AL-ISLĀM YATAH... ADDĀ
THE CONCEPT OF GOD IN
WAH...ĪD AL-
AL-ISLĀM YATAH... ADDĀ
By
*
Muhammad Amin Abdul Samad
*
Dr. W. Haddad
God and Man in Contemporary
Muslim Thought (397-702D)
Oct. 17,
1978
INSTITUTE OF ISLAMIC STUDIES
INTRODUCTION
This paper is an attempt to study the concept of God
in Wah.īd al-Dīn’s book entitled al-Islām
Yath.addā. Wah.īd al-Dīn Khān is a
journalist. He is the editor of the weekly
al-Jam‘īyah of Nadwat al-‘Ulamā’, Lucknow ,
India
The book, al-Islām
Yath.addā, was written in Urdu under
the title of Ilmé Jadīd ka Challenge in 1964 and published by Academy of Islamic Research Lucknow ,
India Cairo
The object of the
book is to defend Islam against atheistic trends, particularly in the Indian
sub-continent, and to serve as introduction into Islamic faith by means of
science. He presents the arguments of
those who are against religion in chapter 1, and then he presents his arguments
in refuting them in chapter 2. In
chapter 3 he deals with the method of scientific evidence in proving that
science, as well as religion, is based on the belief in the unknown (al-ghayb),
and that science has its own limitations.
In chapter 4 he deals with nature as evidence of the existence of God.
Khān also wrote
other books in Urdu entitled in Arabic as a. H...ikmat
al-Dīn (Wisdom of the Religion), translated into Arabic by Z.afar al-Islām Khān, 1st ed.
(Cairo: al-Mukhtār al-Islāmī, 1973); b. al-Islām wa ’l-‘As.r al-H...adīth (Islam
and the Modern Age) which is also translated by .Z.afar al-Islām
Khān, 1st ed. (Cairo: al-Mukhtār al-Islāmī, 1976).
I. THE ARGUMENTS OF
REJECTORS OF RELIGION
According to Sir
Julian Huxley (1887-1975), an English biologist and politician, the development
of science in the last century is considered as knowledge explosion in breaking
human mythology of deities and religion.
Many atheists believe that religion is nothing but manifestation of
human instinct in searching the true natures of the universe.
Khān maintains that
human instinct itself is good, but due to man’s limited information, he did not
reach the true answer of the issue, especially concerning God and
religion. Nowadays, with the development
of science, it is time to review what our ancestors achieved. Khān mentions the
three stages of the development of human thinking according to the French
philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798-1857), as follows:
1.
Theological stage, the use of
theological interpretation of the phenomena of nature.
2.
Metaphysical stage, the use of
metaphysical interpretation, i.e., something beyond human understanding.
3.
Positive stage, logical
positivism, the use of interpretation through a certain rule that can be
scientifically known.
According to Khān
the rejecters of religion base their arguments on three bases: biology,
psychology, and history.
A. Biological (and Physical) Arguments
Khān mentions many
arguments and statements of scientists who do not believe in God, among which
are: the French astronomer, mathematician and physician Laplace
(1749-1827) said that the astronomical order does not need any divine myth. Newton
B. Psychological Arguments
Psychologists say
that religion is only the produce of human sub-consciousness. God is only a projection of man on a cosmic
screen. Sub-consciousness is the
treasury of forgotten things which do not appear except in abnormal conditions,
like: madness and hysteria. It is, like an iceberg which most part of it is
hidden below the sea-level, constitutes 8/9 of men’s sub-consciousness. Freud maintains that sub-consciousness could
receive ideas in childhood and lead to unreasonable act (behaviour). This, according to Freud, includes religious
beliefs. The concept of Hell and Paradise go back to the echo of human wishes that emerge
during man’s childhood. As these wishes
do not occur, they remain in his sub-conscious mind. Then this sub-conscious mind imagines the
existence of another life where his wishes become fulfilled. This also happens to a man whose wishh cannot
be fulfilled in his wakefulness is fulfilled in his dream. (pp. 23-6).
