The Failure of atheism:
(Clifford's Principle) “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”
Since an atheist believes in laws of nature (as observed by human five senses) called science, he finds no way to prove the existence of a God or any supernatural being using the laws of nature or science.
The presumption that God does not exist is due to the no belief. Atheism has no teaching of its own. It has no ideology; therefore it puts the burden on others to prove their concepts. However, evidence or proof will always be insufficient because they depend upon limited human senses or instruments that man invents, instruments are consistently being improved. If one say in the year 1000 A.D, for example, that gamma ray or X ray doesn’t exist because there is no evidence that it exists, he might be right as per Clifford rule above. But after the observation of radioactivity it was shown that alpha, beta and gamma rays do exist, the only thing needed was the invention of photographic plate to record it. In the modern times now the gamma camera and X ray is being used in a lot of application to benefit humanity. There are quite a number of things accepted today that has no place in olden days like virus, DNA etc... Thus the demand of evidence is not the grounds to not accept any fact. Time machine doesn’t exist yet, if it is existed then one can go in the past and reveal the current knowledge to the people who are ignorant of modern facts due to lag of evidence, but they have to believe the messenger, who is from the future, without demanding any evidence.
The atheist claim that science explains, will explain or has explained everything is false. Now on the basis of observations made during the last fifty years or so, we know that many concepts and scientific theories are proved to be wrong or inapplicable in certain domains of universe. Improved and high quality instruments showed that the natural laws believed to be true before are now thought to be not true in the sense as they were used to be understood. Now new explanations are needed to redefine them. For example theory of creation of a solar system out of a disc is in a need to be redefined, dark matter and dark energy are still a puzzle.
What modern science says about reality?
The perimeter institute of theoretical physics Waterloo Ontario has described the limitations of science in finding reality as follows:
“These two theories together – quantum and relativity – provide the tools to explain virtually everything we currently have the technology to test. In practice they have never failed despite nearly a century of intense efforts to push them to the breaking point. However, extreme situations, which are not yet accessible to experiments, reveal their limitations, and here both the quantum and relativity theories fail.
There is some key aspect of the nature of reality that our theory is failing to take into account. For example, near "time zero" (during the Big Bang), the billions of galaxies worth of matter in the observable universe today (not to mention an even larger amount of dark matter) occupied a region of space much smaller than the nucleus of a single atom! To describe such a bizarrely extreme situation will require a theory that seamlessly combines our best understanding of the very small (quantum theory) with our best understanding of space, time, and gravity (general relativity). What general relativity fails to take into account is the quantum nature of space, time, and gravity.”
Source: https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Outreach/What_We_Research/Quantum_Gravity/
This is the failure of two great theories i.e. quantum and relativity, although they work well in their respective domains. But they don’t accommodate each other. This is totally unscientific!
Here are a few of unexplainable observations that challenge basic scientific theories:
Newfound Planet Orbits Backward
By Jeanna Bryner and Robert Roy Britt
posted: 12 August 2009
09:56 am ET
anets orbit stars in the same direction that the stars rotate. They all do except one.
A newfound planet orbits the wrong way, backward compared to the rotation of its host star. Its discoverers think a near-collision may have created the retrograde orbit, as it is called. The star and its planet, WASP-17, are about 1,000 light-years away. The setup was found by the UK's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory. "I would have to say this is one of the strangest planets we know about," said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the discovery.
There is no theory available to explain this event. Assumption of near collision is very improbable.
Extrasolar Hot Jupiter: The Planet That 'Shouldn’t Exist'
ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2009) — A planet has been discovered with ten times the mass of Jupiter, but which orbits its star in less than one Earth-day.
The discovery, reported in this week’s Nature by Coel Hellier, of Keele University in the UK, and colleagues, poses a challenge to our understanding of tidal interactions in planetary systems.
Theory of tidal interaction fails to explain this universal event.
