Ali Ataie – Does God Exist A Muslims Response to Atheism Ustadh Ali Ate
AI: Summary ©
The speakers explore the theory of a physical body and how it cannot be replaced by any other material. They discuss the history and use of logos and symbols to signal political parties and the importance of history and the law in understanding the existence of the universe. They address the "has been around" movement, which is focused on protecting Muslims against false statements and false leg-ups, and address the "has been around" movement, which is focused on protecting Muslims against false statements and false leg-ups. They also address the "has been around" movement and the "has been around" movement, which is focused on protecting Muslims against false statements and false leg-ups.
AI: Summary ©
Tonight's,
lecture is, gonna be more kind of classroom
academic rather than, like, a sermon.
So basically, to begin, there are 2 approaches
to the, quote, God question.
There's no there's what's known as,
which means to presuppose the existence,
of God. Here we look at revealed theology.
This is actually my specialty looking at the
Quran and the Bible and things like that,
all the New Testaments, looking at the language,
the context of scripture, things like that.
So we presuppose God's existence here,
and we seek to know him more personally.
So presuppositionalism,
the object here is to have ma'rifah or
to have
divine
knowledge of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, intimate knowledge
of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
So like a Muslim Christian debate,
a Muslim and a Christian are not going
to debate, does God exist because they both
presuppose God.
Right? They both believe he exists. So that's
not the topic of the debate.
The topic of the debate
between a Muslim and a Christian
is,
what is the way to God?
Is the Bible the word of God? Is
the Quran the word of God? Is Risa,
alaihis salam, God? Is the prophet, sabbath, alaihis
salam, a messenger of God? So that's one
approach, presuppositionalism.
The other approach is called evidentialism.
And this is where, and this is called
natural theology. It's called philosophical theism. William Craig
Elaine calls it that.
Here we look at evidence. We don't look
at scripture.
So we look at logic. We look at
philosophy, these types of evidences.
Look at reason and science,
we employ
deductive or,
syllogistic arguments
that are not strictly theological,
but may have theological implications.
What was that?
Oh, syllogistic. We'll talk about a syllogism inshallah.
We'll talk about that. I'll give you some
examples of a of a syllogism.
It's a form of argument. It's, attributed to
Aristotle.
So look at that inshallah.
So here with,
evidentialism,
the Muslim and the Christian will join forces
as it were, against the atheist.
Right?
Because they both believe in God, but the
question here
is not what does this God reveal about
himself? The question here is is there a
God?
If you look at our Shahada,
right,
that's atheism.
That's deism.
Right? Belief in a God.
You believe that there's no God
but the God or Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
That's deism. God created, but he may not
be personal. Muhammad
that's theism. God is personal.
Okay. So tonight, we're gonna be looking primarily
at evidentialism,
this approach
to the God question. Now Now let's look
at examples of syllogisms.
Okay?
Again, this is a form of argument that's
attributed to Aristotle,
simple argument.
Give you an example. Premise number 1, all
men are mortal.
Premise number 2, George Washington was a man.
Therefore
right, our conclusion that follows logically
and inescapably
is that George Washington was a mortal.
So this is an airtight logical
argument. You might even say that our premises
are self evident. They're axiomatic.
They're just accepted
on their face. You don't have to prove
your premises.
Right? Unless somebody has some weird theory about
George Washington was a jinn or a vampire
or something like that. But most people say,
no. George Washington was, all men are mortal.
George Washington was a man. Therefore, George Washington
was a mortal.
So another example.
Premise number 1, the universe is ordered. Premise
number 2, this is either by chance or
design.
Premise number
3, this is not by chance.
Therefore,
our logical conclusion is it is by design.
So this is a logic logical argument,
but the problem here with this argument is
that it could be potentially what's known as
question begging,
a question begging syllogism. What does it mean
for a quest for argument to be question
begging? It means that we haven't proven or
demonstrated our premises.
Our first premises was the universe is ordered.
That may not be self evident. You may
not agree with that. It may not be
axiomatic.
You might want me to provide evidence of
that. So even though this is a logical
argument, we have some work to do by
providing
or proofs for our premises.
You also have an argument that flows logically,
but whose premises are axiomatically
untrue or irrational.
For example, premise number 1,
all donkeys can speak English.
Premise number 2, Gary is my pet donkey.
Therefore, Gary can speak English. It's a logical
argument.
The logic is airtight,
but it's irrational.
It's axiomatically
untrue.
Now if you look at the arguments of
what are known as the 4 horsemen of
neo atheism, right, a new atheist movement, These
are Christopher Hitchens. His book is called God
Is Not Great. They have different books.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Sam Harris,
and the faith, Daniel Dennett,
breaking the spell. If you look at their
arguments against God,
they primarily revolve around issues
of social impact of religion.
In other words,
religion religious people are bad,
therefore, there is no God.
Right? Look at there's Hitler, there's * priests,
there's suicide bombings,
there's ISIS, this type of thing. So before
we continue, I want to make a distinction
here, very important distinction between an atheist and
a new atheist.
An atheist is someone who does not believe
in a God and follows no religion.
Right?
Or someone who doesn't believe in a personal
God. That's technically also an atheist. In other
words, somebody believes that there's a creator, a
great architect, that this God doesn't interact with
humanity. He doesn't send scriptures or send messiahs
or prophets.
Right? So the first 6 presidents of the
United States probably were deists.
Right? In Washington,
Adams Jefferson,
Madison,
Monroe, John Quincy Adams were probably
deists. And then the first,
proper Christian was,
Andrew Jackson.
A new atheist
like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, these characters that
are so prominent nowadays,
These are more properly called antitheists
rather than atheists.
An antitheist.
So this is someone who is opposed
to the belief in the existence of God,
opposed to it, and actually believes that religion
must be
eradicated
from the face of the Earth.
Right? So it's a more militant form of
atheism. It started around 19th
century with the writings of Karl Marx.
He said that religion is the opium of
the people and must be abolished.
Antitheism
is demonstrated by a famous statement of Christopher
Hitchens, the late Christopher Hitchens, who said, there
is no God, and I hate him.
Right?
So these are the antitheists.
Right?
So
Yeah.
Even if he did exist.
Right?
Even if he did exist, he would continue
to hate him.
This is the kind of mentality we're dealing
with.
If we put their their argument into a
syllogism, it would sound something like this.
Premise number 1, theists say God is good.
Premise number 2,
God created man.
Premise number
3, man does evil or non good.
Therefore, God does not exist.
This is called a non sequitur argument.
It does not follow. This is an illogical
argument. So people like Bill Maher and Sam
Harris. Right?
And they're talking about ISIS,
and they're saying, look,
Islam is an inherently evil religion because of
ISIS.
Right? The adherence to ISIS are less than
1% of 1%
of the Muslims globally.
So I can use the same type of
argument and say, look, 5 of the last
12,
Nobel Peace laureates,
5 of the last 12, almost half were
Muslim. Therefore, all Muslims are peaceful. They wouldn't
accept that.
Right? And that's 5 out of 12, not
1% of 1%.
Or if I said something like, because Bill
Bill Maher is an atheist, but his mother
is Jewish, so he's ethnically Jewish. Same as
Sam Harris, ethnically Jewish. Christopher Hitchens, ethnically Jewish.
So I said all ethnic Jews are bigoted,
hate filled ignoramuses.
Would they accept that?
Of course, they wouldn't. And I wouldn't make
that argument either because that's a racist argument,
and it does not follow. It's a non
sequitur argument.
And that's what people are listening to. These
4 4 horsemen, right,
they think that if we just turn every
mosque and church and synagogue
into a Starbucks or a Chuck E. Cheese
or a Hooters,
everything's gonna be okay. Right? Imagine a world
without religion, as John Lennon said. Imagine and
no religion too. Of course, John Lennon was
a Beatle. The Beatles actually
brought Aleister Crowley into popular culture. Aleister Crowley
is the founder of the Church of Satan,
the founder of the Thelemites. He called himself
the great Therion, the great beast of the
book of Revelation.
They put him on the cover of their
Lonely Hearts Club band. There's all these satanic
imagery that they keep doing. So these are
Satanists. They John Lennon used to know how
to sing backwards,
which is a a trick that satanists use.
Anyway,
the classical atheists now the classical atheists,
what I call the original gangsters
of atheism. These are Freud,
who said God is dad,
Nietzsche,
God is dead,
and Bertrand Russell.
These people were at least smart enough to
know that if you take God out of
the equation,
the world would fall into this nihilistic quagmire.
Right? Utter social and moral depravity.
So they understood that it was
primarily religion
that moralized people.
And that the purpose of religion was to
make one a more compassionate
or better human being.
As Voltaire said, if God did not exist,
we would have to invent him. As Dostoevsky
said,
if there is no God,
then all is permitted.
If there is no God, then all is
permitted. In other words, if there is no
moral authority,
there is no higher moral authority, you don't
have a moral anchor, it's my morality, as
I perceive it to be, against
yours,
then what's gonna happen in the world?
Right? What's gonna be our guiding moral principle?
Survival of the fittest.
Right? So I can kill you and say,
well, that's the law of nature,
survival of the fittest. Or is it the
Crowleyan,
Luciferian,
do what thou wilt. Right? Do whatever you
want.
Right?
What's that? Why do you have Darwin that
live? Did you close it? I think he's
not free.
I quoted why didn't I include Darwin?
Yeah. Oh, I'll get to You quoted Darwin.
Oh, I'll get to Darwin inshallah.
I'll get to him. Yeah.
Well, we'll talk we'll definitely talk about Darwin.
We can't We can't leave out leave out
the man.
Darwin. Yes. Of course we'll talk about him.
Okay.
So the moral anchor of Abrahamic tradition
what is the moral anchor of Abrahamic tradition?
If the moral anchor of or if the,
chief axiom of atheism is survival of the
fittest, and the moral anchor or,
credo of Satanism, which has grown in popularity,
is do whatever you want. What is the
moral anchor of Abrahamic tradition?
So this is answered in,
several sources. A 2nd century rabbi named Hillel
was asked, what is the Torah in a
nutshell? And he quoted 3 verses. Deuteronomy 64,
65, Leviticus 1918.
So this is the
essence of the Torahs and everything else is
commentary.
What does it say? 64 Deuteronomy,
God is 1. Deuteronomy 65,
love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart, soul, and strength.
Leviticus 1918,
love your neighbor, meaning your fellow man, meaning
fellow human,
as yourself. Love of God, love of humanity.
Interestingly,
in a Christian source, the gospel of Mark,
a scribe comes to Isa Alai Salam according
to this source, and says to him what
is the greatest commandment and Isa Alaihi Salam,
he quotes these 3 verses
verbatim from the Torah. So So Allah says,
Musaddiqalimabayna
yadayamina
Torah. That Isa alayna salam, Jesus Christ, peace
be upon him, he simply confirmed the theology
of the Torah.
So God is 1, love God, and love
your neighbor.
Now the prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alaihi sallam,
he says in a famous hadith, hadith rahma,
the hadith of mercy. And this in traditional
Islamic curriculums, was the first hadith that children
were taught at 5 years old.
I think this microphone.
There
you
go.
The first hadith that they were taught 5
years old.
