Showing posts with label logic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label logic. Show all posts

Friday, 25 March 2016

Twenty evidence of the fact that atheism is the worst doctrine on earth .. !!



Twenty evidence of the fact that atheism is the worst doctrine on earth .. !!
1 - Atheism violates the first law of Newton.
The first law of Newton says that "an object at rest will stay at rest and an object in steady motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force (static or dynamic)." So there must be an external force that made the Big Bang to happen at that very moment and forced the universe to begin at that very moment.

2 - Atheism violates the first law of thermodynamics.
Law of Conservation of energy or what is known as the first law of thermodynamics says ((matter/energy cannot be created nor can it be destroyed.)) If we contemplate in this law, we come to conclusion that the universe cannot exist. According to this law, the universe does not exist or it's present in the presence of the Creator.

3 - Atheism violates the second law of thermodynamics.
The second law of thermodynamic says that the universe is now heading towards thermal death when the temperature of all organisms and particles becomes equal. So the universe as scientists say is heading toward disintegration, towards demolition, towards cooling and towards thermal death “thermal death of universe”, while atheism says that the universe is moving towards complexity and towards building a struggle to develop. So scholars consider the second law of thermodynamic to carry the end of Darwinism and selective evolution. And these are laws, not theories.. so the science on the side while atheism and Darwinism are completely on the other side.

4 - Atheism is contrary to the Code of Ethics.
The original definition of morality: - Morals are those that come against self-interest .. against matter .. against reason
Moral obligation is a restriction of the human being and as Nietzsche said long ago: - The lack of power in human being is because of his ethical commitment.
So morals are not profitable practically .. there must be a value for ethics and this value is not of this world .. a value that is not measured by abstract materialistic standards and not subject to natural laws .. ethical behavior, sacrifice, supreme ideals, asceticism and altruism are the inherent morality either are meaningless or has a meaning in the presence of God...

5 - Atheism does not find an explanation to the law of pairs.
Sheikh Nadeem Aljssr said in his book Almate'a (the story of faith): - “Before that, I did not know the secret of the wisdom of the repeated mentioning of the two sexes, male and female in the Qur'an (And of everything We have created pairs that you may be mindful) ADH-DHARIYAT-49 .. (And that He created pairs, the male and the female) AN-NAJM 45. Until I read from the contemporary philosopher Henri Bergson and realized that the repeated mentioning of the pairs is not intended for gratitude, but also meant something greater which is to alert that pairing is in plants, animals and even particles and which is a great evidence of the purpose and the denial of the chance, Darwinism, randomness and senseless.

6 - Material atheism is in contradiction with the immaterial self.
If a human being committed a crime and insisted that he did it unconsciously, each lawyer seeks to prove there was no intent, but from the material perspective, the crime took place and ended up on the reality and the offender is also admitting that he’s the perpetrator, but the law interferes to know the purpose, intent and self-condition during the commission of the crime and whether the crime took place unconsciously or not .. Here, we put self in position higher then facts and higher then abstract materialistic reality.. In reality, we do not really judge what happened in the world, but to judge what has occurred within the self .. This reflects the contradiction in principles between man and the world.

7 – Atheism is contrary to the laws of human rights.
Human rights is metaphysical pure issue and your saying that human beings are equal this is possible only if the human is a creature of God, so equality between human beings is exclusively ethical, not a natural, materialistic or mental fact, since people from the materialistic, natural or mental perspective are undoubtedly unequal and based only on religion, the weak can claim equality.
Those who are weak and poor in money, health and mind and excluded from the tables of the celebrations in the world, those who do not have anything to show or to prove about except through religion only, by which they demonstrate that they are equal or even better to God than the healthy, and this is where lies the frequent proof of the value of religion in equality.

8 - Atheism violates the privacy of all, since it does not recognize the sanctity and holiness.
No value to bunch of virtues that have been established by religions in the last tens of thousands of years. As Dr. Missiri says: - the atheist sees the ground as an exploited matter and his purpose is to achieve maximum satisfaction of it or as the thinker John Locke says: - If all hopes of human is limited to this world and if we enjoy life here in this world, it is not surprising nor illogical to look for happiness, even at the expense of parents and children.
So the ideas of impurity, holiness, chastity and purity are ideas derived from another world have nothing to do with the materialistic, Darwinian, imperative, cold world... If we were really the sons of this world, it will not seem to us as it has something dirty or sacred...