Particles Found to Travel Faster Than Speed of Light
An Italian experiment has unveiled evidence that fundamental particles known as neutrinos can travel faster than light. Other researchers are cautious about the result, but if it stands further scrutiny, the finding would overturn the most fundamental rule of modern physics—that nothing travels faster than 299,792,458 meters per second.
Breaking the law
The idea that nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum is the cornerstone of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which itself forms the foundation of modern physics. If neutrinos are traveling faster than light speed, then one of the most fundamental assumptions of science—that the rules of physics are the same for all observers—would be invalidated. "If it's true, then it's truly extraordinary," says John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN.
This observation has very serious consequences on fundamental assumptions of science; all the framework of science could be demolished. In order to avoid this controversy, about two months later, it was said that the measurements were defective. In my and many others opinion this statement is made to close the subject for now and avoid controversy. But this will not be going to last long. Also the scientific experiments are liable to more uncertainty and unreliability after this statement.
Quantum Entanglement Links 2 Diamonds
Usually a finicky phenomenon limited to tiny, ultra cold objects, entanglement has now been achieved for macroscopic diamonds at room temperature
By John Matson | December 1, 2011 | 55
A group of researchers report in the December 2 issue of Science that they managed to entangle the quantum states of two diamonds separated by 15 centimeters. Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon by which two or more objects share an unseen link bridging the space between them—a hypothetical pair of entangled dice, for instance, would always land on matching numbers, even if they were rolled in different places simultaneously.
The unseen link as mentioned above is the proof of limitation of science. The unseen is something unobservable or unknown to science.
Neutron stars are presumed to contain the densest matter in the cosmos. These remnants of core-collapse supernovae pack more than the Sun’s mass (M ⊙) into a sphere less than 30 km across. There is considerable uncertainty about the character of matter squeezed to such ultrahigh densities, which cannot be reproduced in the laboratory.
Young’s double slit experiment:
This experiment shows that the observation changes the past. How it is possible nobody knows. It also shows the strange phenomena of Interference of single photon or electron by itself!
Understanding of reality is impossible:
A modern neuroscience view
“What neuroscientists have shown is that we are free to make choices about how we interpret events. It is our interpretations of events, and not the events themselves, that determine what we do. Research by neuroscientists has revealed that the way our brains have been constructed means that we do not see reality directly but only the images or interpretations that our brain has created. As the neuroscientist Chris Frith says in his excellent book Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World (Blackwell), "Even if all our senses are intact and our brain functioning normally, we do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain." Our brain creates these images and interpretations out of our past experience, that is, the memories which are stored in our brain. Since no two people ever have exactly the same experience, no two people ever interpret anything in exactly the same way.
People's interpretations can vary greatly, not just in meaning but in the degree they relate to what is actually going on. Some people try to create interpretations that are as close to the truth as they can make them. In scientific terms, these interpretations have a high degree of validity. Some people create interpretations that are based solely on their fantasies, and any relationship to the truth is accidental. Most of us operate somewhere between these two extremes.
The ability to interpret events that create meanings and to choose between alternative meanings arises out of the way our body and brain function. Creating meaning is one of the systems whereby our body/brain/mind operates. However, the range of meanings we can choose from is limited by how much we have learned in our life. This is why being a child is so difficult. This is why organizations that want to have power over us, like the State, the Church, and Big Business, try to control what we know. The less we know the less choice we have.”
That is why the pure justice can’t be determined and implemented and reality is out of reach of mankind. Man needs a divine guidance for life and a day of absolute judgment to find justice and reality as it is.
To claim to be in possession of an absolute truth is to claim the impossible because all we can possess is our interpretation of what we have experienced or been told.
Whether our interpretations are close to the truth or not, they are guesses about what is going on.
This argument is equally valid for scientific knowledge. Scientists, too, have the ideas that are taught to them, they also interpret what they have experienced, and they have the same brain. Although they are on a higher wisdom level, they are also human therefore this rule applies to them as well. The theories of science are always subject to change whenever something new is observed or discovered. This means that any scientific idea or scientific theory is not a final word to prove anything.