The prophet
said,
he said,
the most merciful shows mercy to those who
show mercy.
Show mercy to those on Earth and the
one in heaven will show you mercy. How
many times did he mention Rahma? 5 or
6 times. Because this is very important to
engrain or inculcate into the child's mind this
virtue of Rahma. So his entire the basis
of his entire Islamic
education
is mercy.
He said,
none of you will enter paradise until you
truly believe, and none of you will truly
believe until you love one another.
Shall I tell you something that will increase
your love? And they said, yes. It's, afshus
salaam abaynaqum.
Spread peace amongst yourselves.
Love God and love of humanity. Love of
God and love of humanity. Fakhruddin al Razi,
he said, al Islam, al ibada to lil
Khaliq or rahmatul lil Khaliq.
He said Islam can be summed up in
one statement, worship of the creator and mercy
towards his creation.
This is our moral anchor as Abrahamic theists.
We're in the middle of Ibrahim Hanifa. This
is and we have difference of opinion, obviously,
with our Christian friends and and neighbors and
relatives and our Jewish friends and neighbors and
relatives. We have theological differences, we have different
types of differences, there's no doubt about it,
but the essence of the religion
is the same. Now without this
essential understanding of religion,
without religion,
morality then becomes
something relative. Human beings are little more little
more than cattle,
chunks of flesh and blood.
They become soulless,
easily slaughtered,
dispensable.
Atheism is material reductionism.
Thus, speaking of social impact,
no one has more blood on their hands
than atheists.
So think about the big four. Right? Mao
and Stalin
and Pol Pot and Mussolini.
Confirmed atheists, over 100,000,000
lives
over. I mean, that's that's a the low
end estimate.
Over 100,000,000
live. That's 17 Hitlers. Because when you don't
believe there's a God, there's no day of
judgement, you're not gonna be taking account for
anything, there's no objective morality,
no one has anything incorruptible about them, there's
no ruler, there's no soul, there's nothing that
survives death. Well then your axiom becomes survival
of the fittest, and hey, that's natural selection.
Now in Sharia, in Islamic law,
there are certain rules of engagement.
Women and children are never targeted in war,
and this is called, a tradition that is
Tawatr.
Tawator means multiply attested. There's no doubt about
it. It is simply wrong. Even in pre
Islamic rules of engagement, women and children were
not targeted. Pre Islamic. Even the man who
wanted to kill the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam
on the day of Uhud, when he had
killed the Mus'ad ibn Umer and had his
sword out and was charging towards the Prophet
sallallahu alaihi wasallam. He stopped dead in his
tracks because a woman named Nusayba bintuqab was
standing in front of his horse. He dare
not strike a woman on the battlefield. This
is pre Islamic rules of engagement.
Right?
The pre Islamic Arabs did not kill people
who were sleeping.
The man who came to the prophet sallallahu
alaihi wasallam, Du'Thur, the chief of the Muharib.
He actually woke up the prophet sallallahu alaihi
wasallam before he, was going to attack him.
We know the story of what happened to
him.
So
But if your rules of engagement are determined
by what you feel benefits you and your
people the most
at a particular time,
then that's realpolitik.
That's American foreign policy.
So the national interest
is your guiding principle.
And this lack of principled morality,
this lack of consistent objective morality,
gives birth to things like false flag operations,
where the government will act
will do something, will do an act of
terror, and then blame
innocent people for what they've done.
Because national interest is the law of the
land. And this is something that oppressors have
done for 1000 of years.
Nero, who was a,
Roman Emperor at the time of the apostles,
the Hawarion of Isa alaihis salam, he sent
he set half of Rome on fire
and sat back playing his little fiddle.
And he blamed the Christians for it. And
then they made street lamps out of Christians.
They would dip them alive into wax, put
them on poles, and light them on fire
while they were still alive,
all up and down the streets of Rome.
False flag operation.
But Hitler did, Hitler burned
the Reichstag,
right, the German buildings of parliament.
And then he said, these were the communists.
So now you have this
countrywide
inquisition of anyone who had,
you know, communist ties or suspected to have
communist ties. And then he would attack his
own military bases and blame other countries. Although
that was the Polish. So now you get
the people on your side,
Right? And you can do whatever you want
now because you're guided by national interest.
There's many types of false flag operations
that are confirmed, declassified,
Gulf of Tonkin that got us into Vietnam,
the false flag operation
never happened.
Right? Many many, examples of this. The, USS
Maine that got us into Spanish American war
never happened.
How many millions of people died because of
these lies that were blamed on others? And
there are other things as well, other events
that we can think of as well.
This lack of principled morality,
lack of consistent objective morality,
it leads to,
you know, little boy and fat man.
Those are the terms that Truman used for
the atomic bombs that were dropped on innocent
civilians
in Japan.
200,000 people on impact
killed on impact.
But hey, it's good for us.
Right? It's good for our nation.
And by the way, these these bombs were
totally unnecessary.
The Japanese economy was in shambles after the
oil embargo that was placed on them by
FDR a couple of years earlier. Harry Truman
actually writes in his,
diary that once the Russians get involved, the
Japs are done. That's a direct quote.
So this was just a testing ground for
their nuclear arsenal. That's what it was. Human
guinea pigs. Right? That's why. They're not guided
by divine principles. If you look at the
all of the battles of the prophet, sallallahu
alaihi wa sallam,
right,
Over
20 Maghazi
or military expeditions.
What are the numbers of casualties
in all of the battles of the prophet
sallallahu alaihi wa sallam?
Right?
And 2 bombs dropped in Japan over 200,000
people on impact.
In 23 years,
what are the number of dead people, the
people killed, and all of the military campaigns
of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam? What do
you think the number is?
1,018
according to Abu Hasan and Naddui.
1,018
in battle, these were soldiers,
about 700 enemy and about 300
Muslim Shuhada, the companions of the prophet salAllahu
alaihi sallam.
1018.
And the way that the Prophet
sometimes depicted
is as
primarily as a warrior. We shouldn't study
Sira like that. We don't start with Kitab
al Maghazi, the book of the military expedition.
Start with the Shamayil of the prophet sallallahu
alaihi wa sallam. The outward and inward manifestations
of him
This is the best way to start study
about him.
But here's an interesting thing is that
the,
Quran
does not even accept
atheism. It's that everyone worship something, at least
my understanding
of the Quran. So,
most people worship their Hawa, their
their caprice.
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says in the
Do you see the one who takes his
caprice, his desires,
his emotions, his ego
as his god.
Right? He's all about himself.
Right? Selfie
Selfie Selfie. So he's putting selfies up. How
many followers do I have?
This is interesting.
How many people are following me? How many
followers do I have?
Right? Everyone has lying dormant in their hearts.
The seed
of the claim of the pharaoh, Anarab Bukumul
A'la, I am your Lord Most High.
They're there lay dormant, this claim to deity.
Right? People worship their aqal, their intellect, they
worship money.
There's an interesting book if you want a
reference,
John Haught,
h a u g h t.
He's a Jesuit. He wrote a book called
God and the New Atheism.
He says something interesting.
He says, atheists are guilty of what he
calls explanatory
monism
explanatory
monism,
where he says, they say that science is
the only answer to everything.
Science is the only answer to everything.
So for example, I walk into a kitchen,
and,
my mother is making tea for me, but
I don't know what she's doing. So I
say, what are you doing? She says, I'm
expanding molecules.
That's true.
That's scientifically what's happening, But does it answer
my question?
No. What are you doing?
I'm heating up water and expanding molecules.
That's great.
But why?
Because I'm making UT because I love you.
This is the answer I'm looking for.
You see, why is a much more profound
question than what.
Science can never give you the why.
It can give you how and possibly what,
but not why. Another example used by William
Chittick in his book Science and the Cosmos,
he says, imagine there's a
painting. Let's let's say it's the Mona Lisa,
and you put a scientist in front of
the painting and you say to the scientist,
tell me about this painting.
So on the principle of explanatory monism, the
scientist will say, okay let me do some
tests, so he he does some radiocarbon 14
testing on the canvas, it dates to 15
whatever from Florence. The paint is acrylic and
this is what it's made of and so
on and so on. All these all this
information,
pages and pages, and you're thinking that's great.
It doesn't help me at all.
And then you put a child in front
of the painting.
You say, what? Tell me about the painting,
and the child looks at Mona Lisa and
says, what is she thinking? I wonder what
she's thinking.
Which one of these 2 has greater insight
into the mind of the of the painter?
The scientist or the child?
The answer is the child, because the child
is asking a more profound question. Why? Why
the painting? Why the universe? Not what the
universe. We'll talk more about this, but why?
Right? I would argue that we all have
transcendental curiosity.
Right? All of us. This is a human
condition.
John Hart calls it a silent calling, an
invitation
from God. Right? A silent invitation. You know,
it's our fitra. Istajebu
lillahi lima da'akum lima yuhyikum.
O you who believe, o humanity,
answer the invitation of Allah
when he calls you to that which gives
you life. Everyone has a transcendental
curiosity
and everyone fills in that void with something.
Most people do it with religion. Some people
do it with *,
with drugs,
with rock and roll, with satanism.
And Christopher Hitchens, an atheist, but he was
a total full blown alcoholic.
Even after a debate he had with Chris
Hedges one time, right on stage, you saw
him take out a little vodka and and
start
hitting the bottle.
Raging alcoholic. Why? Because he wanted to enter
into these altered states of consciousness. He has
a transcendental
curiosity.
Everybody has this. Everybody.
However, the Quran says only with the dhikr
only with the Dhikr of Allah Subhanahu Wa
Ta'ala
are hearts made to tranquil.
Okay. So this lack of principal morality,
this lack of consistent objectivity
or objective morality,
it leads to things like this. Invasions of,
you know, countries under false pretenses,
the theft of natural resources.
In an October 2006,
article in the Washington Post, this is in
2006.
The author of the article claimed that 650,000
civilians
were killed in Iraq. Civilians.
And that was in 2006.
So this number is up in the millions.
Millions.
This is genocide.
Any way you slice it, it's genocide.
So do brown lives matter? Those are those
are women men, women and children. Entire families
taken off the planet.
You know, Noam Chomsky,
is a professor of linguistics at MIT.
He says, we have to put ourselves in
another person's shoes, and then we can understand
what terrorism is.
He says, imagine
Saddam Hussein goes on international television
and says, mister Bush, you have 48 hours
to leave the White House,
to leave your country, you and your entire
family.
48 hours or else we're going to attack
America.
And if you stay, we're attacking,
and we're doing this because we have evidence
that we're not going to show you.
Chomsky says that is sheer
terrorism.
That is terrorism
any way you slice it.
Right?
But this is what happens when we don't
have divine commandments guiding our conduct When it's
real politic, when it's national interest, we can
bend things because it's in our national interest.
We don't have objective morality. Things that are
right and wrong, Period. It doesn't matter the
circumstances.
And this leads me to my first argument.
When should I stop speaking by the way?
You go? Okay.
First argument for the existence of God
is called the moral argument,
the moral argument. Here's the thesis of the
moral argument. In the absence of God, there
would be no objective, meaning universal,
moral
values, no higher moral authority.
There would only be sociocultural
relativism.
