Why Should I Believe in God Session 2

Why Should I Believe in God? - Session 2

By Nouman Ali Khan

Introduction and Opening

As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying that the mic system here is really shoddy, so the more you talk, the harder it becomes for me to hear myself even. So, try to, inshallah.

I ask that in particular, usually I have very good attention span and I can talk over voices, given that I have lots of children and lots of students. So I'm used to that, but this subject matter requires just an extra deal of concentration and organization of thought, so I'm requesting that you... Thank you so much. I can't stand Gatorade.

All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds, and peace and blessings upon the master of the prophets and messengers, and upon his family and companions, all of them.

I'll try to keep my talk to about 25 minutes or so, so if it's getting to that time, just raise your hand so I know that I've got to stop. Basically, I was asked to talk a little bit about atheism and theism and the proof of God's existence and why should I believe in God anyway, all of which are very legitimate questions and very deep questions.

Humorous Perspectives on Faith

None of these questions can be addressed in a one-liner. My wife has a one-liner about it. I'll share that with you first. She says, God exists whether you like it or not, and if you don't believe it, well, fine, He'll get you anyway. So, that could have been my talk.

The Bedouin Arab's Simple Logic

And after my wife, I'll start with something that the ancient Bedouin Arabs used to say. Like, sometimes there would be people from other civilizations, like the Persians or the Romans, they would do trade. And before Islam, they would do trade sometimes or pass through Arabia, and they'd see these Arabs, even though they had shirk, they still believed in a God. They still believed in one supreme being.

So, somebody asked the Bedouin Arab, how do you know God exists? How did you come to faith? How did faith come to you? And you know, these Arabs, they spent most of their time in the desert. So, he said something really interesting. He pointed at his camel's droppings. His camel's, you know, duty. He pointed at it, he goes, you know, because of that, I know my camel exists. That's all he said.

That's all he said. And what did he mean by that? He meant there are, you know, when I see that in the desert, when you see something, it's a sign of something else. When you see a path or footprints, you

know somebody walked by here. When you see a fire that's been put out, but there's burnt wood there and ashes there, you know some people were here camping. And they left. There are traces here.

He looks at all of creation as traces of God. Just like that small feces in front of him is a trace of his camel. That his camel's there. So, in his mind, there's no doubt. That's as straightforward, as linear as his thinking is. It's as clear as day to him. That's not even a question.

The Quran's Approach to God's Existence

Now I want to come to actually the Quran's reasoning. These are very simple way of looking at things. But I want to see if the Quran deals with this subject. And you should know that explicitly, the Quran does not ask the question or answer the question, does God exist? That is not a question in the Quran. That question doesn't exist.

The Quran is Allah speaking Himself. Is Allah speaking Himself. And He's in conversation with His creations, with you and me. He's in this direct conversation with us. The only questions He asks is, do you really believe it's me talking? Do you really believe that these words are my own? Because you're not hearing Allah's voice. You're hearing the voice of Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم.

And these words are being given to him. So that's the question the Quran asks, is this God's word or not? He asks another question related to God. Are there other gods that you should be worshipping besides myself? He asks another question. He says, you think you're gonna worship yourself and not me? You think you're gonna thank someone else other than myself? These are the kinds of questions the Quran asks. It never asks the question, does God exist or not?

Why the Quran Doesn't Ask "Does God Exist?"

But then another question rises. Out of all of these questions, another question is born. How come the Quran never asks that question? How come the Quran never deals with the question, does God even exist or not? Why not? Why not deal with this question head on? This is one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy in human history across civilizations. So why not, if this book is for guidance for all of humanity, why not deal with this problem head on? And we find the answer to that in the Quran also.

Why is it that that's not even a question? Why is it that that's not even a discussion as far as the Quran is concerned? And in order to understand that, we have to understand something about ourselves.

The Prophetic Teaching on Self-Knowledge

First I'll tell you a hadith of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم. He says:

"Whoever knew himself, really knew himself or herself, they truly know their master."