9 – Atheism is contrary to the law of cause and effect.
Of nothing comes nothing... there is no effect without a cause .. this common sense is erected in the mind because it is higher than the law and on it stands the modern science and goals’ purpose. Descartes says: “I exist so who made me exist and who created me? I have not created myself. It has to be my Creator." This Creator must exist and does not lack a creator and He should be named with all the attributes of perfection (Or were they created without there being anything, or are they the creators?) Tour 35 .. and it does not occur to us to deny this common sense because of the pretext that the mental delusion of the sequence of reasons to no end and it is mentally false or because of the pretext of our ignorance but it is the cause and the law of causality that is not based on observation as atheists claims since our senses just shows the pictures of the disjointed and sequenced phenomena and does not show us the relationship with the causality, so how can we know this relationship only if the mind has innate organized laws - the talk of Descartes – which with it, the human being can realize the sense of and then make new constructed judgments that does not depend on the senses

10 - Atheism contradicts the law of intent and care.
All assets on the ground fits to the human existence and operates accordingly to him, so it is not surprising to say that everything around us is subjected to our requirements of day and night, four seasons, space, surrounding air molecules and how all that situated to the human nature and his needs, and it is not unrealistic to the fact that we say that this harmony in the universe is designed specifically for the production of the human race and as our brother Majdi says: "By washing your hands, thousands of bacteria die, since Man is the fixed component in the world history , his spirit value and moral values will remain unchanged, so the human being was and will remain as human being from thousand years ago born by the past to thousand years later born by the future, neither his nature nor his intent will change."

11 – Atheism is contrary to teleology.
Science is in constant progress ... all scientists’ researches based on the existence of laws governing the world and controlling the matter .. the purpose of science in every search is to find the law governing this case since the science is teleological and therefore it is in constant progress .. and without the science adoption already of a law that governs all things for this progress, the science would not progress one step .. and here lies the contradiction in principle between messy atheism and teleological science.. and it is not imaginable that everything around us is governed by the law of teleology and the human is the only being responsible in this case.

12 - Atheism contradicts the law of consistency previous to consolidation.
Says Leibniz “the atoms are moving with God's will and work ability that shows how they relate to each other, However, they are not really related, but the power of God to make each atom goes in motion that harmonizes the motion of other atoms, so what seems to us of this harmony is the impact of the law of “consistency previous consolidation” since the matter does not discern the laws applied on it. And there is no rational must to oblige the water to boil at one hundred degrees Celsius or its molecules to diverge with boiling, and as Hume says: - a science that explains that with former interpretations is very immature science since it does not do more than adopting the situation but without giving any reasons. And it’s unavoidable but to admit of the law of “consistency previous consolidation”

13 – Atheism violates the principle of the famous Barclay.
Says Hume: - no evidence obliges us to believe that there is something If our senses missed it and no evidence compels us to believe that the thing we saw today and then we left and we go back to see it in the second day is the same thing we saw on the first day, since we do not know about the outside world except of we what have in our mind from sensory perceptions, and the mind obliges that there must be a holistic mind that absorbs all things and be a witness by it, and as God says (Is it not sufficient as regards your Lord that He is a witness over all things? ) FUSSILAT - 53

14 - Atheism is the founder of most criminal doctrines on the Earth.
Se Gore says: - The Darwinism doctrine is one of the despicable doctrines that are not supported except by the worst tendencies and contemptible feelings, since its father is infidelity and its mother is dirtiness.
Nazism was formed only on the discrimination of races and ethnicitie.
Mao Zedong the atheist thug said: - All the lower animals will be executed and all who stood against the revolution is an evolutionary error, and said in a December 9, 1958 «mass graves provide a good fertilizer for the land». As a result, 50 million people was killed in China.
Atheist Guevara said: - "To send men to the firing squad, the juridical validation is not necessary. We must learn how to kill queues of people in a shorter time!!!"
The criminal atheist Lenin said: - No mercy for the enemies of the nation, but kill, hang and confiscate.
Marx said: - "We have no pity for you, and we do not ask for your sympathy, when the day will come, we are in practice: conscientious savages."
and Marx justify this criminal terrible approach, saying: - "When people accuse us of cruelty, we wonder how they forgotten the basics of Marxism?"
As a result, 250 million people was killed in one century by horrible Darwinian atheism and this is probably more dead people, more than all the wars from Adam to this day.

15 - Atheism is against art and life.
The existence of another world along with the natural world is the primary source of every religion and art .. and If there was only one world, the art would be impossible
Atheism will never understand the essence of art and nature .. If there is no spirit of man so why we are keen to have the spirit of art?
When the science deals with the man, it looks at it as what is dead and what is not personal, while when an art deals with man, it looks at what is humane and teleological, since art is on a natural collision with the world and with all its sciences, that the silent rebellion and if there is absolutely no support to man with no room for his spirit and his self, then the art is not an area for him and the poets and tragedy writers deludes us and write nonsense that does not make sense
Art in nature and its recognizing of the existence of another world is carrieing revolutionary meanings of blasphemy of materialistic world... and that was understood by the famous French painter de Buffet when he said: - (the essence of art is uncomfortable and useless, it’s against society and the threat of it). Therefore, the essence of works of art are fully and vaguely obscure, it’s a continuous rebellion on the reality. It is repeated confession of the existence of another world that we do not belong to and we will go to it one day .. confession of human suffering on the ground and its inability to achieve the paradise that lies within his dreams and to search for it .. Art is simply is the fruit of the relationship between the spirit and the truth.
So when you contemplate on deep painting.. When you read a great novel .. the human being feels a strange sense that is mysterious with transcendence and holiness and entering the world of eternity .. Art is exactly as religion, both are recognizing the existence of another world, but art is not a religion but an expression of religion. Art is the illegitimate son of the truth... while religion is the legitimate son of the truth ..