Right and wrong would be determined by the
dominant
group. It would be totally subjective
and thus extremely
violent.
So if my society feels that our morals
and values perpetuate our group, why should we
listen to your morals and values?
Richard Dawkins said,
quote, there is no good nor evil.
We are machines to propagate DNA.
There is no good nor evil.
We are machines to propagate DNA. You see
on atheism
you can't be immoral.
You can't be immoral. Atheism science does not
deal with morality.
It is fundamentally non moral. There's no right,
no real right or wrong,
just societal constructs.
Right? And science can't prove everything.
Right? What I call the religion of scientism,
where the Akal is worshiped
and science is the only answer,
explanatory monism.
Science cannot prove morality.
Science cannot prove through the scientific method
that murder is wrong.
Can you prove it through the scientific method
that murder is wrong? No.
Science cannot prove metaphysical events
like did Washington cross the Delaware? Did Caesar
cross the Rubicon?
Can it prove these things to the scientific
method? No. Because in order to do that
you have to go back in time or
reproduce that event which is impossible.
Science cannot prove metaphysical events. Science cannot prove
love.
It cannot prove that I love someone. You
can hook me up to some machine
and test my heart rate if I'm sweating
and things like that. What is it love?
It might be hate. It might be envy.
What's my specific emotion?
Science can't prove it.
Science can't prove math,
it presupposes math. To claim that science can
prove math is to argue in a circle.
And what is consciousness?
Scientists still doesn't know. Scientists
still don't know. Oh, it's chemicals mixing in
your
in your brain. Well, how do you get
from chemicals mixing to thought and memory and
imagination?
Alright.
So science cannot give us morality.
It is fundamentally non moral.
I'm not saying that atheists are immoral.
They're atheists are extremely moral people. What What
I'm saying is that there's nothing in science
that compels anyone to be moral.
There's nothing in science
that compels anyone
to be moral
because you become the highest authority.
There's no God,
you become the highest authority. And then you
start inventing your own morality. This is human
nature, so you start playing God. Like Richard
Dawkins said,
if you find out your child has down
syndrome
just abort it.
Try again.
Just abort it. I read this today on
Facebook.
Just today
I read that there was an an Armenian
couple and they had a healthy baby boy,
but he had Down syndrome.
The wife said to the husband, give it
up for adoption or else I'm divorcing you.
The husband said, no. It's a human being.
This is Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala created.
It is He who formed you in the
wounds of your mothers as He willed.
La ilaha illallah. There's no god but Allah
Subhanahu wa ta'ala.
He said, no. You have to give it
up for adoption. If it was a month
earlier they would have killed the child.
Giving up for adoption. Apparently if you kill
it now it's murder, but a month earlier
it's it's fine. It's called abortion.
You know,
and that's the trick of the shaitan.
Shaytan plays with words.
Right?
Right?
Edward Said in his book,
Orientalism,
and George Orwell talked about this. Linguistic colonization,
when the oppressor takes your words in your
tradition and gives them a new meaning, redefines
words.
Right? So like Taqiyyah and Sharia and jihad,
they're redefining these terms
and Muslims are buying into it. Jihad, unmitigated
perpetual warfare against unbelievers. Really? Well, in the
Quran it talks about Jihad. Oh, I I
can't be Muslim then because I can't I
can't get I can't get down with that.
But that's their definition.
Right? We have to define our own terms.
That's what Shaitan does. Shaitan's tricky.
He calls things by different names.
Right?
Paulo Freire, this is a book that everyone
should read, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
So the oppressor uses bread and circus, food
and entertainment
to anesthetize
the intellects of the masses, and then he
uses the antiseptic
language of the oppressor,
and
repeats it and repeats it over and over
again, 24 hour news cycle. So you don't
even know what you're saying anymore.
Collateral damage in the theater of operation.
What does that mean?
There was a lot of collateral damage in
the theater of operation. That means a lot
of innocent men, women, and children were slaughtered
in their own country.
That's what that means,
but we're using antiseptic language. So there's no
empathy there. If we don't have empathy we're
not human beings. That's our humanity.
Right?
Okay.
So you cannot extract,
you know,
the
virtue of charity or virtue or justice or
selflessness or compassion from a double helix, a
chromosome, or a test tube. We get these
things, we extract these things from scripture.
On atheism we're just animals,
just a slightly more evolved primate,
second cousin to the chimp.
Animals don't have moral duties, so why do
we?
Most atheists agree
that if you see a man drowning in
a river it's your duty to help him.
But why?
Why is it your duty?
You could ask an atheist.
Is it
is it part of our evolution to put
ourselves in harm's way?
Why put yourself in harm's way?
Where does this altruism come from?
Show me the gene.
Right?
And speaking of evolution,
now we're gonna talk about Darwin.
A criticism.
To go from a primeval ape
to a human being requires
trillions
of transitional
forms and mutations.
Trillions,
not 100,
not 1,000, not millions, not billions.
To go from a cow to a whale,
a t rex to a swan,
takes trillions,
trillions
of transitional
forms.
And of course Darwin says in the Bible
of
the
atheist, the origin of species,
18/63,
that eventually we'll dig up the Earth and
we'll find all of these fossils.
But we've dug up the Earth.
We haven't found anything.
Found oil
and gold.
Found a few things.
How many
skeletons have scientists
discovered that they believe to be missing links?
Is it in the trillions?
Is it in the billions? Is it in
the millions? Is it in the thousands?
Is it in the hundreds? Is it in
the dozens?
You can count them on 2 hands,
and they're probably
fragments of
extinct apes. They say, oh, these are the
missing links. There need to be trillions of
transitional forms in the earth. That's just for
human beings.
And of course there's Darwin's doubt.
No one knows what Darwin's doubt. Darwin who
once said, well if I truly believed
that my brain evolved from the brain of
a primeval ape, then I why would I
even trust my intellect?
Should I even trust my intellect to give
me the right answer? How do I know
that in 10000 years
my descendants are not gonna look back at
me in 2015 and say look how stupid
those people were back then. Just like the
way we look at chimpanzees in a zoo
and say look how stupid these chimps are
throwing their feces.
Right? Why should I even trust my intellect
if I believe that my intellect evolved from
a primeval ape and is still in a
state of,
macro evolution?
Another argument they make is
chimpanzees and human beings are 98% identical in
their
DNA.
As a rabbi once said, a jellyfish and
a watermelon are also 98%
identical.
I'm not going to eat a jellyfish.
What's in that 2% is intellectus.
Intellectus.
Right? This is our differentia to use Aristotelian
nomenclature.
What makes us different than any other species
is the ability to reason.
I like to see a chimpanzee play a
violin,
or build a skyscraper,
or do some trigonometry,
but it's not all about not all about
the intellect either.
Ultimately, it comes down to being a moral
person,
an ethical person. The prophet
said, inna ma biriftul yutammima
maqariman akhlaq. I was only sent to perfect
your character. And part of having good character
is believing in Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
Now somebody might say, well,
there's different ways of looking at this. Some
of the modern day rilemma,
they might say, well, you can believe in
microevolution
because there's no definitive answer on this issue
except on one part of it. So for
us to say evolution is a total farce,
I think that's a dangerous position to take
because then people are gonna think that you're
someone like Sarah Palin,
who says dinosaurs are,
you know, they were around 5000 years ago,
and all of this radiocarbon
14 dating that's all a conspiracy from Satan.
Right? If you go to Ohio they have
the creation museum
in Ohio, the Creation Museum,
somewhere in Ohio, you know, built by evangelical
Christians. You go in, you see, you know,
children playing on stegosauruses,
animatronic
dinosaurs,
that's called the Flintstones.
That's that's not science.
Right? So when you say there's no such
thing as evolution, they're gonna put you in
that category.
Right?
So it's important for us to understand
that not everything they say is
completely out there or false.
In fact, a lot of what evolutionists say,
is totally compatible with
Islamic theology.
Microevolution,
this is something you can prove If you
put frogs in a certain environment and mess
around with the temperature and things like that,
you're gonna see them starting to change and
adapt to their environment. Why do Middle Eastern
men have big noses and long eyelashes?
Because you gotta keep the sand out of
your face.
You need to be able to breathe
in the desert.
Right? Microevolution.
However, we take strong exception to this idea
that we evolve from primeval monkeys.
Right? Now what's also interesting here is that
if you look at when Allah Subhanahu Wa
Ta'ala created Adam alaihis salam and
created him, formed him. Right? He's lying in
state as it were, he had not breathed
into him of his ruh.
The angels had an interesting complaint.
They said, are you going to create one
who's going to shed blood on earth?
Why would they say this?
Are you gonna create someone who's going to
shed blood on earth? Why would they say
it?
Because something's happening on the earth.
Blood is being shed on the earth. Right?
There are creatures on earth that are shedding
blood. And the angels are saying, well this
is going to be similar to that.
And what are they talking about? Animals on
earth? Animals killing each other is not necessarily
considered evil.
That's their instinct, that's
nature. They don't There's no tekleif, they're not
judged on the day of judgment.
So it could be
that the angels are referring to some sort
of humanoid creature on earth, possibly the Neanderthal
Allahu Adam that looks somewhat similar to Adam
and saying, look, they're killing each other. Are
you going to create something similar that's going
to kill each other as well? And then
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says I know what
you know not. What's the difference between Adam
and a Neanderthal? A homo sapien and then
a Neanderthal is the ability to reason and
articulate.
This is what makes Adam This is what
gives him the Khilafa.
This is what gives him the,
vice regency of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala on
earth.
The Neanderthal did not have a developed larynx.
It can just make simple sounds not complex
speech.
Allah Subh'anaHu
Wa
Ta A'la says, We taught Adam the names
of everything. Ar Rahman Alaman Quran Khalaqal
Insan
Al Lamahu Al Bayan.
Ar Rahman, the Most Gracious.
The teacher of the Quran.
He created humanity
and taught human beings how to speak, how
to articulate.
Right? So it's not necessarily our physical bodies
that make us different than the rest of
the animal kingdom.
You know as
philosophers said
as a philosopher said an eagle can spot
a fish underwater from a mile up in
the air. I can't do that. Put me
in a room with a
lion, I'm going to lose.
Right?
But what makes us special? What gives us
the khilafa of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala is
our ability
to
reason
and submit and have good character and comportment
and,
believe in Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
And this is why we're judged on Yomul
Qiyamah.
Okay.
So good and evil has no referent
if God doesn't exist
unless we redefine good and say that it
means something that makes your life more pleasurable.
Right?
But that's dangerous because your pleasure might be
someone's
torture. What if someone takes pleasure in killing
children and bearing them in his backyard?
Right? On atheism,
that is not immoral
nor wrong.
Atheism does not deal with morality.
It's fundamentally
non moral. It's just not socially acceptable.
Right? Like breaking wind in public, or burping
out
loud. So what if it was socially acceptable?
On what grounds does Richard Dawkins
condemn child exploitation,
child *, if that society finds it acceptable
and conducive
to their perpetuation?
You see it's revelation that gives us the
10 commandments,
the Noahidic laws,
the moral imperatives of the Quran, which are
called Al Ma'aruf.
Al Ma'aruf. Ta'muroona bil Ma'aruf.