The claim that science explains or has explained everything is false.
It has been a practice that the observation and evidences or theories posing serious challenges to any basic rule or assumption of science is either disregarded or discouraged, keeping it pending for time being to preserve the current theories, as we have seen recently in the case of higher than speed of light neutrino. Also in biology rejecting any evidence posing threat to theory of evolution or keeping belief in “missing links” in evolution and hoping to find them sometime, as a scientific “fantasy”.
Let us read and ponder this statement:
Dr. Hilton of Apollo Campus Pennsylvania State University, studied the evidence presented at the Glen Rose stated:
"I would have to say that the belief in evolution is in a state of terminal illness but its death will only be admitted by a new generation of scientists whose minds have not been prejudiced by the type of education now prevalent in the nation's public schools, an education which starts with the belief that evolution has happened, which interprets all evidence according to that faith and simply discards any evidence which cannot be fitted into the evolutionary framework"
(Quoted from "Dinosaurs" by Dr. Carl E. Baugh, 1987. Promise Publishing Co., Orange , CA 92667
The argument that the religious language is meaningless is baseless.
The meaningless could also be meaningful:
To say that a word or a statement is meaningless is nonsense, for, it is evident that a lot of words spoken today are meaningless if were spoken 100 years ago for example multimedia, CD, DVD, blue ray, computer, neutron star, or gravitational lensing, even radio. Even when first mechanical calculator was invented, there was no idea or concept about computer. Thus the words are meaningful but the human knowledge was limited. This is a universal truth and is valid in all times. The criteria that proves a statement to be true or false changes with time and knowledge. For example before Copernicus the idea that earth revolves around sun was thought to be false and even punishable. A piece of truth that is not known at a certain time cannot be explained using the words from the set of words available in any language at that time. The human dictionary is and will always be poor in vocabulary. Another example is the sentence, air has weight or pressure, was meaningless before, later experimentally proved and accepted. Does it mean that meaningless sentence became meaningful only after experiment or was it an all time universal fact, even without an experiment?! This means that experiment or evidence is not the criteria to prove the meaningfulness of a sentence.
Dr. Adel M.A. Abbas wrote in his book (Throne was on water chapter. 8):
“It is true that when one addresses a child, one has to speak in a manner that a child’s brain can understand. In other words, a child is not lied to but rather is given information in a manner that is comprehensible to him. Similarly when God addresses men in a book of teaching, he has to touch on the some of the scientific aspect that are present in the surrounding environment. This is how various scientific phenomena and facts are presented in Quran. For the purpose of teaching or telling something one has to use the vocabulary which is familiar to and understood by the listener. Therefore God uses the word day for different time periods in creation of universe. The Quran state that time, far from being absolute, is variable in different parts of the universe. In other words, it introduces the idea of relativity. A day with God id eternal, as he is the first, the last, and the light of the heavens and earth. He uses the term day in order to give the periods of the creation of universe. In some estimates, the days of creation are calculated in terms of billions and billions of years of man counting. He gave other examples to show that a day in other parts of universe could be shorter. Example of fifty thousand years and one thousand years were given. Thus the relativity of time cannot be disputed.”
Reality in a modern physicist view
In his book The Grand Design, Hawking writes:
“Most people believe that there is an objective reality out there and that our senses and our science directly convey information about the material world. Classical science is based on the belief that an external world exists whose properties are definite and independent of the observer who perceive them. In philosophy that belief is called realism. There is another possibility: ones concept of reality can depend on the mind of the perceiver. That view point, with various subtle differences, goes by names such as anti realism, instrumentalism, or idealism. According to those doctrines, the world we know is constructed by the human mind employing sensory data as its raw material and is shaped by the interpretive structure of our brain. This viewpoint may be hard to accept, but it is not difficult to understand.”
Hacking’s point of view also points to the fact that understanding of reality is not possible.