C. Historical Arguments
The arguments of
rejecters of religion are also based on history. They say that ancient people when they were
facing disasters, like: flood, earthquake, illness, etc., they created
imaginative powers to save them. These
people went further until they found what they called God that was more
powerful than man. Julian Huxley says
that religion is the products of a kind of interaction between man and his
surrounding. (p. 27)
According to the
Communist philosophy religion is a historical hoax, because this philosophy
looks upon history on economic basis.
Lenin (1870-1924) said: “We do not believe in God. We know very well that men of the church,
feudal barons and bourgeoisies do not talk to us in the name of God but for the
purpose of exploitation and their own personal benefit….”
II. CRITIQUE ON REJECTERS OF
RELIGION
Khān gives us his
critique on the arguments of the rejecters of religion as follows:
A. Biological Arguments
According to Khān
the idea that events (natural phenomena) occur according to the law of nature
without supposing the existence of an unknown god is not acceptable. It is because, quoting the idea of an
unidentified scholar, he says that nature is itself a fact, not an explanation.
He says further that all inventions are not the explanation of the cause of the
existence of religion, but they are the external framework (al-haykal al-z.āhirī) of the universe. Modern
science explains exclusively what is happening, not why it happens.
In order to clarify
this view Khān gives the following example: A chicken comes out of an egg. People believed that God took it out of the
egg. But through microscope we find that
on the 21st day of the egg a small horn appears on the bike of the
chicken, which is used to break the egg.
This horn disappears some days later.
The rejecters of religion and God say that this means that God does not
take the chicken out of its egg. Khān
contends that this new finding does not explain the real cause, but it leads us
to a new event. The issue is no longer
breaking the egg, but the appearance of the horn that is needed by the chicken
on the 21st day of its being laid.
The use of microscope etc. is merely an investigation of the fact in
wider extent, not an explanation to it.
Again Khān quotes an American scholar, Cecil B. Haman, professor of
biology who says: “Nature does not explain, she is herself in need of explanation.”[1]
Khān also cites Prof. A. Harris in his critique on Darwin
B. Psychological Arguments
Khān contends that
it is true that man’s mind (dhihn) restores ideas which might appear
later in different forms. But this does
not come to the conclusion that religion is a fake. It is because the use of analogy in this case
is not in its proper place, for it is the use of unnatural proof from a natural
event. It is, according to Khān, like a
person who saw someone making an idol and stated that he was the one who
created man.
Khān argues further
that we cannot compare the statements of prophets which reveal the secret of
this universe with that of a madman who speaks with strange words as the result
of his ideas stored in his mind. Suppose
that the inhabitants of another planet come to the earth and that they can
hear, but they cannot speak. They are
going to investigate how man can speak.
Suddenly the wind blows, the branches of trees rub one another and make
sound, and this occurs several times.
They make the conclusion that man speaks by rubbing his upper jaw with
the lower one, so that they produce sound.
This view, Khān argues, does not reveal the secret of speech in
man. Likewise, a man on the street who
speaks strangely due to his ideas in his sub-conscious mind cannot reveal the
secret of prophethood. (p. 32).
In the beginning,
before being born, man’s sub-consciousness is empty, because it is merely a
treasury of information and things seen by him.
Therefore, it is impossible for him to state what he has never known or
seen before. We see that religion
brought by prophets contain eternal fact which has never come to the mind of
anybody any time.
B. Socio-historical Arguments
Khān reproaches
those who maintain that religion is a socio-historical process, because he
contends that religion is a single reality and always remains so. People might differ in accepting or rejecting
it. Its true nature cannot be
investigated in the same way as investigating the process and the development
of architecture, so to speak. Otherwise, religion would be without God, like
that of Buddhism, so that, as Julian Huxley put it, the god of the present time
would be the society itself and its political aims, the messenger would be the
parliament, while the temples of this modern god would be the huge factories
and dams.[3]
III. THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC
EVIDENCE
Knowing reality
(fact) through experiments and inspection cannot approve or disapprove the true
nature of religion, because, according to Khān, it is not scientific
evidence. One example is that formerly
ships were made of wood, because people through their experiment believed that
wood floated and iron sank in water.
This conclusion is not totally true, for if we put a piece of iron into
a plate it will not sink in water.
Again, in the beginning of this century, through a weak telescope we saw
heavenly bodies like light, so that we believed that they were clouds of gas
and vapour. Now, by using a stronger
telescope we found that the same heavenly bodies are stars looked like clouds
due to their extreme distance from the earth.