You call to that which is good. Ma'aruf
literally means things that are known.
We know these things.
We know them. They're axiomatic. How do we
know them? They're either taught to us directly
from revelation given by prophets
or they're infused as Aquinas said, upon our
very souls by Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. Either
way, they come from the divine presence.
Our moral objectives, our objective moral values don't
murder, don't steal,
don't commit adultery, respect parents,
don't oppress,
speak the truth.
In ancient Athens,
Pederasty was very common.
Pederasty is,
like grown men having relationships with boys.
Right? These are married men. In fact, Socrates
says that once he walked into the gymnasium,
the word gymnasium in Greek means a place
of naked boys.
So I walked in, I saw them wrestling
naked, I wasn't even aroused. Here's what he
says. This is the ethos, the culture of
ancient Athens.
Simply what most people were doing.
But in Sparta, another city state, that is
a capital offence
to do something like that, another Greek city
state.
Now if a Jew wandered into Athens,
right, in 5th century before the common era,
and he saw what was happening there as
far as this type of thing, he would
be able to condemn it because he has
objective principled morality.
He believes in the scripture.
But an atheist could say,
Well that's their culture.
They abuse little boys, that's their culture.
He could say that because he doesn't deal
with morality, doesn't believe in scripture.
Or he'd say, It's it's wrong.
Why is it wrong? It's just wrong.
Why? It's just wrong.
Show me the gene.
Why is it wrong? It's wrong because it
eventually leads to the downfall of their society.
That's why it's wrong.
No. It's wrong. Period.
It's morally wrong.
It's just wrong. Period. We can say that
because we believe in a higher morality, a
moral anchor
that's above human intellect.
So just as, you know, theists have the
problem of evil, right? It's called theodicy.
William Demski, he talks about the problem of
good with atheists,
the problem of good. I'll give you an
example, something simple. Why would I give my
seat to an old woman on the
train? Atheists say for two reasons, to prolong
your species
or for reciprocal advantage.
I scratch my back, you scratch yours because
we're all apes at the end of the
day apparently.
Right?
But is that why I give my seat
to this lady?
Do I, wanna prolong my species?
Do I want her to tip me or
something?
No. Why would I give blood?
Do I wanna what why would I do
that? They say, well, it makes you feel
good.
So atheism is an extremely cynical way of
looking at the world, extremely cynical.
You help people because it makes you feel
good.
Right? That's why you're doing everything.
So why do it?
You know, Mother Teresa is a atheistic moral
enigma.
This is someone who used to hug lepers,
you know, a model of sacrifice and charity
and altruism. And of course she came under
attack by Hitchens. He wrote a book about
her saying she was all about money. She
didn't really believe in anything. This type of
thing. So they can't answer why would somebody
do something like that?
Why would they give their lives in the
service of others?
So in conclusion on the moral argument,
if there's no God,
there is no moral anchor.
If we don't have a moral anchor then
everything becomes relative morally. If everything becomes
morally relative
then something like national interest
will replace
God's law which advocates
objective morality.
If national interest takes over, it's gonna lead
to a whole lot of violence, and that's
what we're seeing right now. A whole lot
of violence.
You know?
Yeah. You know our leaders are they fain
Christianity.
They're not Christian.
Christians don't worship owls.
You
know, check out the Bohemian Grove.
If you haven't heard about it, you should
learn about it.
Bohemian Grove, just Google it.
Okay. This next argument is called the cosmological
argument.
This is espoused by Abu Hamad Al Ghazali
in his tahafatul philosophy of the incoherence of
the philosophers,
and advocated by contemporary scholar,
William Lane Craig, his book called Kalam Cosmological
Argument.
It's a book that I highly recommend, the
Kalam Cosmological Argument.
It's based on the Ghazali text.
So here's the basic syllogism.
Premise number 1, whatever begins to exist has
a cause.
Premise number 2. The universe began to exist,
therefore the universe has a cause. This is
not strictly theological but has theological implications
because then we have to ask what can
create a universe?
Now a the rule of classical metaphysics
is ex nihilo nihil fit,
in Latin which means from nothing
comes nothing.
Now most atheists
agree whether they're cosmologists or physicists or biologists,
Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Quentin Smith, Daniel Dennett,
Roger Penrose,
Stephen Hawking, they all say that the universe,
the cosmos
came from nothing,
nothing.
This is now the standard model of the
universe. Universe came from absolutely nothing and this
is true.
Asteas we believe that Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala
created the universe ex nahilo,
out of nothing.
But atheists say, no it's uncaused, it's unprovoked,
It just popped into existence
from literally no from literally nowhere.
Quintin Smith says He's at the University of
West Michigan, atheist. He says, quote, the universe
came from nothing,
by nothing,
for nothing.
That's a metaphysical claim.
That doesn't sound like a naturalist.
That's a metaphysical claim. Daniel Dennett, he says,
the universe picked itself up by its own
boot straps.
Imagine you're wearing boots, can you pick yourself
off the ground
by picking up your boot straps? That's a
metaphysical statement. That's a religious statement.
How can something come from nothing uncaused?
Is that science?
Theist Frank Turek,
he said, he wrote a book called, I
don't have enough faith to be an atheist.
Is to believe a universe can come from
nothing is worse than magic.
Is in magic, I take my hat off,
I pull a rabbit out of my hat.
That's going from something to something. Empty space
is something, it's not nothing. But a universe
out of nothing
is a great leap of faith
requires a lot of iman,
a whole lot.
You gotta you gotta be a mukman big
time to believe in something like that. I
don't have enough faith to believe in something
like that.
So what is nothing? Stephen Hawking says the
universe can spontaneously create itself out of nothing.
Again, that's not naturalism.
That's a supra rational statement, a religious statement.
What is nothing? Aristotle said, nothing is what
stones dream about.
What does a stone dream about?
Absolutely nothing.
It's not simply empty space. Like I play
a trick on my kids and I say,
is there anything in my hand? And they
say, in my hands they say, no. And
I go like this.
There's a finger in there.
Right?
No. Even if I went like that, there's
nothing. There's something there.
Empty space is certainly something. Or like that
show, let's make a deal. Door number 1
or door number 2? Door number 1, they
open it. Oh, there's nothing. No. There's certainly
something from a scientific standpoint. There's a lot
of things there.
Right?
So Stephen Hawking, this is something interesting. He
says, look, at the subatomic
level,
subatomic level, in the quantum vacuum, and no
one really understands quantum physics and mechanics, anyway,
he says in a quantum vacuum,
you have the photon
coming in and out of existence, and he
says, look, this is evidence that something can
come from nothing.
In the quantum vacuum, you have the photon
coming in and out of existence. The problem
is that the quantum vacuum is a sea
of fluctuating
energy,
highly volatile and unstable.
It is certainly something.
The latest from Hawking, and they made a
movie about this recently, The Theory of Everything,
is that he's this is what he says.
If you extrapolate the universe
backwards because the universe is expanding.
Right? It's expanding.
Right? And it's expanding isotropically, which means evenly.
And this is something that is proven scientifically,
the redshift of the planets and galaxies is
called Hubble's law.
Right?
Which means the universe is actually expanding, not
constricting. If it was constricting,
it would the planets,
the the color would appear blue according to
the Doppler effect, so it's definitely
expanding. Right? I mean, Einstein called it in
1917,
Einstein sitting at his desk with a pencil,
and this is something interesting, something amazing about
the universe, the uncanny,
accuracy of mathematics,
that the universe you can work things out
at your desk with a pencil
because the universe is ordered,
and that's evidence of design.
Well Einstein said look, my calculations say either
the universe is
expanding faster than the speed of light or
is collapsing upon itself. And this can't be
right because at his time, the dominant theory
in the scientific community is the steady state
model of the universe.
Right? That the universe is eternal in the
past
and it's not growing or expanding. So he
put in the Lambda, the cosmological
constant in his equations to ensure the steady
state model of the universe, and he called
it the biggest blunder of his life. He
was actually correct. Universe is expanding. Also, MBR,
microwave microwave
background
radiation discovered in 1965 by 2 men, Penzias
and Wilson, proves the universe is expanding.
This is called the the Hartle Hawking
Standard Model of the universe. It's also called
the Friedemann Lemaitre Standard Model or Big Bang
Cosmology.
Anyway, Stephen Hawking says if you extrapolate the
universe backwards
you get to the point where there's an
infinitesimally
small black hole.
Okay?
And this is how he sidesteps infinite regression
Because in the black hole, there's no time.
What is infinite regression? I say what came
first, the chicken or the egg? So the
egg came first. The egg came out of
a chicken though.
Okay, the chicken came first. But the chicken
came out of an egg.
Okay. The egg came first, but the egg
came out of a chicken though.
Okay. The chicken came first, but the chicken
came out of an egg. We go back
ad infinitum. It's called infinite regress.
Infinite regression.
So how does he solve it? He says,
look, in the black hole there's no time.
There's nothing before that because there's no time.
Therefore, we've
we've conquered infinite regression.
The problem with that is that a black
hole
is
not
an initial condition of anything.
It is a resultive state.
It is a secondary state of a solar
explosion.
It is matter,
and matter requires motion,
and motion requires
time.
So we may ask, what was before the
black hole?
Right? Because a black hole is not
nothing. Right? Where did the singularity
come from?
Reminds me of a joke that a group
of atheists are speaking and God is listening
to their conversation.
And then the atheists are saying, okay, there
was
And God tells them, how did it come
about? And they say, okay, there was this
black hole, and then God says, hey, get
your own black hole.
Lawrence Krauss, foremost cosmologist, Arizona State University, wrote
a wrote a book called the, a universe
out of nothing, big atheist.
He says we can date the universe to
4 decimal places,
13.7256000000000
years,
to 4 decimal places. He can date the
universe.
He says the nexus of space time
came into being at the Big Bang. In
fact, space time and matter came into being.
This is called cosmogenesis.
But how? He says by itself.
By itself. It created itself. This is a
faith claim.
This is a metaphysical claim. It's like if
I say to you, I created myself.
Would you believe me?
No.
Unless, you know, you believed I have supernatural
qualities.
So you see the only way to avoid
infinite regress is to go metaphysical,
to go supernatural,
to go theological.
Only a non contingent
being, in other words, one who is not
subject to infinite regress.
1 who is eternal
and one who is necessarily
spaceless
because space came into being and timeless because
time came into being and immaterial because matter
came into being, extremely powerful and intelligent because
a universe came from that entity,
Only such an entity can bring a universe
out of nothing.
But then the atheist will say, then who
caused God?
It is God's very nature to be pre
eternal. The first premise of the Kalam Cosmological
Argument says, whatever begins to exist has a
cause. God did not begin to exist.
In fact, to ask this question
is to question the very existence of the
universe
itself. I'll give you an example. I use
this example a lot. Let's say I'm standing
in a line and there's a brother standing
in front of me, and I say to
the brother, hey, brother. Can I give you
a hug? And this brother says, you have
to ask the guy behind you for permission.
So hey, can I give him a hug?
And this brother says, ask the guy behind
me for permission.
Hey, can I give him a hug? Ask
the guy behind me for permission.
Hey, can I give him a hug? Ask
the guy behind me for And this goes
on ad infinitum. Will I ever hug the
brother?
