arrangements of particles. There is no good and bad. And the other is moral epistemology,
which is that once we establish that there is such a thing as good and bad, how do we know which particular actions are good and which particular actions are bad? And of course human beings have the fit for us. We have a natural intuition. Okay, murder is wrong. Stealing is wrong. Being kind to one's neighbors is good. But in order for these notions to be developed and to be cultivated, you need the institution of faith and you need the source of revelation to allow a person to develop them. And that leads to the third one, which is moral psychology, which is where does a person find the motivation to undergo that tremendously difficult process of self-sacrifice and self-purification in order to become a better version of themselves. What we find now in popular culture is the mantra is commonly just be yourself, just accept yourself. The idea that there could be something about you that is worth changing, that is worth developing to become a better version of yourself is completely missing. So that's another aspect. And then the fourth one is moral sociology, which is the ability of people to come together with a shared value system. That is something that needs a source of guidance that people can turn to. Just a quick, quick comment. And that last one is usually I think what people in modern times, they feel it more. They feel that you have even atheists and agnostics that want to be part of a church, for example, because they know somewhere inside of themselves that they need a community. They're maybe lukewarm about the theological commitments, but they recognize the need for that. And the only real way to sort of establish that is based off some sort of common moral ground. It's very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, what's interesting is one of the reasons why the COVID pandemic
was so devastating for people in many different aspects of life is because people were already stripped of sources of stability in their life before the pandemic came about. So if you think about what are the sources of stability in a person's life, there's faith, family, community, and you've had a gradual process of faith being eroded by the ideologies of secularism and atheism, family and community being eroded by radical individualism and liberalism. And so now all of a sudden, these immense sources of stress and tribulation come about in a person's life, and there's no sources of stability. There's just all these destabilizing forces. And that's led to a lot of people talking about the contemporary meaning crisis, right? People are just unable to cope with that level of uncertainty about the future, that level of stress, and so on. So going back to that question that you raised about, you know, what is the reason why people don't pursue these deeper questions of life, and why is it that people remain in a state of atheism? It's multifactorial. There's not one single point that you can mention. The poem mentions a whole typology of different psychological dispositions, different attitudes that lead people astray. But one of them is the state of ghafla, the state of heedlessness. If you look at society today, we've got, you know, the biggest industries are related to entertainment, and it's about manufacturing a state of permanent heedlessness for people, so that they're never able to contemplate the higher questions of life. Why do I exist? What happens to me after I die? You know, what makes my life worth living? These are important questions that every human being has to grapple with, and you either have
coherent answers to these questions, or you have incoherent answers. And you can disguise the fact that you have incoherent answers to these questions by remaining in a state of perpetual heedlessness, and never forcing yourself to confront those questions. And, you know, Imam Ibn al-Qayyim in his work, Wa'bil al-Sayyib, he says, a beautiful line, he says, اعلم ان في القلب خلة وفاقة لا يسدها شيء للبطة الا ذكر الله عز وجل He says, know that in the heart there is a void and emptiness that nothing will ever fill except the remembrance of Allah ﷻ, that spiritual connection, connecting back with our Creator and fulfilling our purpose in life as custodians on this earth for the sake of Allah ﷻ, right? That can never be replaced by anything else. So no matter what contemporary ideologies people surround themselves with, or whether they choose to deaden that impulse with just, you know, zombie scrolling on their phone, or spending hours and hours on Netflix binging, or whatever it is that people do, there is that emptiness inside that is crying out for, you know, for fulfillment from Allah ﷻ. That's immensely profound. And I love the examples that you used, because one thing that I always take issue with is the sort of the mainstreaming of substance-based language. So we use the words binging, we use the word addict, and these are things that are literally descriptive of how people interact with their social media, or their entertainment, or whatever it is. Even the idea, I always bristled at the idea of food porn, right? Like, this is another sort of way in which words are important, and they desensitize us, but they also show something else. They show sort of the, especially with the latter example,