If you really know who you are, then you know who your master is. Now that seems a little ambiguous at first, so we have to explore that statement through the Quran so we understand what it is that the Prophet is telling us صلى الله عليه وسلم. How do you get to know Allah? The clue he gave is you have to get to know who first. Who do you have to get to know before you get to know Allah? You have to get to know yourself. If you truly know who you are, yourself, then you'll get to know who Allah is.

Understanding Our True Nature

That's a very strange thing because all of you would probably answer, I already know myself. My name is so and so, I have a weight problem, I have weak eyesight, I'm this old, I flunked out of these many classes, I know a lot about myself. What do you mean I don't know myself?

Well actually there's a part of yourself that you know. A part of yourself that you know. But there's another part of yourself that you may not really know that well. This is a part of you that Allah created before you came on this earth. There's a part of you that Allah created before you came out of your mother. It was already in existence. And this part of you, the Quran calls it the ruh. Your ruh.

I'm not gonna translate it as your spirit or your soul or anything else, or your personality. I won't give it any of these modern terms. We'll just call it what again? Ruh.

The Mystery of the Ruh

And the reason you don't know a lot about it is because this ruh itself, most of what it is, is a mystery to us. This is something Allah himself tells us. He says:

"And they ask you, [O Muhammad], about the ruh. Say, "The ruh is of the affair of my Lord. And mankind have not been given of knowledge except a little."

They ask you about the ruh. Every one of us has a ruh inside us. And Allah says, they ask you about that ruh they have inside of them. Tell them that this ruh is from a special command of my master, and you have very little, you haven't been given knowledge except very, very little.

You haven't been given knowledge, not much knowledge, except very, very little of what this ruh actually is, what its function is, what its benefits are. So Allah has told us a few things, and I want to bring your attention to those few things. The purpose of me bringing attention to those things is that you and I get to know who He is, first of all, who we ourselves are. And once we get to know who we are, by means of that, we will get to know who Allah is, who Allah is.

The Covenant Before Birth

So the Quran's argument begins with this. If you want to talk about the theistic argument, or the argument about the belief in God, it begins from this point. Now the thing about this ruh that we learn in the Quran is that it was in Allah's company, that it got to meet Allah, it spoke with Allah, it had a conversation with Allah, and in this conversation, it spoke and Allah spoke, and both sides have been recorded in the Quran.

Allah says to all of the ruh, there was a huge gathering of all the arwah, all the ruhs all together, and Allah asked them a simple question. Now at this point, the ruh doesn't have a question, do you exist or not? It doesn't have a question for God, whether He exists or not. Well, why doesn't it have that question? It's talking to Him. How do you talk to someone and say, are you really here? Seriously, do you exist? I'm not sure if you're there or not, you know. That would be insanity. That would be a kind of insanity that you're talking to someone and you don't believe they're there, right?

So now it's in conversation with Allah, and Allah asks a very direct question. Allah didn't ask the question, do I exist? He didn't ask that question because that's not a relevant question. He said, am I your master or not?

"Am I not your Lord?"

Am I not your master? Do I not own you? Are you not my property? He asked that question.

The Universal Response

And all of the ruh, the ruh of the believer, the ruh of the disbeliever, the ruh of the Christian, the ruh of the Jew, the ruh of the kafir, the ruh of the Hindu, the atheist, the agnostic, the pantheist, all of them together, all of them together had one answer. And the answer was:

"Yes, we have testified."

"Of course, we bear witness. We testify."

Now we didn't just testify that He exists because that's not what He was asking to testify to. He asked us to testify to something else. And what is that something else? What was the question? Who remembers? Call it out.

This hall has a lot of echoes so you gotta scream at the top of your lungs when you answer. What's the question He asked? Am I your master or not? In other words, it's not just when atheists talk about God, they talk about some entity that exists that has no relationship with you. But someone who owns you has a direct relationship with you.

The Master-Slave Relationship

So He talked about a relationship. Do you and I not have a relationship? And what is that relationship? That I am the master and you are the slave. That is the question He asked. That's the question that He asked us. And we all gave that answer. So now we know that He is master and we are slave.