16 - Atheism represents abnormality in the history of civilization.
Atheism is nothing more than an intellectual abnormalities and mental pollution in the history of nations and civilizations, Will Durant says in his book (The Story of Civilization): - There may be cities without walls without armies, without plants but there is no city without a temple
And The author of the book (why we say that God exists) says : - (and there one who said that man is guided to God with revelation or without revelation, but with the revelation, it was better and thorough, and some argued that all the worships are revelation from God, but it might be an old revelation that was stained with myths from magicians and fortune-tellers, so the primitive nations sidetracked in their ignorance and God was sending Messengers to purify these beliefs from sidetracking). And Schmidt and Lang -two of the researchers of the assets of religions- say that the origin of all religions in purpose is the Oneness and the diversity came in the later stages, and it have been discovered that inheritance of Indian American and Indigenous residents of the North America are similar in many decrees to monotheistic religions particularly in terms of punishment and reward and here where lies the argument on people, where they are equal in reason and requesting guidance .. and humans differ in religion, but they agree in what God wants them to do.
Sheikh Nadeem Aljssr said in his masterpiece, the story of Faith, p. 35: - It’s more likely that many philosophy of the ancients in Egypt, China and India are the remnants of forgotten history, so the owners of these philosophies were stacked among the philosophers and they might be prophets or prophets’ subordinates.
That’s why atheism is abnormal approach that appears in temporary image and quickly disappears and if it‘s beneficial to people, it would’ve stayed on the earth.

17 - Big Bang and the fall of the myth of the stable static universe.
In 1989, NASA had lunched the satellite (Cuba) for the detection of cosmic radiation resulted from the Big Bang and compiling information on the radiation and this satellite was able in only 8 minutes just to give a complete picture of the radiation and it is proven that the universe is made and this is what knocked off the atheists in critical embarrassment.
A. S. EDDINGTON says: "Philosophically, the notion of an abrupt beginning to the present order of Nature is repugnant to me"
And DENNIS SCIAMA said that he did not defended the steady-state theory, not because he deemed it valid, but because he wished that it were valid. SCIAMA goes on to say that as evidences began to pile up, he had to admit that the game was over and that the steady-state theory had to be dismissed.. And that he must leave aside the theory of the stable universe
and his colleague GEORGE ABEL said that he has no choice but to accept the Big Bang theory.
This prompted the atheist philosopher of the twenty century ANTHONY FLEW to say his famous aphorism: - "Notoriously, confession is good for the soul. I will therefore begin by confessing that the atheist has to be embarrassed by the contemporary cosmological consensus." .. because the science has proven the idea that were defended by religious books.

18 - What is the mystery behind the bias of modern science towards the Qur'an?
Gustave Le Bon says "Islam is religion of the most appropriate for scientific discovery", and that’s the reason of the frequent convert to Islam in the scientific community of doctors, researchers and professors.
The wonderful Alija Izetbegovic Say: - Aristotle has wrote three scientific books (in physics in the heavens .. .. in the earth) These three books do not exist today with one sentence that is scientifically valid .. three books from a scientific perspective is equal to zero to ten, while the Qur'an as Maurice Bucaille says in his famous book (the Qur'an, Bible and the Torah in the perspective of modern science): - The truth is I did not find any verse from the Qur'an that is contrary to one scientific fact but the Qur'an already passed the modern science and corrected many of the scientific theories that were prevalent in his day, for example the idea that groundwater was formed through a deep gorge at the bottom of the continents moved underground water from the oceans to the depths of the earth did the Qur'an ratify this scientific myth which was prevalent in that times or said (Do you not see that Allah sends down water from the cloud, then makes it go along in the earth in springs - Zumar 21) ... .. The source of groundwater is made up of springs, rain and not from Aristotle gap in the depth of the continent ........ And so on

19 - Atheism does not give an explanation for anything.
Atheism is not a solution but a confession of a failure in finding a solution and this is the beginning of atheism and the end of it ..
The famous atheist Richard Dawkins says in his book delusion: - (Atheists are like bunch of cats, every cat in different direction..) Every atheist is an independent church and as a Sheikh Moqbel Bin Hadi says (If ten people of falsehood meet, they separate in eleven ideas) so you do not find two atheist with the same idea combined and this is the misfortune of atheism and its ravages, it is the undisciplined doctrine that does not have a clear explanation of any issue, does not have a value of just a fun game mentality, as said by Dr. Ahmed Okasha .. Atheism in itself is merely a superficial naive idea that is very lazy on a very deep and serious issue ... Atheism is messy, nihilistic and skeptical. As one of the old brothers says: - (since the science is in continuous progress and since there are laws and fixed facts, the function of science is to look for those laws and facts, therefore, there no existence of Atheism or the messy Agnosticism.)