maybe the objectification of the world that we live in, or our relationships to our food, or to other things. And it shows sort of our, how much we've just surrounded ourselves with just distractions, ghafla, as you said, heedlessness. Related to this, you know, we began the conversation talking about proof, and talking about evidence, and there is a school of thought out there that belief is not sort of as much a cognitive function of evidence and proof, but as rather a moral function, right? Of sort of what are, what do you have, that not believing is not about having insufficient proof, but actually it's a moral failing. And there's some sort of weight to this, you can justify it with certain parts of the Qur'an. In Surah Al-An'am, Allah discusses this phenomenon as well. What do you think about this? Is this part of the typology that you mentioned? Is this something else that we should consider? Are these things, is it an either or? Is it actually both are true? How does, how much of belief is a cognitive battle, and how much is, is it a moral one? So this is a really deep question, and it's something that, you know, I've spent so much of my life researching this particular topic, and it's the topic that's related to my current PhD in Islamic theology that I'm doing, related to exactly what you just mentioned. So the reason why it first came to mind, you know, is I would notice that people have what's called this evidentialist approach to faith. This idea that belief or faith is something that is, you know, something you infer as a result of a long sequence of almost like mathematical calculations, right? It's logical proofs that are like mathematical proofs. It's like 10 minute shahada, just, you know, A, B, C, and you'll lead. Right, and that's all it is, right? And then,
you know, there's a lot of problems with that approach. And I remember, you know, as an undergraduate student at university, seeing people standing at the dawah booth, and somebody comes to ask about Islam. And they spend like, you know, 30 minutes talking to them about what is necessary existence, and everything that begins to exist must have a cause. And then they start debating about the nature of the Big Bang, and what different cosmologists have said. And if it gets really complicated, they get into the Borg-Guth-Vilenkin theorem of whether, you know, the Big Bang implies that the universe had a beginning, or whether it, you know, there was existence before that. And then at the end of the day, the guy walks away, and it's like, what have you explained to that person about Islam? Absolutely nothing, right? And so this, you know, elicited my interest in kind of probing this from the perspective of, again, Qur'anic epistemology. How does the Qur'an say that faith should be established? And it doesn't make sense to have that approach where you view faith as the outcome of some kind of logical calculus, or mathematical operations, where, you know, it's about, you know, proving to somebody this complicated mathematical formula, and presto, now you're going to be a believer. Because what that means is that if somebody hasn't understood it yet, it's a failure, like not understanding a mathematical proof. Why would their salvation be dependent on understanding some complicated mathematical? And then I found that Muslim scholars talked about this. So Ibn Hazm wrote an entire Risalah, or epistle, on this topic, Al-Bayan Fi Haqiqati Al-Iman, explaining why it is the case that Iman does not need to be built on philosophical arguments. Al-Shahrustani, a famous heresiologist, Muslim scholar who died 548 Hijri, he talked about this as well, and he said something that's very interesting. He said that, you know,
when you look at a lot of these philosophical proofs that people give for the existence of God, my certainty in God's existence is greater than my certainty in any of these premises that they're mentioning in their philosophical proof, right? You know, and it's typically the case that you use what is more obvious to prove what is less obvious, rather than reasoning from what is less obvious to prove what is more obvious. And so he mentions a statement that Muslim scholars have said, which is, عرفت الأشياء بربي وما عرفت ربي بالأشياء that I came to know of things through my Lord, rather than knowing of my Lord through other things. And I thought, well, that's very profound. Now, how exactly do you justify that? And one scholar who quoted both Ibn Hazm and Al-Shahrustani and many others on this topic and further developed this discussion, is again Ibn Taymiyyah. And he explains in a very beautiful way how he links this with the story of Musa Alayhi Salaam and Fir'aun in the Qur'an. And I don't know if I'm just kind of going on, if you want to pause me there. No, no, no, I know, please. So what he mentions about this story, you know, Fir'aun is an example of an atheist in the Qur'an because he denies the existence of a creator in the heavens. And he says, Oh, Haman, build me this, you know, skyscraper, build me the structure so that I can look up into the heavens. Like hyper-empiricism. He's like, I should be able to go up and look if he's really meaning that. Yeah. Very empiricist. In fact, one of the phrases he says is, I only show you that which I see, right? But he says about Musa Alayhi Salaam, I think that he's a liar that there's a God in the heavens, right?
