I recall that there was an incident of a professor who insisted to his students that there is no God.
I’m Yusuf Estes and for the next few minutes I would like to talk to you about one of the biggest beauties of Islam that has struck me as being probably the best of answers to a human being.
When people come to this point or conjunction in their life they say:
“Why are we here? How did we get here?
What’s it all about?
And what’s the purpose of my life?”
And that’s what we are going to talk about in this episode of the beauties of Islam.
The Purpose of Life
What’s the purpose behind everything?
First and foremost is to establish that there is God. We have done a number of programs about that to prove even scientifically beyond any shadow of a doubt that Allah exists. There have been scientists who have also come to this conclusion. But then there will be always those who say “Yes but according to my logic I don’t understand. I don’t see how you can believe in a God”.
“According to my logic”? … But human logic can only go so far. According to human logic just 500 years ago most of Europe was convinced the earth is flat. They didn’t know that the Quran already said it’s round 1400 years ago. But what about 2000 years ago? What did the people think about the earth? Human logic: you look straight forward on the earth and it looks flat. You don’t really see the curb, do you? No you don’t.
So how far can you go with human logic? And stop and think about this. According to our logic, if we have just used our logic and we hadn’t known some scientific discoveries, there are a lot of things that just wouldn’t work.
The Bee Can’t Fly?
I remember for instance when I was at school many years ago they told us according to the aerodynamics of the bee, you know the honeybee; this little creature that is kind of fat and big and has tiny wings on him, they said according to their logic, according to the aerodynamics that they understood about flying that the bee can’t fly!
I said “The bee can’t fly?!”
I was a little boy and I was thinking “The bee can’t fly according to your books, according to your teachings, according to your aerodynamic design? A bee can’t fly?”
I said “It’s a good thing the bee can’t read!” because if it read the book and found out that it can’t fly it would have walked through all the flowers!
Human logic?! Human logic is nothing more than the reflection of the current mode of thought of the day. People at the time of Plato and Socrates and the great thinkers also thought they knew everything they need to know about everything.
But if you want to insist on human logic, I’ll allow that in our conversation, simply because it’s logical and at the same time I’m going to ask you a question:
“Who was it in fact in the very beginning who came out with this concept of logic anyway?, human logic, the brain, the way we rationalize things, where we understand things came about from who?”
The very people I just mentioned Plato and Socrates; those thinkers. And guess what? You want to accept that? Do you accept it? Yes, yes they came out and they were great thinkers and they were great theologians. Good. Did you know that each and every one of them came to the conclusion there is God?
So you want to talk about that? The people you think are so great, so brainy, so brilliant, according to their rules of testable evidence, they said that God exists. What are you going to say now? So it wouldn’t be logical now for you to deny that, if you are going to say “I use logic!”, logic says God exists!
Now what are you going to say?
A Student Debates with his Professor
I recall that there was an incident of a professor who insisted to his students that there is no God.
He kept saying that: “There is no God, there is no God”.
When the students asked: “Why?” because most of them believed, some were Jewish, some were Christians and some were Muslims, he said “If I don’t see it, if I don’t hear it, if I can’t feel it, if I can’t taste it, if I can’t smell it, it doesn’t exist and if it doesn’t exist I don’t believe in it. It’s as simple as that”
One of the students tried to argue with him about it, and he said “Well God is something beyond that, you should have faith, you have to believe”
The professor said “Why, why should I believe, how?”
The boy said “Well I don’t know, but we just have to believe”
He said “Sit down”
Another boy stood up and said “Listen, as Muslims we believe, but we have proof at the same time.”
He said “Proof? What proof do you have?”
The student said “By knowing what God has done, and what He is doing we know that He exists”
The professor said “What? What are you talking about?”
He said “Sir, can you see electricity?”
“No”,
“But it still exists?”
“Emmm, sure”
“Sir, are you able to hear everything?”
He said “Yes”
He said “Wait a minute, aren’t there sounds that some animals hear and we can’t hear?”
“Well, yeah”
“OK, now there are two things, one you can’t see and one you can’t hear but you still believe in them, don’t you?”
He said “Well, yes but I have evidence, I have scientific evidence on that”
“OK, OK, now I’ll ask you another thing, Sir is there is such thing as heat?”
He said “Of course, everybody knows there is heat, and we measure it as BTUs, British Thermal Units”
Cold and Dark
He said “Sir, is there such thing as cold?”
“Yes, there is such a thing as cold”
“Sir, there is not such a thing as cold”
“There is no cold? What?! Are you nuts? What are you talking about, don’t you know what it’s to be cold? You go outside and it’s cold outside”
The student said “Sir, that’s a concept that we have about our feelings, our skin temperature, but in fact there’s no such thing as cold. There is only the existence of heat. Because there is an absolute for cold 0 Kelvin and below that there isn’t anything colder, that’s absolute, from that we add to it and go up degree by degree by degree, until you get as high as you want to go until you have heat and mega heat until you can go on and on, but there’s no such thing as cold. It’s heat or the absence of heat”
The professor didn’t say a word…
Then the student said “Sir, is there such thing as light?”
He said “Are you crazy? Of course there is light. Look around you, how do you see me right now if you don’t know about light?”
He said “You’re right sir, there is light. Is there such thing as darkness?”
He said “Where are you going with this? Why are you wasting my time? Of course there’s darkness”
He said “No, there is not.”
“What? If you turn off all the lights and there is no sun that is up you are going to be in the dark, yes or no?”
“Sir, there is actually no such thing as darkness. There is light, but when there’s no light we call it darkness”
“What?”
“Sir, listen. You can bring light in all forms. You have candle lights. Light from a match, flash light. You can have megawatts of light, big lights of all kinds but when you have no light at all you call it darkness, but in reality it’s still nothing more than what? Absence of light”
The professor says “Yes, but I still don’t see your point.”
He said “OK, listen, you are saying because you don’t see something, you don’t hear it, you don’t smell it, you don’t taste it, you don’t feel it, you don’t imagine it, it doesn’t exist”
He said “That’s right, and that’s what I’m believing and always going to believe that”
“OK, sir, has anybody ever seen, heard, touched, tasted or felt your brain?”
“No, of course not”
He said “Then sir, according to your own rules of testable evidence you don’t have a brain”!!
You see? This is what happens when a human being tries to take their logic too far because in fact it’s only Allah who has all knowledge. And Allah gives us from that knowledge, and takes away from us from that knowledge. When you are born you start out zero, and Allah begins giving you knowledge. And if you thought that you are the product of generations upon generations of people learning by trial and error, that’s totally and completely incorrect. That would be like thinking that we have to re-invent the wheel every generation.
We do learn from past mistakes. We do learn from what’s in front of us to take advantage of it. But just as we would not accept that we have to re-invent the wheel every generation, we also don’t have to invent thinking. There’s so much more about this topic.
We got a website all about this. And on the website you can watch scientists, nine different scientists who were exposed to the teachings of Islam. They understood the Qur’an and then applied these teachings to their own particular disciplines of science, and each one concluded just as the great philosophers of logic did centuries ago that there must be a God. And you can see these videos on our website at beautiesofislam.com.
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Taken with slight editorial modifications from onislam.net; based on an episode by Sheikh Yusuf Estes titled: “Beauties of Islam; Why are we here?”.