Dealing with facts Khān
quoted the view of Prof. A.E. Mender who divides facts into two categories:
perceived facts, and inferred facts.
Perceived facts are what we know directly, like: climbing is more
difficult than descending. Inferred
facts are what we know through deduction, the process of reasoning, e.g., the
law of gravity that binds many facts, like the fall of the apple from the tree,
and the turning of the moon in its orbit.
Inferred fact is also like knowing the rationality of the universe and
the existence of relationship among every part of it. According to Khān it is not true to say that
religion is only belief in the unseen, while science is belief in scientific
perception. Religion and science are
both based on the belief in the unseen.
However, religion’s field is the final true nature of things, while science
confines itself to the basic aspect of things.
IV. NATURE AND SCIENCE SPEAK
ABOUT GOD
A. The Skepticism about God
John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873), the English economist and philosopher, was taught by his father
that the question “who created me?” is not sufficient to prove the existence of
God, because another question would follow automatically, “then, who created
God?” According to the English
philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), the second question is enough to
reject the indication of the first one.
According to Khān,
this view of skepticism is based on the atheists’ rejection of the
pre-existence and eternity of the creator of the universe. They say that if this view is to be accepted,
then the universe should also be pre-existent and eternal. Since there is no indication proving that the
universe creates itself, the above statement should not be accepted. But now, with the invention of the Second law
of Thermo Dynamics the above argument becomes void. It is because this law proves that the
universe cannot be eternal, that heat always moves from hot existence to
non-hot existence, not vice-versa. Therefore, the weakness of the universe
increases daily, until time will come where there would be no more left any
useful power for life and work. So,
there would be a beginning for the universe, and there would be a creator as
the first mover.
There is much
evidence of the existence of the beginning of the universe. For example, astronomy states that the
universe expands, stars and other heavenly bodies become farther away from each
other. So, there should be a beginning
where these bodies were together in a certain place, then a huge explosion
occurred, which took place about 5 trillion (5 with 12 zeroes) years ago. Believing in this astronomical discovery,
that the universe has a limited age, is contradictory to the view of denying
its creator. It is, according to Khān,
like believing that Taj Mahal built itself without any engineer or a builder.
B. Astronomical and other Discoveries
There are many
discoveries that indicate the existence of God, among which are as follows:
·
It takes 1,000 million
light-years to go around the universe, according t Einstein (1879-1955)’s
theory. But in 1300 million light-years
this universe would have expanded to double of its present size, so that
turning around the universe with the speed of light would never end.
·
The universe consists of about
500 trillion galaxies, each with about 100 billion stars, and all of them move
in order.
·
The atom represents the same
system of the universe. The electrons
turn around the proton billion times in a second.
All these, Khān
argues, indicate the existence of a very intelligent creator. Men themselves invent many instruments by
imitating nature, like camera. From the jelly
fish the Russian invented an instrument that can receive infrasonic vibrations,
so that it can predict the occurrence of flood, earthquake, etc. between 12 and
15 hours before it happens.
C. The Wonderful Spirit of the Universe
Another evidence of
the existence of God is the wonderful spirit of the universe (rūh.
al-kawn al-gharībah). We
discover the checks and balances of nature.
Examples:
·
If the earth were smaller or
bigger than it is now, there would be no life on earth. If it were as big as the moon, its gravity
would decrease and became 1/6 (one-sixth) of the present one, and there would
be neither water nor air. At night
everything would become frozen, while in the daytime everything would become
burned. On the contrary, if the earth
were as big as the sun, the gravity would increase 150 (one hundred and fifty)
times. Weight will increase 500 (five
hundred) times, and men would be as big as rats.
·
If the amount of oxygen on
earth were 50 % (fifty per cent) in the air instead of 21% (twenty-one per
cent) the ability of burning of fire would increase. If a tree were on fire the whole jungle would
be burned. On the other hand, if the
amount of oxygen were only 10% (ten per cent) in the air, man’s activity and
power of reason would decrease.