Now in the dialogue between Musa Alayhi Salaam and Fir'aun, when Fir'aun asks Musa Alayhi Salaam, what is this Lord of the universe? Ibn Taymiyyah says that Fir'aun is not asking like a legitimate question about what is the nature of God and tell me about the divine attributes. He's asking a rhetorical question, you could say. He's phrasing his denial of God in the form of a question. And what's interesting is Musa Alayhi Salaam's reply, رَبُّ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَوْضِ وَمَا بَيْنَهُمَا إِن كُنْتُم مُّقِينِينَ The Lord of the heavens and the earth and whatever is between them, if you have yaqeen. Right? So what does that mean? We're a yaqeen institute. What does that mean? Musa Alayhi Salaam is saying, if you have yaqeen. So Ibn Taymiyyah says it's very interesting that Musa Alayhi Salaam doesn't say, if you have yaqeen, certainty in this particular thing or that particular thing, but he leaves it universal. In other words, it seems to be putting the cart before the horse, at least from a modern sort of evidentiary position. It's like, shouldn't yaqeen come later? And Musa is kind of saying, if you have yaqeen, then it will manifest in some sort of way. Yes. And I'm going to get to that point as well, because that's a very important observation you just made. But he says, if you have yaqeen and he leaves it unqualified, right? So in other words, as Ibn Taymiyyah says, it's whatever yaqeen you have in anything, God is more worthy of you to have certainty in him, right? Your certainty in God is actually the basis for having certainty in everything. And how do you illustrate that? Going back to the concept of radical skepticism. You can start to apply radical skepticism to every single thing out there, whether it's cause and effect, whether it's the existence of good and bad, whether even your own logical reasoning, you could say, you know, how do I know
that my reasoning that is generated by these three pounds of organic matter in my skull has any ability to latch onto ontological truths about the nature of the universe? You could be skeptical about all of that. And the only escape from that kind of radical skepticism is to have a foundation that allows you to have certainty in all of these other things. And that foundation is belief in Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. That's what allows you and guarantees the reliability of your senses so you can believe in the external world. It guarantees the reliability of your moral faculties so that you can pursue good and abstain from evil. It guarantees all the other things that human beings take as certain. Those are all founded upon that fundamental yaqeen, that fundamental certainty in Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. And it's no surprise that when people have removed that foundation, we are now seeing rampant radical skepticism in every single domain of society because the very structures of reality, the structures of certainty in people's minds are just collapsing without that fundamental foundation. And it's no surprise that we have the rise of post-modernism now, which says that there is no objective truth. It's taking radical skepticism and applying it to the concept of truth itself. You have your truth, I have my truth. There is no objective truth. There is no overarching narrative. And this is all from the corollaries and the logical entailments of taking out the foundation that gives yaqeen to everything, which is tawhid, which is our connection with Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. Interesting. Okay, so did you want to comment about the sort of putting the cart before the horse and the sequence of things? Yes. Thanks for reminding me about that point. There's so many different ways. I have another question. So that's also a really interesting point that you raised because the other way that
people approach belief that is a little bit problematic is they assume that you're going to present some kind of argument, and if it's convincing, I'll have no choice but to believe. So it's called doxastic involuntarism. That's the fancy term for it. The idea that beliefs are involuntary, that they aren't the result of a choice. So when I wrote this article on atheism and radical skepticism, one Muslim university student was very astute. He read the article and he said, it sounds like to me the point that you're making about how we have to pursue meaning in life, we have to look for coherent answers, it sounds like to me what you're saying is that belief in God is a choice. And I'm like, that's exactly right. Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la says in the Qur'an, it comes down to a person's choice. You can choose to see life as meaningless, you can choose to be a nihilist and just embrace meaninglessness, or you can choose to see your life as having a purpose. You can choose to pursue meaningful answers to the big questions of life, or you can choose not to. And you can choose to believe in Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and choose that foundation of yaqeen, which brings order and certainty to all other domains of life, or you can choose to turn your back on it and not have any way of rendering reality meaningful. And that's why it ties back to that point of yaqeen being a choice for the individual. Yeah, and it has such far-reaching effects. I mean, as we're saying that we can't really cleave morality from theology as people would like to do. And so to reject one is to reject the other. And it is a choice that people make when people are choosing sort of atheism, or they're choosing sort of to reject the afterlife as a phenomenon,