20 – The return of scientific world to God
The physicist (Frederick Bermham) author of History of Science (Science historian) Says: (at present, the scientific community deems the idea of God's creation of the universe a more respectable idea than ever before for hundreds of years).
Michael Behe says: I am compelled to accept the existence of God since the result of all these cumulative efforts to examine the cell. ie: to examine life at the molecular level is a loud shout to the clear sharp design ...
And I evidenced that by the return of hundreds of scientists and thinkers in the past few years to God and acknowledged that the cause of atheism is psychological rather than mental



The famous astronomer (Fred Hoyle) says in his book (mathematics of evolution) page 130: - (in fact, how the very clear scientific theory says that life is collected by a clever mind, however, the person marvels and wonders, why it’s not accepted widely as an intuitive ... but most likely it’s psychological reasons rather than scientific.)
and as Imam Hussein may Allah be pleased with him when he said (God, an eye has blinded that doesn’t see you)


To sum up, Sheikh Ghazali was right when he said: - We are imagining a mule building the pyramids, but we do not imagine what is assumed by atheists when they deny the divinity .. and as has been said in the Islamic history: - "The ox knows its master, the donkey knows its owner, but this one does not know ..." or, as the Bible in the Psalms of David the Prophet says : ”The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. 14-1 .. or as our Lord said in the Qur'an (And certainly We have created for hell many of the jinn and the men; they have hearts with which they do not understand, and they have eyes with which they do not see, and they have ears with which they do not hear; they are as cattle, nay, they are in worse errors; these are the heedless ones) AL-ARAF 179

Thursday, 20 November 2014

Contemporary Physicists and God’s Existence

Contemporary Physicists and God’s Existence (part 1 of 3): The Eternalness of Matter

  You have viewed this article previously  
Description: An Islamic Critical Evaluation of the Ideas of Some Contemporary Physicists: Part One: The eternalness of the universe and the decay of matter, and the implications of the Big Bang.
By Dr. Jaafar Sheikh Idris