No. The hugging of the brother represents the
creation of the universe.
So if these are gods behind me, a
god who created another god, who created another
god, who created another god. This does not
solve infinite regress. Infinite regress dies at the
door of the eternal.
Infinite regress
dies at the door
of the eternal.
And you cannot traverse an actual infinitude.
An actual infinite number of events, you can
never traverse that.
You can never complete that.
In other words, if the universe is eternal
in the past
and God created
another God who created who was created by
another God, we never get to today, we
never get to the creation of the universe.
An infinite
an actual infinitude cannot be traversed.
So George Cantor, the
theoretical mathematician, modern based set theory and things
like that, He distinguishes 2 types of infinitudes.
This is the first type, he calls it
an actual infinitude, and it's represented in math
by the Hebrew a'a, letter
aleph. What is the actual infinitude? A number
that transcends
and contains
all natural numbers
and cannot be increased by 1.
A number that that contains and transcends
all natural numbers and cannot be increased
by 1 unit. It does not exist in
nature.
It cannot exist in nature. Abu Yusuf al
Kindi, he gives an example. Abu Yusuf al
Kindi, he says his analogy. He says, imagine
you have in space somewhere a huge blob
and this blob is made of an actual
infinite number of particles.
Then you take 10 of those particles and
you put it on the side. Is this
blob still an actual infinitude?
You say, yes. It's still an actual infinitude.
So then there are 2 actual infinitudes. Infinity
and infinity minus 10. So oh no, that's
illogical.
So now it's a finite
number of of particles. Okay. What about if
we put this 10, also finite, back into
the blob?
A finite plus a finite only gives you
a finite. You can never get to an
actual infinite number. What we do have however,
is a theoretical infinitude.
The lazy
8. A theoretical infinitude. And a theoretical infinitude
can be traversed
in finite space. We do it all the
time. My hand is above my notebook.
Right? How many times can I cut this
distance in half?
In theory,
an infinite number of times but I'll never
actually get
to an actual infinitude.
But what if I do this?
Does that mean that I've traversed an actual
infinitude?
No. Because I've set parameters. This is 0.0
and this is 1.0.
Right? But when we're dealing with the universe,
if it's pre eternal in the past and
God was created by another god, who was
created by another god, who was created by
another god, we don't have 0.0. We'll be
stuck forever in the infinite past. We never
get to the actual creation of the universe.
And actual infinitude cannot be traversed.
Suppose someone comes up to us, comes in
this masjid and says, I've been counting from
negative infinity
from negative infinity and now I'm about to
I'm about to, get to 0. Negative 3,
negative 2, negative 1, 0.
That took so long. We'd laugh in his
face, wouldn't we? We'd laugh in his
face. So,
if the universe is eternal in the past
or if we dare to ask the question,
who created God then? Then we're denying the
very existence of the universe itself which is
here
and we know it is.
Infinite regress dies at the door of the
eternal.
Who is the eternal?
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
21 30 of the Quran.
Very interesting verse.
Very very interesting word. I quoted this verse
to an atheist as an undergraduate.
Do not the unbelievers, the atheists, the agnostics,
do not they do not do they not
see that the heavens and the earth and
the heavens and the earth is a euphemism
for the cosmos in the Quran. That the
cosmos, the universe was a single unit of
matter
and then we clothe them asunder.
Fafataq nahuma.
We clothe them asunder.
I quoted this verse to an atheist.
He said I said this is a verse
from scripture. He said that verse is not
in the Bible.
I said I didn't say it was in
the Bible. I said it's in scripture. So
what scripture?
I said the Quran and I showed it
to him and he looked at it and
he said, who wrote this? I said, this
is a revelation. It's 1400 years old. He
said, I don't believe it. You wrote this.
This is what he told me. You you
you must you must have written this. Said,
no this is 1400 years old. You're translating
it wrong. Said, no I know Arabic.
This is what it says. This is loosely
Basically what it's saying. No, no. You wrote
this. He refused to actually acknowledge it.
Very interesting verse. The firmament,
the heavens.
Right? We created them with skill and we
are expanding them.
This is active participle.
We are actively
expanding
the universe.
Right? This is Surah 51
verse 47.
You
know.
Fatar. Allah is Fatar
What does fatar mean?
To split or break something apart.
The splitter
of the heavens and the earth, of the
cosmos.
Badir
in al Baqarah. Badiur means the originator, the
one who creates out of nothing, the originator
of the heavens and the earth.
That is your Lord. There is no God
but He. He's the creator of everything.
Space, time, matter, energy, everything.
Layshukamitlihi
sheywun. This is why God could not be
in space, time and matter because there's nothing
like God whatsoever.
There's nothing like Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala whatsoever.
Somebody might say, what about other gods?
We're all atheists. You don't believe in Thor
and in Baal, and in Dionyses, and Zeus.
What about these other gods?
But Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala,
the God of Abraham,
stays relevant
and will stay relevant
because his qualities adequately explain
the origins of the universe.
His qualities adequately explain
the origins
of the universe. He's transcendent of space, time,
materiality,
pre and post eternal.
This will always stay relevant because this answers
the question of the answers, the enigma of
infinite regress.
And Isa,
his worship is being phased out.
Christians are in the Abrahamic tradition,
but many of them are leaving Trinitarian Christianity.
And this began in the 16th century with
the Protestant Reformation,
right, and the development of the printing press,
where Christians are reading the Bible in their
own vernacular
and rejecting the text,
have major issues with the text.
Right?
So a very fast growing movement nowadays, a
Sokinian Unitarian Christianity
It's very similar to our theology.
Right? Unitarian Christianity.
Okay.
Almost done. The last argument I wanna talk
about and it will be done Insha'Allah.
It's called the teleological
argument.
We cover the moral argument.
We cover the,
call Kalam cosmological
argument. This is called the teleological
argument. So there's 2 versions of it. The
traditional version of the teleological argument argues for
biological,
complexity.
So,
look at the human eye. Is it by
chance that it's it's incredible, the human brain,
you know, these systems in the body,
you know, the bodies of insects. I mean,
the architect of the Eiffel Tower looked at
the bodies of insects.
The,
the architects of airplanes looked at the wings
of birds.
The the human cell Anthony flew, was a
big atheist at the University of Cambridge.
For 50 years he debated
big time scholars,
theistic scholars. He was a total atheist.
After 50 years, he said, you know what?
I think there's a God.
After 50 years of debating theists he said,
I can't account for the human cell.
I can't account for it. How all of
this information can be in a cell. This
can't be chance, it's not evolution.
This is design.
Right?
I mean the 2 greatest scientists of all
time, according to scientists believed in God.
Newton and Einstein.
Not only did they believe in God, they
were Unitarian.
They're Unitarian
deists,
and Newton had to keep his Unitarian belief,
in the closet as it were. Because at
that time in England there was no church
separation of church and and state, and professing
Unitarian beliefs was seen as kufo or blasphemy,
and the penalty was death.
Later in his writings, in his diary, in
his journal,
we see that he was in fact a
Unitarian Christian.
The enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes,
John Locke, all of them believed in God.
They had issues with aspects of Christianity,
but none of them were atheist.
Okay.
So that's the traditional sort of teleological now
the cutting edge,
what's known as the cutting edge,
teleological
argument, argues for cosmic design
due to fine tuning of the universe. This
is also called the anthropic
principle.
So we know the watchmaker analogy. Right? And
this is attributed to William Paley in 1802.
Right? And actually Ghazali said something similar. It
actually goes back to Cicero, but Europeans usually
get the the credit for everything. Right? Like
the printing press, they give the Gutenberg, but
in China, 100 of years, they had actually
paper and printing press, you know,
Pascal's wager, something said almost identical
by Sayidina Ali. Right? Anyway, they can take
the credit for whatever they want. Okay. So
anyway, you're walking on the beach, you see
a watch, you pick it up, you notice
that it's obviously designed.
Right? So you say, oh, this is just
chance. You know, the atoms
formed itself to make this beautiful
precise
work of art.
It was chance.
Right?
Or if you, you know, you're on the
moon, you know, the dark side of the
moon, and you see this massive piece of
machinery there.
Machinery.
So you can conclude 3 things,
either this machinery has to be there, it's
by necessity,
which scientists do not agree with, the moon
functions without the machinery,
It's not necessary to be there.
Or it's there by chance,
meaning the atoms
sort of just
fell into the right places,
or it's designed.
Now you say okay, it's designed. Then who
designed it? You don't need to have an
explanation
for design to be the best explanation.
You don't have to have an explanation
for the designer, for design to be the
best explanation. It's still the best explanation.
So you look at the Earth for example,
the distance from the sun. If the Earth
was a little bit closer or farther, there's
no life on the planet.
If the Moon was a little bit closer
or farther there's no life on the planet.
The Earth is actually in something scientists called
the Goldilocks zone.
The Goldilocks zone.
It's not too far. It's not too close.
It's just right.
And that's a very, very
thin zone, a life permitting zone around the
sun.
Alright.
Days are 24 hours. If they're longer or
shorter we either die from heat, we burn,
or we'd freeze to death.
The axis, 23.5
degrees. So it would turn a little bit,
there's no life on the planet. The atmosphere
of our planet
swallows up these solar flares that are being
thrown at us from the sun. This if
we didn't have an atmosphere, we'd be dead
in a in a nanosecond
from solar
flares that are that are that's,
protecting our planet from solar flares.
The, planet Jupiter,
because of its gravity, is pulling all of
these asteroids
and comets away from the Earth
and basically being like this huge cosmic vacuum
cleaner
protecting our planet.
Alright.
Protons
are exactly
1836
times larger than neutrons.
If they're 1837
times larger, there's no life on the planet.
If you're
18 1835 times bigger, there's no life on
the planet.
This type of precision.
Right?
The solar system itself is like a watch.
So Newton, Sir Isaac Newton, he noticed that
the planets were on the same plane
and they orbited in the same direction.
And he said this is design.
And now the atheist, he says, look. This
is what the theist does. The theist, you
know, he says that when we don't know
why something's happening,
he fills in that gap of ignorance with
God.
This is called the God of the gaps
argument. This is what theists are are, alleged
to do by atheists. When a theist doesn't
know something, he says, oh, that's just design.
That's God. God of the gaps.
However, we understand how a watch works.
It doesn't negate a designer.
We know what causes a solar eclipse.
We can predict them. We can predict floods
and earthquakes.
This doesn't negate that they're asbaab or they're
means
by which God works
in the world.
Right? There's a movie that just came out
called Exodus, where he tries to,
present,
scientific explanations.
The the Nile turned red because there were
some crocodile attacks.
Okay. But what does that mean? That's that's
what happened, Zahiran. But what does that mean,
Ba'ti'nan?
What does that mean in reality?
And that's where the theist looks to.
The frogs came out because there's blood in
the water. Okay. But these are the 10
plagues of Egypt. Why did Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala wield that to happen? What's the purpose
behind it? Why do we have these destruction
stories in the Quran? The Ad, the Samud,
the people of Noah. They said, oh, that
those are just, you know,
earthquakes
and tsunamis. Yeah, that's what they were, but
why?
Why did that happen?