This ruh was inside of our bodies even when we were inside the body of our mothers. We were inside our mothers and Islam teaches us, the Prophet teaches us that the angel plucks a ruh, he takes a ruh and he delivers it inside the belly of your mother while you are still inside the fetus. You're just a fetus and it blows that ruh into you a hundred and twenty days until your mother's pregnancy with you.

And so now even before you're born you believe that you are a slave of Allah. Your ruh does. Your mind, your brain hasn't developed yet.

The Development of Physical and Spiritual Awareness

When a child is born, their vision is blurry. You know, they don't have muscular motion control. They don't know what their eyes and hands are doing. Babies, you sometimes have to put mittens on them because they claw their own face. They don't know. They don't have control over those things.

This part of their intellect is developing. It's gonna develop over time. Eventually they'll have enough control in their limbs and enough balance that they can walk and slowly they'll start making words and slowly they'll start using the diaper. Right? They'll develop. And eventually they'll evolve. But this ruh, this ruh, it was always there. It was always there. And you will have to grow to a certain level before you can understand that there's this other thing inside you called the ruh.

Understanding Your True Self

Let me throw this, you know, it's gonna sound a little philosophical but let me throw this at you another way, okay? If I ask you, and I've done this experiment with school kids, I don't know how well this works with you guys but let's try.

If I ask you, where are you? Which seems like a silly question. I say, where are you? You point to yourself. You say, here I am. I'm right here. And I say, no, you're pointing at your chest. Where are you? And then you say, me, right here. Oh, this is your body. Where are you? Where's you?

This physical being of yours is gonna get old and it's gonna die. But you will still live. This physical body will rot. But you is something else. What is that you? That is your ruh. That is the actual who you are. That is what Allah put inside you. And that part of you knows Allah already. It knows Allah already.

The Authority of the Master

Now, what did we say is the relationship between us and the master?

Oh, I already gave it away. Master and what? What are we? Slaves. And in that relationship, who's got the authority? The master does.

Now, I think many of you have employers. You have bosses. Many of you have teachers that have authority over you. The teachers that have authority over you. Your parents have authority over you in some respect. But none of them are masters. But if you talk about a parent having control over a child or a boss having control over a child or over an employee or a teacher over a student, you can't compare that much, that control to the control of a master over a slave. A master has absolute control over the slave.

A master can say anything he wants and the slave has to do it. Like a boss can't tell you anything he wants. He can't. You can sue him. You know, he can't tell you. And if your job is at 5 o'clock, it ends, your boss can't tell you, no, you have to stay until midnight. You say, no, no I don't. I'm from the union. You know. Talk to the local chapter. You don't have to listen to them after a certain point. But a master, when do you have to listen to them? All the time.

Our Disobedience and Allah's Mercy

Now, we understand that we have a master from the very beginning. And we've been disobeying that master from the very beginning. He has absolute authority over us and we've spent the bulk of our life disregarding his authority. Disregarding completely his authority. And then at the end of all that disregard, he says, listen, all you need to do is be grateful to me. Be grateful to me and ask me to forgive you for all this disregard. I'll let it all go.

The Quran begins, Fatiha begins with what phrase? After Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim. What does it begin with?

"[All] praise is [due] to Allah"

Now you tell me, when we think of Alhamdulillah, we think of the things Allah has given us, right? Allah has given us many things and we thank Him for it. But from the point of view of our ruh, the first and foremost things we're thanking Allah for is that Allah is our master, which He tells us in Fatiha, He reminds us again, Alhamdulillah, He what?

"Lord of all worlds"

Master, again. He's our master, we're the slave, we've been disobeying Him, but He didn't annihilate us.

Allah's Patience with His Creation

A farmer owns a cow and he milks the cow and it stops milking, he says, this cow is no good for me. I'm gonna slaughter it, get rid of it. You do worse with your phone when it stops working. You do things to your laptop out of anger. When it crashes, it gives you the blue screen of Malakul Mawd. Right? So, you have the things you own, don't do what you want them to do, you have your way with them.