Whether God exists or not is not as such, part of the subject matter of any empirical science, natural or social.  But the facts or what are sometimes assumed to be the facts of the natural sciences, especially physics and biology, are often interpreted to support one view or the other.  This is not therefore a paper about physics, but about the relationship between physics and the question of the existence of God.  More specifically, it is mainly an Islamic rational critique of the ways modern atheists attempts to meet the challenge posed by the Big Bang theory.  It does not deal with positive proofs for the existence of the Creator; it only proves the invalidity of the arguments used to buttress atheism.
One of the main arguments invoked in support of some form or other of atheism has always been the claim that the world, or some part of it, is eternal and, as such, needs no creator.  Thus, some Greek thinkers believed that the heavenly bodies, especially the sun, were eternal.  The main argument of one of them, Galen, was, according to Al-Ghazali, that it has had the same size for continued for eons and eons,a fact which shows that it is not perishable, for if it were, it would have shown signs of decay, which it doesn’t.  Al-Ghazali says that this is not a good argument because:
First...we do not grant him that a thing cannot perish except by decaying; decaying is only one way of perishing; but it is not improbable for something to perish suddenly while it is in its complete form.  Second, even if we grant him that there is no perishing without decay, whence does he know that it does not suffer any decay?  His reference to observation posts is not acceptable, because their quantities [the quantities known by them] are known only approximately.  So if the sun, which is said to be a hundred and seventy times or more the size of the earth[1], were to diminish by amounts the size of mountains, that would not be apparent to the senses.  So it might be decaying, and might have decreased by amounts the size of mountains or more, but the senses cannot perceive this ...” (Al-Ghazali, 126)
Al-Ghazali’s guess that the size of the sun might be diminishing was, as we can now see, a rare prescience of what science would prove.  Scientists now tell us that the sun does indeed decay, but much more than he thought, and that it will ultimately perish.
The amount of energy released by the sun is such that the mass of the sun is decreasing at the rate of 4.3 billion kilograms per second.  Yet this is such a small fraction of the sun’s mass that the change is hardly noticeable…
Our sun is believed to be about 4.5 billion years old, and will probably continue its present activity for another 4.5 billion years. (Wheeler, 596)
If the heavenly bodies are not eternal, what is it then that is eternal, the substances from which those bodies are made?  But physicists have discovered that these are made of molecules.  Is it then the molecules that are eternal?  No, because these are made up of atoms.  What about the atoms?  It was once believed that they were indivisible, and were, as such, the immutable matter from which all kinds of transient forms of material things are made.  This seemed, at last, to be the solid foundation on which to erect modern atheism.
Science continued to advance however, and contented in its advancement to embarrass the atheists.  It was soon discovered that atoms were not the immutable solid ultimate eternal constituents of matter that they were believed to be for a time.  Like everything else, they are also divisible; they are constituted of subatomic particles, which are in turn divisible in yet smaller constituents.  Is there an end to this divisibility?  No one knows; but even if there was, that would not be of any help to the atheists, for science has not only shown atoms and their constituents to be divisible, it has obliterated the division between matter and energy.  Thus, every piece of matter, however small, is not only theoretically but also practically changeable into energy, and vice versa.  The end result is that there is no longer any actual existent to which one can point and say with any assurance: this has always been like as it is now, and will continue forever to be.
That discovery should by itself have sufficed to dash any hope of anchoring atheism on the eternity of matter.  If it did not, the Big Bang theory certainly did.  It was this theory which dealt the final death blow to the eternity of any part of the universe.  Why?
Cosmologists believe that the big bang represents not just the appearance of matter and energy in a preexisting void, but the creation of space and time too.  The universe was not created in space and time; space and time are part of the created universe. (Davies, 123)
The biggest misunderstanding about the big bang is that it began as a lump of matter somewhere in the void of space.  It was not just matter that was created during the big bang.  It was space and time that were created.  So in the sense that time has a beginning, space also has a beginning.” (Boslouh, 46.)
In the beginning there was nothing, neither time nor space, neither stars nor planets, neither rocks nor plants, neither animals nor human beings.  Everything came out of the void. (Fritzch, 3)
The question of the existence or non-existence of God is not, as we said, the concern of any empirical science.  But scientists are human beings.  They cannot help thinking about the non-scientific yet vital implications of their sciences.  They cannot even help having feelings towards those implications.
Jasrow says about Einstein:
He was disturbed by the idea of a universe that blows up, because it implied that the world had a beginning.  In a letter to De Sitter, Einstein wrote, “This circumstance of an expanding universe irritates me.” ... This is curiously emotional language for a discussion of some mathematical formulas.  I suppose that the idea of a beginning in time annoyed Einstein because of its theological implications. (Jasrow, 29.)
Gastro quotes similar reactions by other scientists, like Eddington who says that “the notion of a beginning is repugnant” to him (122), and attributes this emotional reaction to the fact that they do not “bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained”[2]  and comments on such reactions of scientists by saying that they provide:
... an interesting demonstration of the response of the scientific mind - supposedly a very objective mind - when evidence uncovered by science itself leads to conflict with the articles of faith in our profession.  It turns out that the scientist behaves the way the rest of us do when our beliefs are in conflict with the evidence.  We become irritated, we pretend the conflict does not exist, or we paper it over with meaningless phrases. (Jasrow, 15-16.)


Footnotes:
[1] We now know that it is definitely more. The mass of the sun is 333, 000 times that of the earth, and its radius is 109 times the earth’s radius.
[2] Gastro would have been more accurate if he said, “a phenomenon that cannot be naturally explained.”, since Divine creation is an explanation, and the only one in such cases.
 
 

Contemporary Physicists and God’s Existence (part 2 of 3): A Series of Causes

  
Description: An Islamic Critical Evaluation of the Ideas of Some Contemporary Physicists.  Part two: Various hypotheses of what could stand as causes of beings or events.
 
If matter, time and space all had a beginning, the question that naturally comes to mind is: How did they come to be?  The Quran tells us that if a person does not believe in God, then he cannot explain the coming into being of anything except by one of three untenable explanations:
a.     either he says that it was created by nothing, i.e. that it just appeared out of nothing?
b.    Or that it created itself,
c.     Or that it was created by something that is itself created.
Addressing the atheists the Quran says:
“Were they created by nothing?  Or were they themselves the creators (of themselves)?  Or did they create heaven and earth?  Nay, but they are not sure.” (Quran 52:35-36)
The Quran is not saying that the Arabs whom it addressed actually believed that things were created by nothing, or that they created themselves.  They certainly did not claim that they were the creators of the heavens and earth; no sane person would.  The Quran then, is only making clear to the atheists the absurdity of their position.
After a careful study of some of the arguments of many Western atheistic philosophers and scientists, I have found that they do indeed fall into these three untenable categories.  Why untenable?

Was it created out of nothing?