Our actions affect our physical environments.
This is why we make du'a for rain.
Right? I would say that the atheists are
guilty of the dark of the gaps argument.
The dark of the gaps. So here's what
the atheist says. The atheist,
you know, this is a recent, relatively recent
discovery, that they said, you know,
Jupiter doesn't have enough gravity to keep itself
in its orbit around the sun. It should
be flying off into space somewhere.
What's what's pulling Jupiter towards the sun?
Dark matter.
What's dark matter? I don't We don't know.
But it's dark matter. We're gonna fill in
the gap of that ignorance with a dark
matter.
But what is it? It's the greatest mystery
in all of physics. That's a direct quote
from Lawrence Krauss.
The universe is expanding and getting faster,
accelerating. You would think it would slow down.
Right? You know, the second law of thermodynamics.
It's gonna slow down and reach equilibrium. It's
getting faster.
Why is it faster? Atheists have no idea.
Something is pushing it out.
Verily, we are expanding it.
But what's the answer from the atheist?
Dark energy.
What's dark energy?
We don't know. You're gonna fill in the
gaps of that ignorance with a dark dark
energy.
And they say, oh, you guys are god
of the gaps. We don't that's it's illogical.
Just because we know how something happens doesn't
deny that it has a designer.
Right? If you took a cell phone back
in Marty McFly's time machine,
you know, to 1950,
you look at Bill's and say, wow, this
is magic.
It's magic.
And then you go forward and tell, oh,
we know we know how this works now.
So
just because you know how something works doesn't
negate the idea that it had a designer.
Right?
Okay.
Now almost all scientists conclude that the universe
is fine tuned,
all of them, for the existence of intelligent
life.
Fine tuned is a neutral term. It's not
strictly theological.
How is it fine tuned? You have these
things called constants and quantities.
Constants and quantities, and the 4 fundamental forces
of nature.
They have to fall within an incredibly narrow
range
in order to permit life in the universe.
The 4 fundamental
fundamental forces of nature are gravity, electromagnetism,
weak nuclear force, and strong nuclear force. All
of these found in the point of singularity
at the Big Bang.
So here's the syllogism.
Premise number 1, The fine tuning of the
universe
is due to either physical necessity,
it just has to be like that, and
all atheists by Ijma' of the kufar.
By Ijma' they say that's not the reason
why. It doesn't have to be like that.
Number 2, it's by chance
and almost by Ijma' and they say yes,
that's what it is. It's just chance
or it's design.
Premise number 2. If it's not due to
physical necessity or chance,
then it's due to design. Therefore, it is
due to design.
Specified complexity,
the universe is specified, it is created, it's
tailored
with unimaginable
intelligence and pinpoint exquisite precision.
I'll give you an example. First, a quote
from William Lane Craig. He says there are
50 such constants and quantities
present in the Big Bang that must be
fine tuned in this way, and the ratios
to one another must also be fine tuned
to allow to a life forbidding universe. He
says the numbers become absolutely incomprehensible.
I'll give you an example now.
The number of seconds in the history of
the universe
is 10 to 17th.
10 with 17zeros
after it. The number of seconds in the
history of the universe.
The number of subatomic
particles in the universe, subatomic
particles in the universe is 10 to the
80, according to William Demski.
10 to the 80.
Okay. Atomic weak force which operates in the
nucleus of the atom.
An alteration of the atomic weak force. An
an alteration of one part out of 10
to the 100
would render life unsustainable in the universe.
So imagine, you're given 1 dart
and out there in space,
there's 10 to the 100 targets.
10 to the 100. That's more that's more
than there are seconds
in history, in in the history of the
universe.
That's more than there are subatomic particles in
the universe. You have 10 to the 100,
targets. You're given one dart. So you have
to hit the right dart or there's no
life in the universe.
And you just, Oh,
oh, Masha'Allah.
And this happens over 50 times.
50 times in a row.
Another example, if gravity changed,
one part out of 10 to the 40,
there's no life in the universe. Atheists say
this is just chance. We got lucky. The
constants and quantities fell within the life permitting
range. Let me give you another analogy,
the lottery analogy. Imagine somebody comes up to
you and says, there's this huge cosmic hat
and in this hat there are 10 to
the 40 number of index cards.
10 to the 40, 10 with 40zeros.
Right?
Index cards.
On all of these there's nothing written on
any of these index cards. Nothing. Except 1.
And that's your initials.
We're gonna put them in this big cosmic
at and then we're gonna pull one out
at random.
If we pull out a blank card nothing
will happen.
Nothing happens.
Nothing.
But if we pull out the card with
your initials on it we kill you.
We gonna kill you.
10 to the 40, say okay I'm feeling
I mean it's not gonna happen.
Less than 1% of 1% of 1% of
1% of 1, it's infinitesimally small. It's just
not going to happen. It's basically impossible.
So it's okay. Here we go. Ready?
Your initials. What's the initial thought in your
head?
This is rigged.
Right?
This was designed.
This is rigged. This is a conspiracy.
Right? That's just gravity. There's 50 such constants
and quantities that have to line up with
such exquisite permission, precision to even allow life
to be in the universe.
So we have what's known as a cosmic
landscape,
possible universes.
There are 10 to the 500
possible universes within different values of the constants
and qualities,
quantities, consistent with the laws of nature. The
portion of these universes that can,
permit life is infinitesimally
small. The range is incredibly minuscule. What is
life?
An organism's ability to take in food, process
it, grow and develop and reproduce after its
kind.
Alvin Platinga, he's a professor at University of
Notre Dame. He says, imagine you have these
large dials,
like combination lock dials. He said there's a
million of them. 1,000,000.
And each dial goes up to a1000.
And you have one shot to figure out
the combination.
And if you do we give you a
$1,000,000,000
a $1,000,000,000. That is more likely
than a life permitting universe.
That is more likely
than a life permitting universe.
Conclusion is Allahu mujud.
Allah exists. I
guess we can We'll probably pray whatever you
guys want to do.
Yeah. Yeah. You can So we have blackboard.
We still have that Yeah. I'll I'll mark
it on the third Okay.
That'll work, Joel.
Joel. Hey, I'm I'm not a scientist. This
is sort of something I fell into out
of necessity. My my actual specialty is in
the the new testament.
Yes, sir.
Yeah. I think it's they have morality.
But the theological answer
is that, there is an opinion amongst theologians
that every human being, by virtue of being
a human being, knows the Ma'aruf. The Ma'aruf
means they know the,
they they know the basic
objective moral laws and prohibitions.
So, like, the Noahidek laws, 7 of the
10 Commandments. Everybody knows instinctively
not to kill, not to steal, not to
commit adultery,
to believe in God. Everyone knows that. So
that's just a manifestation of their fitra. There's
still something there. That's one explanation. Another explanation
is that, no, you're born clean. There's a
clean slate.
Right? It's more as'ari,
virtue command theory, theology from our tradition.
But we're socialized.
So these atheists, they don't know it, but
they're actually been socialized with Judeo Christian Islamic
morals and ethics even though they want to
deny that.
So, yes, atheists I know some atheists are
extremely moral people, very charitable people. Right? And
that's great. The problem is when you don't
have a moral anchor,
right, you don't have a higher morality. Then
who determines your morality? If Hitler won the
war and he makes everyone,
you know,
join his cause,
then he becomes the moral anchor on Earth.
Everything becomes relative.
There needs to be someone to stand up
and say this is just simply wrong
because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, my scripture, a
transcendental being that is above us, says it's
wrong or right.
Yeah.
So I would say that
that's an argument that atheists make, and and
I think it's,
from a theistic standpoint, from from an Islamic
standpoint, it's sort of a a shortsighted
way of looking at existence.
We believe that the dunya this is this
is where these things happen in the dunya.
This is not a surprise.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us
that that's the nature of the dunya. Dunya
means the low world. Right? So I think
it's important for us to explain these things
to people that this is a period of
testing, a a period of tribulation, a period
in which Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says.
Right? That this is a place where certainly
we will test you. Certainly.
There's double emphasis in Arabic here,
Very much emphasized.
Certainly, we will test you,
with something from loss,
from hunger and loss of possessions, loss of
life,
oppression, things like that. What we know as
Muslims, and this is how we have to
explain it to people, is that
that the afterlife is better and it's eternal
and that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala I mean
some people just
looking at the world can become very, very
cynical as you know, just looking at what's
going on in the world.
And, some people just from that will say
there must be a day of judgment then.
There has to be a day of these
people are just gonna get away with all
of this type of thing.
Right?
That's just instinctively. They're not might not even
be raised in a religious tradition, but we
know as Muslims that the afterlife is forever.
Right? So what happens here,
it fails or pales in comparison. Doesn't mean
that we don't do anything because the word
Muslim is an active participle.
We're not a, quote, unquote, you know, messianic
tradition where we can't we believe in the
Messiah, obviously. We don't sit back and have
someone come and solve our problems.
A Muslim, you know, not Muslim,
active not passive, is someone who is actively
creating peace on the earth and submitted to
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. So we have work
to do on the planet. Right? But ultimately,
we know
that
there's going to be, you know, what George
Bush tried to call infinite justice
but was changed to some other title. Infinite
justice only happens on Yomul Qiyamah.
Alright. And the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam said
that the most depraved
person in the dunya who was a believer
when he enters Jannah. Imagine the most depraved
believer on earth. He has no arms, no
legs, he's in the street, people are spitting
on him, they're cursing him.
He says when this person enters into Jannah,
he will be asked, did you suffer in
the dunya? He said, I don't remember
because he's in Jannah. And now the maqam
of Jannah
is realized. Maqam of the Yom Al Qiyamah.
In this world a mother will willingly give
her life to save her child. No question
whatsoever.
People will run from their family members cause
they understand the Maqam of the Yomul Qiyamah.
They understand that prophets are on their knees
shaking.
I'm your friend. I am your friend. Ibrahim
alayhis salam.
Khalilullah
is in this state. Well it's our state.
You know, so this is part of this
is part of, you know, Certainly
you're going to hear a lot of white
noise from
people in the book and from,
atheists and from Mushriqim. And I consider the
atheist to actually be Mushriqim because the atheist
say the universe created itself, that's a divine
attribute, or the the universe is pre eternal
in the past, that's a divine attribute, that's
shirk. That's not atheism. You're Mushrikeen.
Right?
So Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us these
things in scripture.
Isa, alayhi salam, says according to the gospel
of Matthew, blessed are you when men revile
you
and persecute you and say all things against
you falsely. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad for
great is your reward in heaven for the
persecuted the prophets that came before you.
Right?
This is what happens in the dunya.
Right?
And we believe, you know, people, you know,
these 1,000,000,
2,000,000 people that are killed by the American
military industrial complex in the Middle East, we
believe inshallah these people are shuhada and they're
in Jannah. That doesn't mean we don't do
any Oh, shuhada, sit back and relax and
enjoy our lattes.
Right? No. We have to speak up. It's
very important.
We have to speak up.
The greatest jihad is a word of truth
in the face of a tyrant.
Right?
So it's important for us to engage, you
know, we don't we don't disengage from the
dunya. This is not our tradition. We don't
go out live in the deserts and whatnot.