Thus if classical science encouraged human to deny God or religion and created a group of people called atheist, the modern science has proved that all that classical science knew was a drop in sea and reality is still far to be understood and science is not mature enough yet to tell us what reality is!.
Let us ponder on the following to understand what actually should be known to human:
Quotation from the book, Life after Death, by Abul ala
“The laws that govern the present system of the Universe do not allow an opportunity for the full unfolding of the moral consequences of human actions. Secondly, the actions of men during their short span of life on earth often have reactions and effects so widespread and lasting that their full consequences must take thousands of years to unfold and manifest themselves fully; and it is obviously impossible for any person, under the present laws of nature, to attain such a long career on earth. From this it logically follows that while the present physical world and its natural laws are enough for the material and animal constituents of man, they are utterly inadequate for the moral element of his being. This component calls for another world where the law of ethics is the governing law and the laws of nature are subservient, to it; where life is unlimited; where all the moral consequences of human actions in the material world that could not manifest themselves there, should manifest themselves fully and in the proper form. It demands a world where truth and righteousness, and not gold and silver, carry weight; where fire burns only such things as deserve to be burned according to the moral law; where happiness and the lot of the virtuous and plain and misery the plight of the wicked. Both nature and reason demand such an order.
If the existing system of the Universe with its present natural laws is a possibility and a reality, why should another world with a different set of natural laws be regarded as an impossibility?”
Ways of securing knowledge as per Islamic teaching:
A quotation from the book “Quran and science” by Prof.Abdul Ali and Dr. Zafar ul Islam, p.35
And do not pursue that of which you have no knowledge. Indeed, the hearing, the sight and the heart - about all those [one] will be questioned…17: 36
Here Hearing points to revelation (heard), sight points to sensation or observation through human five senses and heart points to reflection upon what is gained through these two mediums i.e. revelation and observation. Thus:
1. Securing knowledge and wisdom through reflection based upon what is gained by means of revelation and observation & experience is the quranic way of securing wisdom.
2. Quran first presents the realities and then proofs are presented from within this universe and its constituents. Sometimes it invites man to ponder upon universe and signs of nature to find the evidence to truth.
3. In view of Quran the revelation is a solid and reliable medium of knowledge.
4. Quran puts a few limits on the human rational and reflection. It treats the struggle to find evidence or rational arguments for a few things as unnecessary, Such as the news of the undiscovered or hidden facts like the events in the hereafter or heaven and hell etc. It visualizes it as beyond the scope of human wisdom.”
The above quote of verse and its explanation is so true. As we have seen that now there is sufficient scientific knowledge based upon observation and experiment that points to limitation of human brain, therefore it is quite justified to put limit on human rational and reflection on the matters about the unseen. This also proves the necessity of a divine guidance. Read and ponder the above mentioned verse again.
The perfectness:
A positive all perfect whole sole authority do exist.
Ayat al kursi
Allah - there is no deity except Him, the Ever-Living, the Sustainer of [all] existence. Neither drowsiness overtakes Him nor sleep. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. Who is it that can intercede with Him except by His permission? He knows what is [presently] before them and what will be after them, and they encompass not a thing of His knowledge except for what He wills. His Kursi extends over the heavens and the earth, and their preservation tires Him not. And He is the Most High, the Most Great. 2:255
The perfect reality, The perfect existence, the perfect attentiveness, the perfect ownership, the perfect authority, the perfect knowledge, the perfect occupation, the perfect possession, the perfect power, the highest, the greatest. Do exist and should exist.
Lack of the means to understand the basic manifesto of this huge divine empire and ruling system of this vast universe is the cause of the failure to understand the purpose and cause of creation of this universe. This understanding cannot be achieved with the brain power only. A true and preserved revealed guidance has to be there for mankind. So which revealed teaching is preserved and sustained from all historical, physical, lingual and social disorders and destructions? Think about this miraculous book of teaching. This miracle is proof of its truthfulness.
|