Suppose that you told someone that there was nothing, nothing at all in a certain region, and then lo! a duck appeared alive and kicking.  Why wouldn’t he believe you however much you assure him that that was indeed the case?  Not only because he knows that ducks don’t come into being in that way, as some might suppose, but because believing this violates an essential principle of his rationality.  Thus his attitude would be the same even if the thing that he was told to have come from nothing was something that he never heard of before.  It is because we believe that nothing comes out of nothing, that we keep looking for causes by which we explain the occurrence of events in the natural, social or psychological world.  It is because of this rational principle that science was possible.  Without it, not only our science, but our very rationality will be in jeopardy.  Moreover, the idea of causation is essential even to the very identity of things, as it was observed by the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes):
It is self-evident that things have identities, and they have qualities in virtue of which every existent has its actions, and in virtue of which things have different identities, names and definitions.  If it were not the case that every individual thing had an action peculiar to, it would not have had a na­ture that is peculiar to it; and if it did not have a special na­ture, it would not have had a special name or definition. (Tahafut Attahafut, 782-3)

Did it create itself?

The absurdity of the idea of something creating itself is even clearer.  For something to create, it must be already existing; but for it to be created, it must be nonexistent.  The idea of something creating itself is thus self-contradictory.

Was it created by something that is itself created?

Can the cause of a temporal thing be itself temporal?  Yes, if we are talking about immediate, incomplete causes like eating and nourishment, water and germination, fire and burning, etc.  But these causes are incomplete causes.  First, because none of them is by itself sufficient to produce the effect we attribute to it; every such temporal cause depends for its efficacy on a host of other positive and negative conditions.  Second, because being temporal, they need to be caused, and cannot therefore be the ultimate causes of the coming into being of anything.  Suppose the following to be a series of temporal effects and causes: C1, C2, C3, C4… Cn, such that C1 is caused by C2, C2 by C3, and so on.  Such temporal causes are real causes, and useful ones, especially for practical purposes and for incomplete explanations; but if we are looking for the ultimate cause of the coming into being of, say, C1, then C2 is certainly not that cause, since it is itself caused by C3.  The same can be said about C3, and so on.  So even if we have an infinite series of such temporal causes, still that will not give us an ultimate explanation of the coming into being of C1.  Let us put this in other words: when does C1 come into being?  Only after C2 has come into being.  When does C2 come into being?  Only after C3 has come into being, and so on until Cn.  Therefore C1 will not come into being until Cn has come into being.  The same problem will persist even if we go further than Cn, even if we go to infinity.  This means that if C1 depended for its coming into being on such temporal causes, it would never have come to exist.  There would be no series of actual causes, but only a series of non-existents, as Ibn Taymiyyah[1]  explained.  The fact, however, is that there are existents around us; therefore, their ultimate cause must be something other than temporal causes; it must be an eternal, and therefore, uncaused cause.
When someone, whether scientist or nonscientist, insists on his erroneous beliefs in the face of all the evidence, there can be no way for him to support those beliefs except by resorting to dubious arguments, because no falsehood can be supported by a valid argument.  This has been the case with all atheistic scientists and philosophers who believe in the Big Bang theory.
Some claimed unabashedly that the original matter of the universe came out of nothing.  Thus Fred Hoyle, who advocated the steady state theory, which was for sometime considered to be a credible rival to the big bang theory, but which, like its rival, necessitates the coming into being of new matter-- used to say[2]:
The most obvious question to ask about continuous creation is this: Where does the created material come from?  It does not come from anywhere.  Material simply appears - it is created.  At one time the various atoms composing the material do not exist, and at a later time they do.  This may seem a very strange idea and I agree that it is, but in science it does not matter how strange an idea may seem so long as it works – that is to say, since the idea can be expressed in a precise form and so long as its consequences are in agreement with observation. (Hoyle, 112)
When Hoyle said this, there was an uproar against him.  He was accused of violating a main principle of science, namely that nothing comes out of nothing, and was thus ‘opening the flood gates of religion’ as one philosopher of science put it.  Thus Mario Bunge said about it:
[T]his theory involves the hypothesis of the continuous creation of matter ex nihilo.  And this is not precisely what is usually meant by respecting scientific determinism even in its widest sense, for the concept of emergence out of nothing is characteristically theological or magical even if clothed in mathematical form. (Bunge)
That the hypothesis of creation ex nihilo is not a scientific one, is true, but the claim that it is characteristically theological is wide off the mark.  Theistic religions do not say that things come out of absolute nothing because that contradicts the basic religious claim that they are created by God.  All that many religious people say is that God creates things out of nothing, and there is the whole difference in the world between the two notions.
If creation out of nothing was earlier considered by atheists to be an unscientific and theological principle, it is now claimed by some to have a scientific status and is used to discredit religion.
For the first time a unified description of all creation could be within our grasp.  No scientific problem is more fundamental or more daunting than the puzzle of how the universe came into being.  Could this have happened without any supernatural input?  Quantum mechanics seems to provide a loophole in the age-old assumption that ‘you can’t get something for nothing’.  Physicists are now talking about ‘the self creating universe’: a cosmos that erupts into existence spontaneously, much as a sub nuclear particle pops out of nowhere in certain high energy processes.  The question of whether the details of this theory are right or wrong is not important.  What matters is that it is now possible to conceive of a scientific explanation of all creation. (Jastrow, viii)
What kind of explanation is this?  Do you really even start to explain anything by saying that it pops out of nowhere?  Do scientists really believe that the sub nuclear particle referred to pops out of nowhere, in the sense that it really comes out of nothing, and has no relation whatsoever to anything that precedes it?  Commenting on what Davies claimed, one scientist had this to say: “This, in any case, is an event that occurs in space and time, within a domain bathed in matter and radiation.  ‘Nothing’ is nowhere to be seen in this situation.“[3]
This same fallacious idea is repeated in a later book by another atheistic scientist, Taylor:
As such, there is a non-zero probability of, say, a particle such as an electron appearing out of the vacuum.  In fact a vacuum is full of possibilities, one of which is the appearance of the Universe itself.  It had been created from nothing, as it were. (Taylor, 22)
What kind of vacuum is Taylor talking about?  If he is using the word in its technical scientific sense, then he can indeed speak of its being full of possibilities, or of an electron appearing out of it, because this vacuum is in fact a non-empty region.  This surely, however, is not the nothingness that is referred to by the big bang theory.  There is therefore not even an analogy between the appearance of a particle in a vacuum and the appearance of a Universe out of absolute nothing.