as a possibility. They in fact are choosing to reject all of the moral prescriptions that come with that. The idea of a moral life, of righteousness, of piety, all those things cease to have meaning if you reject the theological basis for it. So that has tremendous consequences. One question that occurs to me is, does this type of yaqeen that we're talking about, if faith is something that is maybe more of a moral disposition, rather than just being shown a bunch of mechanistic proofs, what's the result of that faith? Is the result of that faith just faith in general? Is it a vague faith of something? Or is there something more specific that's entailed there? Is it belief in Islam? Does it get that far? Or is there sort of an intermediary, well, now you've sort of been brought to the door of the phenomenon of belief writ large, and now you have to sort out, well, why Islam, as opposed to other sort of iterations of claimants to representing the true faith? That's a very profound question. And one of the ways to approach it from the Islamic perspective is to look back at the concept of the fitrah, the natural human disposition, and the role of wahi, the role of revelation, and how those two work together. We have the phenomenon of the hunafa, people who are truth seekers before the coming of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. And their truth-seeking behavior led them in different directions, but it all collectively led them away from idolatry, it led them to a recognition that there has to be a message that is going back to the prophethood of previous prophets. There's certain general kind of inclinations that they
came to on the basis of that path of seeking truth. So you could say that there are certain general things that the fitrah can lead to, but in order for that to actually come about in the form of articulated Islamic beliefs, that's where you need revelation to guide the human fitrah. Because the unguided human fitrah can be subject to perversion from many different sources, from societal pressure, from parental upbringing, from culture, all different forces that can lead a person away from those natural moral predispositions that wouldn't otherwise take them in the direction of the truth. But what's interesting is, even more specifically, if you look at what empirical evidence in the field of developmental psychology shows, there's an interesting book by Justin Barrett called Born Believers, where he actually talks about some psychology experiments that were done on children growing up and looking at whether there is an inborn faculty of belief, or whether there is a natural tendency towards believing in God. And you can see very early on, even from infancy, you can see that babies prefer to look at images where shapes are moving around purposefully rather than randomly. There's a natural human inclination towards teleology or purpose. And then that manifests at further developmental stages in the belief in a creator. And one of the things that's very interesting that he talks about is experiments that were done with children growing up in predominantly atheistic societies. If you look at Scandinavian countries where the level of atheism is much higher than the level
of belief, and you go there and you start interviewing some of these children, one of the experiments that really stuck with me is one where the child was just giving the right answer about every single thing about the divine nature, about the attributes of God, that God knows all things, God can do everything. And he was getting all the answers right, despite being like six years old and growing up in a society that has no formal belief in God. And his parents, who were atheists, they were surprised. And they kind of turned to him and were like, Johnny, do you believe in God? He's like, of course, mom. And that kind of threw the parents for a loop, right? So you have this kind of natural tendency that's mentioned and something that's talked about in cognitive science of religion, but in order for it to be fully cultivated and developed appropriately, that's where revelation comes in. We could say that it's similar to language, right? I mean, we're hardwired, at least according to maybe the predominant theory in linguistics, we're hardwired with the ability for language, we're primed for language, we come into the world as a languaged being, ready to go. But yeah, it still takes practice, refinement, and some sort of input from outside of ourselves in order to develop that capacity further. Yeah, that's, sorry, I was just going to comment on that. It's something that has been referred to by Noam Chomsky as the poverty of stimulus, right? You look at the fact that a child with a seemingly very, very little instruction is able to just naturally comprehend certain grammatical principles and acquire language with very little direct instruction, just purely from exposure. And that's led people to say, well, there's some kind of language acquisition device, right? There's some kind of internal inborn