Khān concluded that
if the whole knowledge about universe were revealed to us we would never be
able to compile it. This is what Allah
says in the Qur’ān:
وَلَوْ
أَنَّمَا فِي الْأَرْضِ مِنْ شَجَرَةٍ أَقْلَامٌ وَالْبَحْرُ يَمُدُّهُ مِنْ بَعْدِهِ
سَبْعَةُ أَبْحُرٍ
مَا
نَفِدَتْ كَلِمَاتُ اللَّهِ إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَزِيزٌ حَكِيمٌ (لقمان :٢٧ ).
“And if all the trees in the earth were pens, and the sea, with
seven more seas to help it (were
ink), the words of Allah could
not be exhausted. Lo! Allah is
Mighty, Wise.” (Q. 31:27).
And again,
قُلْ
لَوْ كَانَ الْبَحْرُ مِدَادًا لِكَلِمَاتِ رَبِّي لَنَفِدَ الْبَحْرُ قَبْلَ أَنْ
تَنْفَدَ
كَلِمَاتُ
رَبِّي وَلَوْ جِئْنَا بِمِثْلِهِ مَدَدًا (الكهف : ١٠٩).
“Say: Though the sea became ink for the words of my Lord, verily
the sea would be used up before
the Words of my Lord were xhausted, even though We brought the like thereof to
help.” (Q. 18:109).
With regard to the possibility
of the existence of the universe by accident Khān mentions the view of J.
Huxley. According to Huxley if six
monkeys sat and stroke the buttons of typewriters for millions of years, it
would not be impossible that we should find in some pieces of the latest paper
they have written one of the poems of Shakespeare. So is the case of the universe which is the
result of a blind work. On the other
hand an American scientist Chris Morrison (كريس موريسان) gives us an example to prove that the
possibility of accidental creation of the universe is far less compared to the
fact of the planned creation of it. He
says that if we take ten coins and write one number on each of them from one to
ten, put them in our pocket and mix them, the chance to pick the coin no. 1 is
one to ten. The chance to pick no. 1 and
2 in order is one to one hundred; no. 1, 2, 3, and 4 in order is one to 10 000;
no.1 to 10 in order is one to 10 trillion.[4]
Khān contends that there are
more than one hundred chemical elements in the universe and the possibility of
creation by accident is one out of 160/10 (10 with160 zeroes). The creation of protein particle which
contains 40 000 elements among the 5 kinds of basic elements is possible, but
it needs elements 5 billion times of the present amount of elements in the
universe, and it needs time more than 243/10 (10 with 243 zeroes) years. According to Prof. G.B. Lathes protein
particle consists of long-chains of amino acids. There are 48/10 (10 with 48 zeroes)
ways of combining these chains. Wrong chains would make the protein a killing
poison instead of a living thing.
Another argument of Khān to
refuse the creation of the universe by accident is as follows: According to science the age of the earth and
the universe is respectively about 9/2 (2 billion) and 12/5 (5
trillion) years, while the amount of time needed for the creation of protein
particle by accident is 243/10 (10 with 243 zeroes) years. Khān wonders how, in a very short time (i.e.,
12/5 compared to 243/10 years) appear a million kinds of
animals and 200 000 kinds of plants, and spread everywhere on earth. Above all, among these kinds of animals,
comes a creature of high class called “man”.
[1] Wah.īd al-Dīn Khān, , al-Islām
Yatah.addā, p. 30, quoting the view of
Cecil B. Haman in George H. Blount, The Evidence of God in an Expounding
Universe (N.p., n.d.), p. 221.
Another example given by Khān is about the mystery of the redness of the
blood. Blood contains red cells, so that
it becomes red. These cells contain
hemoglobin which turns into red colour when the red cells interact with oxygen
in the heart. Cells which contain
hemoglobin are made in the liver. The
relationship among these things is based on the law of nature. Why does this law of nature always come to a
definite goal? Khān says that science
states only what happens, but it does not explain why it happens.
[2] Ibid., pp. 30-1, quoting A. Lunn, Revolt
against Reason (N.p., n.d.), p. 133.
[3] Ibid., pp. 34-5, quoting J. Huxley,
Religion without Revelation (N.p., n.d.), no page.
[4] Ibid., pp. 66, quoting Man Does not Stand
Alone (N.p., n.d.), p. 17.
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