Footnotes:
[1] Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah (1263 - 1328), an Islamic scholar born in Harran, now modern day Syria.
[2] Later on he changed his mind, not only about this, but about the whole theory.
[3] This is what my friend,  Professor Mahjoob Obeid,  the famous Sudanese physicist wrote to  me in a personal  communication.
 
 

Contemporary Physicists and God’s Existence (part 3 of 3): Room for God

  
Description: An Islamic Critical Evaluation of the Ideas of Some Contemporary Physicists: Part three: The only conclusion to the series of causes is that there be one ultimate and external cause which led to all others.
 
The idea that something is not created by anything, that it comes out of nothing, is very different from the idea that it creates itself.  It is strange therefore to find some scientists speaking about them as if they are one and the same thing.  It is not only Davies who confused these two notions as we can see in the quotation just cited, but others also.  Taylor tells us that electrons can create themselves out of nothing in the manner Baron Munchausen saved himself from sinking into a bog by pulling himself up by his bootstraps.
It is as if these particles special particles are able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps (which in their case are the forces between them) to create themselves from nothing as Baron Munchausen saves himself without visible means of support...This bootstrapping has been proposed as a scientifically respectable scenario for creating a highly specialized Universe from nothing. (Taylor, 46)
Is it science or science fiction that we are being told here?  Taylor knows and says that Munchausen’s is only a story; what he claimed to have done is in fact something that is physically impossible to do.  In spite of this, Taylor wants to explain by his idea something that is not only real, but is of the utmost importance, and thus ends up saying something that is more absurd than Munchausen’s fictitious story of saving himself by pulling up his bootstrap.  At least Munchausen was talking about things that were already in existence.  But Taylor’s special particles act even before they are created!  They “pull themselves by their own bootstraps... to create themselves from nothing.”!

False Gods

The third alternative to attributing the creation of things to the true God, is to attribute them to false gods.  Thus many atheists try to attribute the creation of temporal things to other things which are themselves temporal (as we said before). Davies says:
The idea of a physical system containing an explanation of itself might seem paradoxical to the layman but it is an idea that has some precedence in physics.  While one may concede, (ignoring quantum effects) that every event is contingent, and depends for its explanation on some other event, it need not follow that this series either continues endlessly, or ends in God.  It may be closed into a loop.  For example, four events, or objects, or systems, E1, E2, E3, E4, may have the following dependence on each other: (Davies, 47)