mechanism that allows people to be able to naturally receive that. But you still have to be exposed to language. If you look at examples of feral children who grew up in the wild or you know, away from any human communication, that faculty of language becomes totally disrupted, right? Because they haven't received that. So having revelation allows you to build on that fitrah, right? And that's one of the things that, it's an interesting tafseer of ayat al-nur, that the scholars mentioned that nur ala nur, light upon light, is the light of revelation combined with the light of the fitrah. Yeah. MashaAllah. I mean, that leads me down a long tangent I don't want to get into, but for me, I've always, I'm always fascinated by languages and linguistics. And I think that linguistics for the history of human language is one of the strongest proofs for some sort of, if we're going to go through the evidentiary sort of model of belief, you know, the fact that languages have gone from highly synthetic and very complicated, and then sort of, I don't want to say devolved, but simplified into analytic languages over time. I mean, this is something actually that I was shocked to read. I can't remember if it was Martin Lingzer, Fazlur Rahman. I think it was Fazlur Rahman mentioned it in one of his books. And I was shocked to also see it written there. And it's something that indicates that there's this very interesting dynamic between what we're given and what we come into the world with, and then what we're expected to do with it. I think that's sort of what this phenomenon that we've mentioned sort of illustrates. I just want to mention one clarification about, because we're talking about, you know, faith being a moral capacity. And I want to mention that it's not an either or, that it's a moral capacity, and therefore there's no role for proofs and evidence and intellectual arguments. Those do have a role, but those have a role as ayat,
right, as signs, right? So once you understand that there's a spiritual capacity for faith, there's a moral capacity for faith, there's an intellectual capacity for faith, but those work together, right? And these things are in conversation. So in order to make the right moral choices and to have the right spiritual attitude towards belief in God, you know, you also have to use your reason correctly, right, and reason about the facts of the world in an appropriate manner. So these things work in concert, and it's not an either or thing where it's, oh, it's the fitrah, there's no room for reason or rationality. No, that's an excellent intervention. And we could maybe say that the inputs, right, such as the signs, the ayats, the evidence, etc., it's important, but it has to be received. And so your sort of moral disposition or your intact fitrah is the thing that would either receive it if you've at least kept it enough intact, or if you've blown it and covered it and failed to maintain it, then it's like, you know, putting tools in the hands of a baby, they're not going to do anything with it. It's actually sort of lost on them. Because the believer that is morally and spiritually prepared will see the proof for God in every facet of life, whereas somebody who is morally and spiritually unprepared, no matter how many proofs you confront them with, they'll still find a way to encounter that with radical skepticism. Very good. So that still doesn't answer our question, though, as to why Islam over other faiths or other sort of claimants to represent faith. Yeah, and I think when you follow the path of looking for meaningful answers, right, and just contemplate the big questions of life, right? So you have the spiritual questions, what makes my life worth living? Why am I here? What happens to me after I die? You have moral questions of life. What is right and what is wrong? What is the consequence of doing
right versus doing wrong? And then you have the intellectual questions, right? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why have we been given these minds that are able to uncover the truths of the universe? If you're looking for a system of belief that is able to address all of these collectively, then what I maintain is that the Islamic system, the Islamic theology provides the most comprehensive and coherent answers to the fundamental questions of life. And it does so from its basis, which is Tawheed. So when you understand belief in Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and worship of one creator, then we understand Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la has put us on this earth for a purpose, right? And our purpose is to grow in our relationship with Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la to worship him alone and to take care of his creation. And that brings about the moral capacity, right? There are certain consequences to our actions, to the extent to which we are serving as a custodian on this earth and serving as beautiful servants of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la in that capacity of caring for his creation. And that also brings about the intellectual aspect, right? Because the minds that we have been blessed with serve a purpose, right? Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la taught Adam the names of all things, that intellectual cognitive component allows Adam and his descendants to use their faculties of understanding and comprehension to understand the guidance of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, to understand the divine nature of the divine names and attributes. Even though we have not seen Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la directly, we can understand him and understand and come closer to him through our worship. So intellectual, spiritual, and moral are united in that fundamental foundation of Islam, which is tawhid. Excellent. No, that's a very, very nice exposition. You mentioned something that reminded me of another question that comes up often. You mentioned the tests that are done on sort of young children, even infants, and how they naturally gravitate towards order. But once people become adults and once they're sort of exposed to other ideologies