But Allah has not done His way with you. He lets you eat, He lets you sleep, He gives you more, He keeps letting you go. And so for that reason, we say, Alhamdulillah.

And so Allah asked the question, you're gonna thank someone else? After everything I've given you, and I keep giving you, you're gonna thank someone else? Should it even be a question whether I exist or not? That's not even a question in the Quran. You understand why? Because that part of us inside, that part of us exists inside of ourselves.

The Atheistic Challenge

Now, the philosophical argument comes from the atheist or the agnostic. The argument comes, well, how do you prove a soul exists? We tried to do radioactive scanners on the sci-fi channel when a person is about to die to see if there would be any seismic activity. You've seen those sci-fi shows? They try to see if the soul is leaving the body, and then the thing goes, and they say, ah, his ghost is leaving, or it's back again, or whatever, right? It's just the microwave's on, but that's the soul to them, right?

So, you know, they're trying to find some empirical proof of the existence of God. Also, the most common form of atheism, though it has tons of different forms, the most common form of atheism you've probably come across or you've heard about from your friends and peers, is the atheism that basically says, modern science, modern science, has reached a point of maturity and knowledge, and we've explored the universe far and wide. There's no God.

It's all science. It's all science. It's all scientifically plausible, provable. You don't need God to show the existence of the universe. We can all show it through laws and principles of science.

The Limitation of Science

There's only one fundamental problem with that argument. Science does not explain why. It only explains what. It does not explain why. It only explains what. It's the study of what happens when I let this bottle go. It's a study of what happens. It's a study of phenomena that already exist. And it's a study of the seen world. It's a study of the seen world.

So it's a study of the droppings. It's a study of the remains on the campfire. And it cannot go, and it cannot find the camp that already left. This creation of Allah is in the seen world. You can study it and study it and study it. But if you've lost your sense of gratitude that was inside you, alhamdulillah where

Quran began, if you've lost that inside you, you could study science till your death day and you will not find God.

Scientists Who Believed in God

And interestingly enough, people who keep their ruh alive, people who keep their decency alive, even among non-Muslims, you might be surprised to find this out. And I'm hoping to convince a friend of mine who's in North Carolina, Suleiman Sheikh, to come over here. This is one of the last things I'll share with you.

He's got a couple of master's degrees, one in the philosophy of science, one in, he did a thesis on Newton from Duke. On Newton. And that was, the question was whether Newton believed in God or not. Whether he was a muwahid. Moreover, did he believe in tawheed or not.

Did you know that Newton, father of modern physics, right, he wrote papers on the existence of God. And he wrote papers against the trinity. And he wrote papers about why it doesn't make any sense that God would have a son. He wrote papers, literally, it's almost like he wrote a tafsir of surat al-ikhlas. That's what it feels like when you're reading it. And these are the pioneers of modern science. And there's not one or two. There's multiples of them.

That actually saw science as a means of confirming God's existence, not denying it. And these are the pioneers of modern science from the western world. I'm not talking about Muslim scientists. I'm not talking about Muslim scientists.

The False Dichotomy Between Science and Faith

But somehow there's this delusion, there's this gap being made. As though when you study more science, you're supposed to now believe in science instead of believing in God. It's like they're one or the other.

The Quran's argument is the exact opposite that Abdul Rahman was making reference to. The Quran challenges us to study science. It wants us to study science. Because the more we study science, the more we appreciate creation. And the more you appreciate creation, if there's any good left inside you, you will be grateful. And who will you be grateful to? Not the creation, but its creator. But its creator.

The physician will be the most grateful to Allah because he's seen a heart beating when he does surgery. And he's seen this design, this incredible machine. He's seen it at work, up close and personal. And he says, mine's still beating inside mine. Alhamdulillah. He's seen those things. He's seen them up close and personal.