But this is a clear example of a very vicious circle.  Take any one of these supposed events or objects or systems.  Let it be E1, and ask how it came about .  The answer is: it was caused by E4, which preceded it; but what is the cause of E4?  It is E3; and the cause of E3 is E2, and of E2 is E1.  So the cause of E4 is E1 because it is the cause of its causes.  Therefore E4 is the cause of E1 and E1 is the cause of E4 which means that each one of them precedes and is preceded by the other.  Does that make any sense?  If these events, etc.  are actual existents, then their coming into being could not have been caused by them the way Davies supposes it to be.  Their ultimate cause must lie outside this vicious circle.
And the philosopher Passmore advises us to:
Compare the following:
(1)  every event has a cause;
(2)  to know that an event has happened one must know how it came about.
The first simply tells us that if we are interested in the cause of an event, there will always be such a cause for us to discover.  But it leaves us free to start and stop at any point we choose in the search for causes; we can, if we want to, go on to look for the cause of the cause and so on ad infinitum , but we need not do so; if we have found a cause, we have found a cause, whatever its cause may be.  The second assertion, however, would never allow us to assert that we know that an event has happened ...  For if we cannot know that an event has taken place unless we know the event that is its cause, then equally we cannot know that the cause-event has taken place unless we know its cause, and so on ad infinitum.  In short, if the theory is to fulfill its promise, the series must stop somewhere, and yet the theory is such that the series cannot stop anywhere – unless, that is, a claim of privilege is sustained for a certain kind of event, e.g. the creation of the Universe. (Pasture, 29)
If you think about it, there is no real difference between these two series as Ibn Taymiyyah clearly explained a long time ago (Ibn Taymiyyah, 436-83).  One can put the first series like this: for an event to happen, its cause must happen.  Now if the cause is itself caused, then the event will not happen unless its cause event happens, and so on, ad infinitum.  We will not therefore have a series of events that actually happened, but a series of no events.  And because we know that there are events, we conclude that their real ultimate cause could not have been any temporal thing or series of temporal things whether finite or infinite.  The ultimate cause must be of a nature that is different from that of temporal things; it must be eternal.  Why do I say ‘ultimate’?  Because, as I said earlier, events can be viewed as real causes of other events, so long as we acknowledge them to be the incomplete and dependent causes they are, and as such not the causes that explain the coming into being of something in any absolute sense, which is to say that they cannot take the place of God.
What is the relevance of this talk about chains after all?  There might have been some excuse for it before the advent of the Big Bang, but it should have been clear to Davies in particular that there is no place for it at all in the world-view of a person who believes that the universe had an absolute beginning.
The fact that every thing around us is temporal and that it could not have been created except by an eternal Creator has been known to human beings since the dawn of their creation, and it is still the belief of the overwhelming majority of people all over the world.[1]  It would, therefore, be a mistake to get from this paper the impression that it hinges the existence of God upon the truth of the Big Bang theory.  That certainly is not my belief; neither was it the purpose of this paper.  The main thrust of the paper has rather been that if an atheist believes in the big bang theory, then he cannot avoid admitting that the Universe was created by God.  This, in fact, is what some scientists frankly admitted, and what others hesitantly intimated to.
There is no ground for supposing that matter and energy existed before and was suddenly galvanized into action.  For what could distinguish that moment from all other moments in eternity? ...  It is simpler to postulate creation ex nihilo, Divine will constituting nature from nothingness. (Jastro,122)
As to the first cause of the universe in the context of expansion, that is left to the reader to insert, but our picture is incomplete without Him. (Jasrow,122)
This means that the initial state of the universe must have been very carefully chosen indeed if the hot big bang model was correct right back to the beginning of time.  It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us. (Hawking,127)

References

Al Ghazali, Abu Hamid, Tahafut al Falasifa, edited by Sulayman Dunya, Dar al Ma'arif, Cairo, 1374 (1955)
Berman, David, A History of Atheism in Britain, London and New York, Routledge, 1990.
Boslough, John, Stephen Hawking's Universe: an Introduction to the most remarkable Scientist of our Time,  Avon Books, New York, 1985.
Bunge, Mario, Causality: The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science, The world publication Co. New York, 1963
Carter, Stephen L. The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion. Basic Books, Harper Collins, 1993.
Concise  Science Dictionary,  Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984
Davies, Paul, (1) The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability to Order the Universe, Simon & Schuster Inc, London, 1989. (2) God & The New Physics, The Touchstone Book, New York, 1983.
Fritzsch, Harald, The Creation of Matter: The Universe From Beginning to End, Basic Books Inc Publishers, New York, 1984.
Ibn Rushd, al Qadi Abu al Walid Muhammad Ibn Rush, Tahafut at-Tahafut, edited by Sulayman Dunya, Dar al Ma'arif , Cairo, 1388  (1968.)
Ibn Taymiya, Abu al Abbas Taqiyuddin Ahmad Ibn  Abd al Halim, Minhaj al Sunna al Nabawiya , edited by Dr. Rashad Salim, Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyad,  AH 1406 (1986)
Jastrow, Robert, God And The Astronomers, Warner Books, New York, 1978.
Hawking, Stephen,  A Brief History of Time,
Hoyle, Fred, The Nature of the Universe, Mentor Books, New York, 1955.
 Kirkpatrick, Larry D. and Wheeler, Gerald F. Physics, A World View, New York, Saunders College Publishing, 1992.
Newton, Sir Isaac, Optics, Dover Publications Inc. New York, 1952.
Pasture, J. A,  Philosophical Reasoning, New York, 1961.
Taylor, John, When the Clock Struck Zero: Science's Ultimate Limits, Picador, London, 1993


Footnotes:
[1] “…the first published avowal of speculative atheism appeared in 1770 on the Continent, and in 1782 in Britain.” (Russell, Atheism. 3).
“The most recent Gallop data indicate that 96 per cent of Americans say they believe in God... “ , (Carter, Culture, 278).  The percentage must surely be greater in the non Western world.
 
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