or even just their culture, they come to associate religion with chaos and actually with permitting of evil. And that takes two forms. So there's sort of the theological question or the question of theodicy, which is why does God allow evil to exist in the first place that a lot of people use as a supposed proof as to why there isn't any sort of creator. And then there's the other sort of charge, which is that, well, religion in itself is a cause of disorder and violence and bloodshed. So maybe we can tackle each of those two things separately. So the first one, if there is a God, why does evil even exist? Right. So Yaqeen has three articles on this topic, and I'm going to give like a 30-second summary. So this is one thing that's really fascinating about this is how the Qur'an addresses this question in the very first story that is presented in the Qur'an, right, which is the story of the creation of Adam alayhi salam. And that begins with a conversation between Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and the angels. And the angels say, أَتَجْعَلُ فِيهَا مَا يُفْسِدُ فِيهَا وَيَسْفِي قُدِّمَا Are you going to place on this earth a creation that, you know, spreads corruption and bloodshed? So the angels add this question that they asked Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, and Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la says, إِنِّي أَعْلَمُ مَا نَا تَعْلَمُونَ I know that which you do not know. Now, Adam alayhi salam is taught the names of all things, as I mentioned. And, you know, one of the tafasir, or one of the explanations of that, is that this is the capacity of language that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la gave Adam alayhi salam. And we see that mentioned elsewhere in the Qur'an. عَلَّمَهُ الْبَيَانُ Right, Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la gave human beings the capacity for exposition of meaning through the vehicle of language. Now, one of the things that's interesting is when Adam alayhi salam presents the names to the angels,
Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la says to the angels, Did I not tell you that I know the unseen of the heavens and the earth? وَأَعْلَمُ مَا تُبِدُونَ وَمَا كُنْتُمْ تَكْتُمُونَ And I know that which you make apparent, and that which you are concealing. So, what were the angels making apparent? They were making apparent the destructive capacity of human beings. The capacity of human beings for corruption and violence and their question. That's what was apparent. What did they conceal? Unintentionally, they concealed the fact that human beings have a constructive capacity. That they have a capacity for good. And Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la is showing that that capacity for good comes about through the human gift of knowledge. The ability to understand the guidance that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la has revealed. But it goes even deeper than that. And this is something where Imam Ibn Al-Qayyim and actually Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali as well. They mentioned a very interesting connection between the divine names of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and human morality. So, human beings, when we strive to understand what it means when we hear that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la is the most merciful, the most generous. How do we understand those things? This was a question that Dr. Jeffrey Lang, who is an atheist and had this kind of question about the problem of evil and suffering. He was confronted with this and when he read the Qur'anic approach to this topic, it's what caused him to embrace Islam and he wrote a book, Even Angels Ask. Even angels are asking this question. Well, if a human being did not have the opportunity to show mercy to those who are suffering, how would they ever learn what it means to be merciful? And if they never learned what it means to be merciful, how would they come closer in their understanding of the one who is the most merciful?
If a human being never encountered poverty, how would they have the opportunity to show generosity? And if they never had the opportunity to show generosity, how would they develop that capacity and therefore come closer to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, the one who is the most generous? So, Imam Ibn Al-Qayyim, he says, just like Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la has ascribed to himself these attributes of beauty and perfection, Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la loves those who act according to what those attributes entail. Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la loves those who act according to what those attributes entail. And so, the one who is merciful to others comes closer to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la who is the source of mercy. The one who is generous with others comes closer to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la who is the source of all generosity. And that in a nutshell shows you how tawhid, the fundamental foundation in Islam, explains all of life's big questions including the problem of human suffering. That's fascinating because it's a common sort of philosophical retort. Well, things are known by their opposites and so if you want to know good, then you must know evil by default. But I think what you're saying is that Islamic theology offers sort of, you know, furthers that argument and says, not only can you not know good in the world, you can't know God who is good, right? There would be no sort of register upon which to make sense of the fact that he's merciful, loving, you know, cherishes you, you know, all these sorts of things without having experienced that sort of thing and its opposite in the dunya. Okay, well how about you? And the only thing I would add to that is I find it very interesting that the one who is often famously associated with the problem of evil is the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. And Epicurus is also associated with the philosophy of hedonism, that he believed that what it means to live a good life is to maximize your pleasure.