The TV Show House Example

I know I'm way beyond my time, but I'll make one quick reference and I'll close my talk. A lot of young people here, so I'll make reference to the show. Probably some of you have seen it. I've seen one or two episodes because I was curious, somebody told me about it. The TV show House.

You can raise your hand, it's okay. I'll accept your istighfar. I'll make dua for you. Right? Basically the idea of the show is that you have this super intelligent physician who crazy cases come to him. Nobody can figure out what's wrong with the patient. And he's this super crazy genius doctor who solves this case by the end of the episode. That's usually how the episodes work, right?

But at the same time, this genius doctor happens to be what? If anybody knows about the show. As far as his beliefs are concerned, what does he happen to be? He happens to be an atheist. So the idea is, well, he's so intelligent, and if believing in God was an intelligent idea, well, the first kind of person that would have believed is a person like him.

Deductive vs. Abductive Reasoning

Though this is not a philosophy class, at least I want you to walk away with two terms. Deductive reasoning and abductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning and abductive reasoning.

You know, when a patient comes to him, he throws a bunch of diseases on the board. This could be wrong with him, this could be wrong with him, this could be wrong, this could be wrong, this could be wrong. And he's just making guesses at this point. And as soon as he throws those possibilities on the board, he gives each one of them a shot as though it's the truth. He gives it a try. He gives it a try.

And then the patient gets worse, and he goes, okay, clearly it's not the first one. We gotta move to the second one. Then they try the second one, that's not working, they cross that out, they move to the third one. You see this process? They look at a possibility, they test that possibility, they experience that possibility, and at the end when it doesn't work, they move on. But they try it first.

The Double Standard in Faith

He never does that with believing in God. That process, that works for him when he deals with his patients. He doesn't use that process when it comes to faith. He doesn't say, okay, let me throw out the possibility that there is a God, that there is a revelation. Let me exhaust my research into this revelation, into this God. So let's see if I can actually clearly come to a proof that he doesn't exist.

And by the way, another interesting thing about his philosophy is that he will not rule out a disease until it is absolutely clear that that's not the problem. Nobody believes that that's the disease. He's the only one with blind faith that says, I know that's the disease he's got. He has blind faith in a disease he can't prove. He's got a gut feeling. He's got a gut feeling. His ruh is telling him it's the disease. Right? But he doesn't do that.

The Quran's Approach: Abductive Reasoning

So that's abductive reasoning. You know, when you explore a possibility and you give it a chance and you really exhaust your energies into exploring it, that's abductive reasoning. But when he says, no, logically speaking, how can there be a God if God existed, then this would have happened, then that would have happened, and you remain in the world of if and then, you remain in the world of hypothesis, and you never physically experience anything or try anything, that is deductive reasoning.

The Quran is entirely abductive reasoning. Our experience in the world, how we lead to success, we don't speak in hypothesis alone. Anybody that wants to be successful uses abductive reasoning. They follow something, they try it, they fail, they try something else. They keep moving.

Prophet Ibrahim's Journey

This is the journey of Ibrahim (عَلَيْهِ ٱلسَّلَامُ) that he was trying to teach his followers. The sun, actually that doesn't work out. The moon, actually no, that keeps changing phases. You know what? That's a journey. It's a journey that's taking place.

Final Encouragement

The bottom line, the reason I mention all of these things to you, though I have a lot of other things to talk about when it comes to this discussion, do not think, just because people that are atheists or agnostics or whatever, are presenting to you certain philosophical arguments that you don't have a counter argument. Oh, that's it. They've got this mystery solved.

And these billions upon billions of people that have believed in Allah and have naturally believed in Allah, societies all over the world, all over the world, mushrik, muslim, doesn't matter. Some concept of God has always been there. And atheism is not the beginning. It's not the beginning state of a society. Some people pull out of atheism into atheism. And usually it's because of some personal reason, which inshallah hopefully will come up in the QA session.

Closing

I won't spend more time on this discussion inshallah ta'ala here. Hopefully at another occasion you can take each of these things and go into more detail.

"May Allah bless me and you, and peace, mercy, and blessings of Allah be upon you."