You can do that for a weekend,
you know, for Dean intensive as it were
and shock your nuffs out of its complacency,
so it'll find an eartidale balance
from the extreme positions. We don't live that
type of lifestyle. We engage with the world.
Right? We try to
rectify the world. Islah, we try to make
reconciliation in the
world.
And Jannah is forever,
you know.
So, you know, at the end of the
day, people who are killed, people who are
oppressed, people who have, you know, tribulations and
are are sick and dying, they're the lucky
ones when you really think about it. They
were the lucky ones because It's
better and it's perpetual,
you know.
Yes.
Three big questions.
We'll do our best,
I've already forgot your first question.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So the the neo atheists,
you know, they're they're
significantly later than Darwin, but, yeah, I probably
should have included Darwin in the what I
call the original gangsters of atheism.
I think I'll throw him in there now
with with Floyd and Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell,
and,
so we'll add to Charles Darwin as well.
As far as relativism goes,
we believe as Muslims that there are certain
immutables
in Sharia, things that never change
over time,
and they're very few actually,
but they include major
prescription and prohibitions,
that are good for all time until the
Yom Al Qiyamah.
So,
it's important to stay within those,
basic universal ideals.
There's also in our Sharia, mutarayarat,
things that are variable, things that change according
to context,
you know, should when people hear the word
Sharia, they think it's some draconian law code
or penal code that's 1400 years old and,
Muslims are trying to, you know, cut off
hands in the streets and publicly flog people.
And that's one aspect, you know, the the
penal the penal code of Islamic law,
which many modern day scholars actually propose a
moratorium to be,
pronounced over those types of things because the
essence of the law is not being realized.
But there
are immutables. Right? Salabit in our tradition.
And I think the problem with,
aspects of Adil Kitab is that they lost
even their tawabit.
Right? They lost their immutables in tradition, so
everything becomes relative. Also, the way that, you
know,
that science
interacts with with Christianity, for example, I would
say for the most part has been antagonistic
throughout its history.
Whereas we don't have that baggage. It's a
completely different paradigm,
for us.
So even though we are Muslims and we
believe in absolute truths, that doesn't necessarily mean
that we're gonna have the same sort of
reaction
that that Christians had in Christendom, for example,
in Christian Europe, which was a disaster for
all intents and purposes. If you look at
our history,
we have a a history
of
of scientific development
and also,
a tolerance
and compassion
for other religions. I mean, Ahlul Kitab, you
know, the Quran mentions Ahlul Kitab, and Muslims
in the 2nd century came to realize that
there are a lot more religions out there
other than Jew Judaism and Christianity. What do
we do with these Buddhists and these Hindus
and so on and so forth? So through
Ijtihad,
that definition was expanded to include any religion
that
that professes belief in some sort of scripture.
So, no, Buddhists are Ahlid Khitab. Hindus are
Ahlid Khitab. And this is the nature of
Islamic is
that it's rooted in the Quran. It makes
absolute truth claims, but it's it also recognizes
that there are other truths in the world
that deserve respect, especially,
the
the the life of human beings is sacrosanct.
And I think that's that's, extremely important for
contemporary Muslims to realize
that also during the colonial period, you know,
after the Ottomans,
were dismantled, you have France and and England
and America and Italy
carving up West Africa or North Africa and
bringing their
literalist interpretation of scripture to those peoples,
and also nationalism.
So now there's one way of reading the
scripture, my way or the highway. Where does
that come from? That's not in our tradition.
The question was never, is there a
metaphorical reading of the Quran? The question was
always, how many levels of meta metaphorical reading
are there in the Quran. Obviously, there's a
literal reading. No one denies
it. No one has denied it.
That there's an exoteric
aspect and an esoteric aspect. But we what
we took from
the
the colonialists
in the Middle East and in North Africa
is one way of reading the text,
and that's a violent way because it's my
way or the highway.
Right? That's not in our tradition. That's something
we took from from others. Anyway,
hopefully that answers your question a little bit.
The third question was about
Jews for Jews Jews for Jesus. Yeah. I
saw this guy at UC Berkeley years ago.
He's wearing a shirt that said Yeshua, right,
which is the name of in Aramaic,
and he was passing this thing out. And,
he gave me this thing, and I said,
the end of the world is,
know, something it says something like, I don't
know, May something,
2010. This was years ago. And I said,
what if it doesn't happen?
And, he was from Jews for Jesus. I
said, he said, I guarantee you it's going
to happen. I guarantee it. I guarantee it.
So, like, May 22nd, you know, the day
after I come up to him. So, you
know, I say, it didn't happen.
Yes. I forgot the verse of that day
knoweth no man.
I forgot it.
Satan tricked me.
Yeah, it's,
you know, I I always went into these
types of people,
You know,
you know, this this lady one time ambushed
me in a coffee shop, and she said
she just went on this diatribe about Palestine
and
so on and so forth. So I asked
her and, you know, she was a Christian.
I said, is Jesus God? He said, yeah.
She said, yeah, Jesus is God. I said,
really? She said, yeah. I said, Jesus is
the God of the Old Testament? She said,
Yes.
Jesus is the God who commanded Moses and
Joshua and the prophets? She said, Yes.
I said, when is it morally justifiable
for Jesus to kill children?
And she went,
what?
So in the Old Testament, the Lord commands
Moses to go into 31 city states and
utterly decimate the entire population. Men, women, and
children.
Animals burn down the city, loot the city.
And she said, oh, that was, that was
the Old Testament.
Right? And you you can't have your cake,
you'd eat it too. There's either 2 gods,
and Jesus is another god, and that's that's
another god. That was a Marcionite position, an
early Christian position that was quite popular in
Rome,
my by theistic position.
But no, she's not a Marcionite.
So I said, look, either he's a different
God or, you know, God changed his mind,
he has multiple personalities,
you know, things like that and that leads
to a lot of different types of theological
issues.
And and then she said, well, what about
ISIS? And I said, look, I condemn ISIS.
Right? A lot of these Israeli officers in
Palestine,
they take these stories literally in the old
testament. They take them literally. There's there's actually
a large community. Most academics,
there are even orthodox Jews, they don't take
those stories literally.
They said they're hyperbole, they're exaggerated,
they were meant to scare the enemies of
Israel. They're not real. But there are some
who believe that they're actually literally history.
So a lot of them are officers of
the Israeli army, and they quote these verses
to justify
genocide of indigenous Palestinian people.
So I said, do you believe? Do you
do you agree what Israel is doing? She
said, yes. And I said, then you are
a terrorist
because
I do not agree with ISIS, but you
agree with Israel's policy.
When is it morally justifiable to kill women
and children?
No answer.
You know,
I mean, it's Genesis 15 says that
that land between the two rivers and the
Israeli flag has two blue lines. Right? And
that's the Nile and the Euphrates.
So, you know, Gaza is nothing. They want
half of Egypt.
They want all of Iraq.
Right? That's Greater Israel. That's Haaretz Israel. That's
called the land of Israel, Greater Israel.
Right? That's what they're trying to go for.
Right? At least the fundamentalist amongst them, the
hardcore Zionist,
That's considered major, greater Israel.
In Genesis 15 it says, God says, Abraham,
I'll give that land to your seed.
Right?
And you know if you look at that
land start at the Nile River and just
go north until you get to the Euphrates.
Every town you pass by
they're making the Adan and saying Muhammad.
That's the seed of Abraham. The covenant was
fulfilled.
That's who it was.
So And most and this and
we have to also draw a distinction that's
very very important.
The majority of Jews
are non Zionists.
The
majority of Zionists are evangelical Christians. The majority
of them are evangelical Christians.
Majority of Orthodox Jews are completely against the
state of Israel,
completely against it. If you go to, like,
stand outside the
Israeli embassy in San Francisco, half of the
crowd are orthodox Jews.
They they put on these huge conferences that
are never on TV
condemning Israel because they say, look, we're
a wandering people and only the Messiah can
come back
and gather the dispersed from diaspora and set
up the kingdom with justice. Right?
Cannot be done through political means. That's their
akida. That's their belief. That's their interpretation. That's
the majority opinion
amongst the Jews.
You know?
But oftentimes what happens is that the the
the fringe elements are the ones that are
prevalent because they make for good TV ratings,
and that's what we always hear about.
You know, that's what we're gonna hear about.
We don't we don't hear about, you know,
the orthodox
position, the majority position, because, you know, it's
just boring. Who cares?
What are these
nut jobs doing out here on the fringe?
You know? That's why, you know, I was
at a church one time, and, it was
a Unitarian
Universalist Church. Something okay. They don't believe in
trinity, so it's gonna be kind of easy.
It was the hardest,
most difficult
battering I've ever taken.
One of them,
she said
she said, you know, older Caucasian lady, maybe
in her like eighties, she stood up and
she said, what's up with Johar Zenaev?
So, wow. I said, how did you learn
that name?
We hear it all the time.
Joe Harzan, that's a difficult name, isn't it?
She said, yeah. It is quite difficult. So
how do you know about the
I don't know.
I said, wow.
You're probably hearing it all the time. She
said, yeah. It's on a 24 hour news
cycle.
Right?
I said, have you heard of Wade Michael
Page?
Much easier name.
Wade Michael Page.
Just call him Wade Page. Have you heard
never heard of him. Really? This is a
man who's in the Aryan Nations,
former marine,
wearing fatigues,
goes into
a Gurdwara temple,
a Sikh temple in Wisconsin,
blows 12 people away,
right,
and thinking they were Muslim.
No one's heard of them.
Have you heard of Eric Rudolph? Never heard
of him. You never you didn't hear about
the man who blew up a bomb at
the 96 Atlanta games?
You never heard of him?
Never heard of him. Eric Rudolph, Christian terrorist.
Right?
Zionist.
Blew up Centennial Park in 1996.
Blows up gay nightclubs.
Blows up abortion clinics killing doctors and nurses.
No one's heard of them.
Right? Why?
Why don't we hear about these people? Somebody's
being miseducated.
Right? So have you heard of the huitari
movement?
Huitari?
What is that? You never heard of the
huitaris?
You heard of Al Qaeda? Oh, yeah. Al
Qaeda. Al
Qaeda.
Of course.
Al Qaeda. Hutaris,
a group of militant Christians
in the Midwest
that
tried to take over the United States government.
They have training camps.
According to FBI there are dozens of such
Christian groups in Texas alone. Dozens
terrorist groups trying to take over the country.
Have you heard of any of them?
The army of the army of the Lord,
the Lord's arm, the the the lambs of
God,
the Ku Klux Klan.
1945,
not that long. People remember this. 50,000
Klansmen marched on Washington.
They had membership of 4,000,000 people in 1945.
That's more than American Jews. These people just
disintegrate? What happened to them? They're gone? No.
They are still around.
They integrated
into the police force, into the Republican party.
They're still around.
They don't just disintegrate.
Democratic party? Yeah.
They don't fall off the face of the
earth.
Right? But people, you know, think about these
things. Right? They Don't even hear about these
things.
It's very strange.
Anyway,
that was my spiel to use a Yiddish
word.
You
guys heard of Robert Bales? That's the last
one I mentioned. Robert Bales.
You ever heard of him? Very Bob Bales.
Easy,
Bobby Bales.