And the fundamental fallacy in the problem of evil is the idea that suffering cannot serve any purpose, right? And you would expect that kind of fallacy to come from somebody who believed that life's only purpose is just to maximize pleasure. Sure. Also, a very interesting thing for the nerds out there that Talal Asad explores in Formations of the Secular, because he sees this as a fundamental sort of part of secularization is the demeaning and even profaning of suffering. And he talks extensively both about how those things shift over time, and then three particular sort of situations that defy this sort of modern way of thinking about suffering, which is only something to be minimized, only something to be resisted, only something to be overcome. Incidentally, he talks about the martyr, right? The figure of the martyr. He talks about childbirth, right? And that might be something a little remote for folks who are, you know, they just get the medicine and they get the painkillers and they get everything. But for a lot of women still, even in the world, childbirth is something that is inherently painful. But that pain has tremendous meaning. It's not just something to be avoided or resisted. The meaning is actually in the pain itself. And then finally, the last example that he gives is virtue ethics, right? The idea that is not just, you know, particular to Islam, but most religious traditions that you have to suffer in order to inculcate virtue, whether it's patience, whether it's, you know, forbearance, et cetera, et cetera. So that's really, really interesting. I'm glad that you brought that up. Let's deal with the second question. The second question was, okay, now we've made sense of the existence of evil, quote unquote, in the world, but how do we respond to the idea that religion is the cause of violence? Right. And this was something that was almost like a mantra of the New Atheist Movement,
which was that not only is religion untrue, but it's also bad, right? It's not just false. It's harmful. And the New Atheism Movement kind of rose and died out very quickly. The last, you know, international atheist conference that they were going to have in Australia had to be cancelled because of a lack of registration. And so it's interesting. But if we examine this, you know, this idea, what was it, you know, what was the basis of this rhetoric, this idea that religion was, is the source of all violence and evil and whatnot? First of all, historically, it's very uninformed as a thesis. And when you actually study, you know, there's an interesting book called The Age of Atheism by actually an atheist historian, Peter Watson. There's a chapter in it about the Soviet Union called The Bolshevik Crusade for Scientific Atheism. And in this chapter, you know, he details how under Stalin, in the Soviet Union, there was a very active campaign to try to eradicate religion. And there were churches and mosques that were destroyed. You know, religious figures were tortured, mutilated in very savage ways. And this was all under the pretense that religion is something that is harmful and that human beings need to live, you know, without religion as atheists. So the fact of the matter is that, you know, the Soviet regime, and if you include other atheistic communist regimes, these have been the most bloodiest governments in human history. There's a term called democide, which is a government killing its own citizens, which is, and you know, you look at the tens and tens of millions
that have been accumulated in the death tolls in these governments, it's horrific. So the point of this is not to say, well, atheism has also done bad things and therefore, you know, violent actions in the name of religious extremists are just kind of cancelled out. The point of this is to say that human beings are able to manipulate any ideology that they want for the sake of furthering their own political agenda, for the sake of, you know, for the sake of violence. And we see that in, you know, if anything, the atheist agenda was manipulated in the worst way to cause violence, but really any human ideology can do that. And when people have deep-seated religious sensibilities, it's only expected that violent political groups that emerge in those regions will use those religious languages or they'll frame their arguments and their rhetoric of religion in order to try to mobilize support for them. And this was something... Even the CIA sort of admitted that when it came to Afghanistan in the 80s, they had the option between several sort of dissident groups to fund and train and they picked the religious guys because according to them, you know, the religious zealots would fight more, you know, better. So this is something that everybody recognizes. So there's the problem. It's like, you know, the example that people often give is, you know, you have somebody who's drunk driving. Is the problem the vehicle or is the problem the driver, right? Is the problem religion or is the problem the instrumentalization of religion or the weaponization of religious rhetoric for violent ends? And when you actually examine the Islamic teachings on the subject, you find that that provides a clear antidote to this kind of violent thinking. Because the Qur'an provides, you know, in numerous verses,
clear principles of justice, principles of... Even in situations of military engagement, the protection of non-combatants and so on and so forth. It was actually the subject of the first article that I wrote for Yaqeen Institute, which was called Forever on Trial, Islam and the Charge of Violence. Just kind of conveying this idea that whenever something, some act of violence would happen, it would always be Islam that would go on trial rather than the actual individual perpetrator of the act. And we could also direct, in addition, we're going to have to put a lot of your papers in the links below the video when it comes out. But in addition, readers can or viewers can avail themselves of William Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence as a good book to go to, to see this sort of thing in action. There's so much to say about the topic. The most violent century in the history of human existence has been this most secular one, right? In the 1900s with the world wars and atomic weapons and things like that. Also, just the particular sort of... There's another, let's say, historical particularism about sort of the European experience with religion and its sort of traumatic experience with what's known as the European wars of religion. And that came to be a trauma that is sort of read and projected upon all peoples in all times that we still, honestly, are suffering from. So a whole lot can be said about that topic and our viewers, I think, have gotten some good avenues for further research on that. One last question before we wrap up here. We're going to come back to the idea of science A lot of people, they have this doctrine that they believe in, the doctrine of progress. And they put sort of religion in this, or they make sense of religion historically as part of some sort of evolutionary product