Bobby Bales goes into,
Kandahar, Afghanistan
and
he kills 16 people, 9 of them are
children, burning them,
Burning them.
He's an American military man.
Who's heard of him? Who cares? No one's
heard of him.
And ISIS burns man one man alive
and obviously we condemn it.
And
The prophet
said, is not becoming of anyone to punish
or torture with fire except the Lord of
fire, except Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. We condemn
it completely.
But who's heard of Bobby Bales?
You know what happened in 1963
at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham,
Alabama?
Does anyone remember that?
Bombingham, that's what he used to call it.
So we don't study history. We start pointing
the fingers at people. Why is this group
in Iraq?
Why are they there?
You have 24 years of American aggression and
invasion, depleted uranium, 100 of 1,000 of children
are dying for 24 years.
You have sanctions put on that country.
Invasion of under false pretense. What do you
expect to happen? People are gonna lay down
and die for you?
What do you expect?
Obviously, we can we condemn ISIS. Obviously.
But why is it happening? What's going on?
You know?
Anyway
I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Yeah. That's
that's my that's I think that's right on.
I mean
because right now, it's it's
yeah. There's a hadith of the prophet
where he says there's gonna be a time
where there's so much confusion in the world.
The best thing you can do is take
some of your sheeps and goats and just
go live up in the mountains and just
get away from all of that type of
thing.
You know?
And I think those are those are times
that are that are rapidly approaching upon us.
Now we need to safeguard our deans
because it's very, very,
you know, people go surfing online and things
like that. They wanna know what's going on.
No one really knows what's going on, and
you can sit there for hours and hours
and hours watch video YouTube after YouTube after
YouTube and just be obsessed and be depressed
and become cynical.
But the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam, he said,
if you're planting a seed and the hour
comes upon you, the day of judgment,
finish planting your seed.
You're never gonna see that seed grow, right?
Because the hour put finish planting, you know,
we have to keep working. Just keep the
point is to keep moving.
Right? And if need be, just turn all
these things off.
My advice is and I have to, you
know, I have to do research and things
like that sometimes
just to be able to be able to,
you know, answer some of these claims that
are being made. But, you know, my best
moments are just me and my
subha or my my Quran memorizing, just reading
a nice text, you know,
turning off gadgets and things like that. You
can become obsessed with it, and it can
really affect the Deen. And there's a lot
of there's a lot of apostasy happening right
now. These people are trying to figure these
things out. They keep digging and digging and
digging. Most of the information on the Internet
is probably wrong anyway or biased. So Muslims
are falling into this
quagmire of confusion. So then they go to
the their parents who are immigrants to the
country. Dad, is there really a god? Ask
Allah. Go make boo boo.
How dare you ask this question?
Yeah, but I wanna know. Ask ask Allah.
Go pray. Ask Allah to give you the
answer. And that's not gonna work for them
because their crisis is not of orthopraxis, it's
of orthodoxy. What Why do I believe this?
So they they go to a university professor
who's got a PhD in philosophy, but he's
a Muslim anti Muslim premises.
Said mister professor.
Yes? What do you think about Islam? Oh,
come to my office hour. And Khalas, he
walks out kafir, he's Murtad walking out of
his office.
And then I know a lot of Muslim
youth are they're they're they're feigning in front
of their parents. They come to Jummah. They
read their Musaf. They're atheist.
They don't even believe in it. I'm just,
you know, I'm going through the motions with
my dad.
You know, I can't wait to move out
so I can, you know, be my own
man and
it's what's happening. You know? So, you know,
you could take that literally, go up, you
know, whatever.
You know, or you can say, you know
what, I'm going to detach myself from all
this type of fitna,
protect my flock, my
my limbs, my family members,
you know, my faculties, just protect it, completely
cut it off from all of that madness
and fit none confusion, and just
do the best I can with the people
around me, inshallah. And don't underestimate,
you know, any type of,
you know, educational opportunity even if it's one
person.
You know,
every good idea started with 1 person. Right?
You never know who you're gonna talk to,
who you're going to influence.
So
Yes, sir.
So
my question is, like, 2 parts.
So it sounds like from what you're saying,
like, the immorality of atheism
is sort of forced
or, like, conditioned, or it's its own, like,
belief system. Yeah. So in order to believe
it, you have to be conditioned to believe
it.
So the first part of the question is
that,
from what you know from the atheist perspective,
where does that
belief system come from that you're conditioned to
believe that immorality? Where does that come from?
And then so the second part is that
if, for example, you mentioned Crowley, you established.
Right? So if you have to be conditioned
to believe this or adopt this ideology, do
as you will, then what did you believe
prior to that? Something that you would probably
that was inherent.
So where did that come from? So then
what both sides of the of the spectrum
from any of your perspective, where do they
come
from? Where does the immorality come from? And
then where does the morality come from that
you're inherently born? Yeah. That's a good question.
Because definitely, atheists, they take moral stances
and most atheists will say that they believe
in objective morality.
But it comes from their understanding of the
world
and their experiences,
but it's totally relative, and that's the problem
with it. And most most of the time,
I think they get it right.
You know? You know, you don't see atheists
on the street,
you know,
killing each other and stealing things and things
like that. I mean, they they follow the
laws of the country that they live in,
and they're generally good people.
So that's I think that's also there's some
conditioning that goes there as far as the
society goes,
and that's that's been my question is where
do they get their morality from? That's always
been my question.
Right? And the atheists will say, well, look,
this is what happened. You know, we were
we were apes back in the day and
the apes that kill each other, they didn't
survive and the apes that sort of
learn to work with each other.
So they learned it through that type of
conditioning.
Right?
And that's sort of that's sort of their
answer.
But I don't I mean, your your question
is a question that that I've been asking
for years.
You
know?
You know? So that's a that's a good
question.
I don't know.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, judgment is the prerogative of Allah
Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. So I can't comment on
that. What I can say is that the
prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam, he according to Ibn
Taymiyyah,
he prophesies the neo Khawarij.
Right? People who are going to come from
time to time with that same type of
mentality
that believe that they're that they have the
truth and that everyone else is on falsehood,
and they make takfir of anybody, and they
don't discriminate in their takfir. They make takfir
of Ali All the way up to Ali
ibn Abi Talib. They don't whoever doesn't agree
with me, they're a kafir. The prophet sallallahu
alaihi wasallam, he described them, and he said
that, you know, they they they
pass through the religion
like an arrow passes through its target, meaning
they deviate very quickly.
And then he said that they are the
worst of creation.
He said they recite the Quran, but it
doesn't go below their throat.
They make supplication. It doesn't rise above their
head. Right after he mentioned that they recite
the Quran, he said they're
They're the worst of creation.
So the early months, they're the worst of
I thought they're Muslim. How can they be
the worst of creation? So the might say,
they're the worst of creation because not only
do they hinder people away from the path
of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala,
but they defame the name of the Prophet
Sallallahu Wa Ta'ala.
They're guilty of defamation of character against the
Prophet Sallallahu Wa Ta'ala.
Right?
So judgment is for Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
I mean, according to orthodox Islam
normative,
This is not, you know, as one of
my teachers said, this is not our California
creed. You know, Imam Ghazali says that if
someone,
was given a distorted form of Islam,
They were told their whole lives. Muslims are
crazy. They're terrorists. They they're they're abusive.
They worship the moon god, whatever they're being
told,
and, they die, that person is
safe from the fire that Allah
will manifest divine amnesty for that person on
the yomul kayama
because a requisite of taqleef
taqleef means responsibility
or burden to become Muslim is that you
were reached by a sound prophetic summons.
A prophetic summons that was sound.
So, obviously, there's been a lot of good
people in the world that weren't Muslim and
this is something to think about.
You go around the world to these ancient
Christian monasteries,
Trinitarian
monasteries. They have open air tombs, open air.
There's a
monk, he's out in the open. He's not
decomposing.
Why?
I thought he was a catheter.
He believes in the trinity. What happened? Something
to think about,
you know. This is the form of Christianity
this man was reached with, Trinitarian Christianity.
And he was
a Mooklis in that tradition and he loved
Isa alaihi salaam. And Allah Allahu alam. We're
not ones to judge.
Right? So it's very difficult for me to
know what happens at this point.
I don't know. I can only tell you
what I've seen in my experiences
and what the Quran tells us. A will
go
to a The question is what is a
What is a So any non Muslim is
a kafir, is black and white. I mean
there's an opinion like that
but the minor majority
opinion is a kafir is someone that Allah
describes in Al Baqarah.
Do not clothe truth with falsehood, nor conceal
the truth while you have knowledge of the
truth.
So who can we actually say is a
kafar?
Who can we actually say? Abu Lahab, Abu
Jahal,
Sir'aun, Haman, Kharun, a handful of people, everybody
else Allahu'ala.
I'm not Allah
and for me to judge people you're gonna
go to *, that's shirk because I'm putting
myself in a position as it were of
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala
and I've committed shirk
if I did that.
So
and that's something, you know, we shouldn't give
up on people either. I mean, I I
was in a masjid one time and it
was a halakos. A Christian brother was there.
The Christian brother was asking really tough questions,
but he was being respectful.
Uncle walks into the masjid.
He listens for 2 minutes, and he goes,
rather, you waste your time with these.
Allah has sealed their heart, they are blind,
they are deaf, they are stupid.
Waste your time on kafar. I said you
gave him 2 minutes of your time. The
prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam gave 20 years
Abu Sufyan, a man who's trying to kill
him.
And he didn't give up on him and
eventually became Muslim.
And that's the best dai.
The best dai cannot convert a man in
20 years, but you come into the masjid
2 minutes and try to convert and he
doesn't, he's kathir.
The book of treasury? It's called the sacred
treasury. Sacred treasury. Oh, I haven't heard of
it.
Interesting.
Yeah. You know, I book recommend a book,
When When Atheism Becomes Religion by Chris Hedges.
Really good book. You should get that book.
Awesome book. Chris Hedges. When Atheism Becomes Religion.
Also God and the New Atheism by John
Hart.
Excellent book.
Yes.
Yeah. So agnostic is more humbler. In agnostic,
you know, a is the the alpha privative,
which means to negate is the negating
alpha.
So in other words, an agnostic says, I
don't know.
I don't I'm open to be persuaded.
Right? So that's a better position than an
atheist who said, no. There's no God.
And, Halas, you can't. That's
you can't persuade me. Right?
Although a lot of atheists are really agnostic
and they say, well, I don't know if
there's there's no God, but I'm open to
a conversation.
But the antitheists are these people we're dealing
with,
not just Yani,
oppose religion completely and believe that it's just
a poison that needs to be eradicated from
the earth.
So,
yeah, an agnostic literally means someone who doesn't
know,
And we're all to a certain degree agnostic.
All of us, even if we're believers. Obviously,
we have faith convictions, but to a certain
degree,
we all obviously, we don't we don't know
certain things.
And the prophet said
that
when we are resurrected in the Yom Kiyama,
we're going to see things much more clearly
and think that this was a dream.
Right? Just like just like when we're dreaming,
we're thinking. And I I do this sometimes
when I'm dreaming. I'm thinking, is this a
dream? No.
Right?
Inside the dream, but it is.
Right?