where, okay, there might have been a time when religion was sort of needed to explain what goes bump in the night. But now we have science. Now we have rationality. Now we have progress. And so science has replaced religion and we're not in any need of it any further. How would you respond to this? So there was an interesting article in the New York Times. I believe it was in 2007. It's generated a lot of debate and it was written by an astrophysicist named Paul Davies, a cosmologist. And the title of the article was Taking Science on Faith. And the argument that he was making in the article is that people tend to think that science has nothing to do with religion and faith is the most unscientific thing. But actually, in order for science to work, it depends on certain conceptual foundations that actually came out of theology. And so of those conceptual foundations that science depends on is the idea that our human minds are actually able to uncover truths about the universe, that the universe is intelligible, that it is something that can be understood, that the universe is governed according to fixed regularities and the language of natural laws that is used in physics and so forth came out of religious verbiage. The idea that God has ordered the universe according to these fixed principles. These are the laws that God has created the universe according to. And in order for science to work, it needs to have these assumptions in place. The idea that if I'm going to do an experiment, I'm going to get the same results tomorrow as I would today. That the laws are unchanging. That they're fixed. Among other conceptual foundations as well. So, rather than science actually being an enterprise that goes against faith, in order for science to function correctly, it depends on
very deep-rooted theological foundations. I recently wrote an article about what Islamic theology has to say about the philosophy of science. And that's a very big topic and perhaps another conversation. But the basic idea is that theology gives us metaphysics which allows us to extract principles of epistemology. And epistemology allows us to inform our philosophy of science. And that allows us to shape and advance the progress of science itself. So in a very deep sense, there's a relationship between religion and science that a lot of people don't appreciate. Now the other thing that's really important about this is that, you know, the whole dichotomy between religion versus science is something that comes out of, again, Western European thought and doesn't actually make sense on an Islamic framework. And that goes back to your point of people projecting their experiences in Christian Europe, projecting those experiences on religion in general. Because from the Islamic standpoint, what is religious knowledge and what is scientific knowledge? You know, the Qur'an talks about ayat, it talks about signs. And it talks about signs of God in scripture, which the scholars call ayat al-Qur'aniyya. And it talks about signs of God in nature or the universe, which you can call ayat al-Qawniyya. And the Qur'an uses the term ayat for both. So when you are studying the natural sciences, if you're studying the human body or you're studying astronomy, you are studying the signs of God. And so that is religious knowledge. And it is scientific knowledge. And when you are studying the verses of the Qur'an or you're studying hadith of the Prophet ﷺ, you are studying the signs of God in revelation. And that is also religious knowledge. It's also scientific knowledge in the sense that Muslim scholars developed a science around this, an empirical science of
collecting data and evidence to formulate conclusions. So there is no bifurcation between these two domains from an Islamic perspective. All knowledge is knowledge of the signs of God. It's either the signs of God in scripture or the signs of God in nature. So even from the get-go, that whole presumption of a conflict between science and religion doesn't work from the Islamic perspective. That's excellently stated. And I think that when I think about where we sit historically, I think that Islam is so well positioned to solve all of the both historical and present traumas and problems of the West. And this is one of them. I don't think it's benefited anybody the rivalry and the enmity and the animosity between science and faith. And Islam and Islamic history I think can demonstrate to people how those two things need not be in rivalry to one another. In fact, that they can complement each other. And honestly, we get the best out of both when they do complement each other. And if we separate them, then we kind of end up with caricatures each of the other. Dr. Nazer, thank you so much for your time today. It was a wonderful conversation. Do you have any final comments you'd like to leave the listeners with? No, jazakallah khair. I really appreciated the opportunity. And Hamda, it's great that we have these kind of conversations available. And we encourage the listeners to check out the Yaqeen articles and to send in their feedback and maybe suggested topics for future as well. Yes, excellent. And I'm sure we're going to have you back again soon inshallah for future discussions. So I look forward to that inshallah. Okay, well thank you everybody. Thank you Dr. Nazer and thank you to our viewers once again. Subhanakallahumma wabihamdakasharoon la ilaha illa anta astaghfiru qawtubu ilayk. Assalamualaikum warahmatullah Waalaikumussalam warahmatullah
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