Another Word For Atheists
By Mohammed Adamu
-a rehash of my previous piece titled:
‘THE PROBLEM WITH ATHEISM’
“…… Since atheists (and agnostics) will not leave us (believers) alone, we too will not tire to ram sense into their disbelieving and doubtful brains! For the umpteenth time, hear this: religion makes no pretence at needing to prove God empirically. Never necessary. As a matter of fact at the core of the fundament of religion is ‘faith’ (no knowledge) in the ‘unknown’ -or what in Islam is referred to as ‘ghaib’.
Man really has no obligation to prove God. Because in actual fact man has neither the mental capacity nor the earthly wherewithal to prove God. Religious man is comfortable only in the belief that there has to be a ‘maker’ of everything that’s made. And as a cup of tea is unlikely to be made by the individual will-power of each of the components by which a ‘tea cup’ is made (someone or something has to mix it up), so is the universe incapable of coming into being the whims and caprices of each of the countless components that formed it! Some preexisting energy must’ve created and willed those components into the cosmic order (or ‘chaos’?) that we see.
By the nature of all sentient beings there has to always be a void in them that yearns for a ‘maker’. There has to be a belief deep down in man that there has to be a ’cause’ for everything, except the ’cause’ of the original ’causer’ of all caused beings. The moment a ’cause’ itself has a ’cause’, then that is not the God! The ultimate ’causer’ of all caused beings has to be himself (or itself) ‘un-caused’. Reason ‘He’ or ‘it’ is referred to as the ‘un-caused cause’. Science itself has not the power to square the roots of this metaphysical equation. Many are the afflictions of scientific atheism; but proving God empirically is the malignance that he is doomed to never come out of.
They will ponder and they will be troubled of heart, the Quran says, to seek to know the realm of ‘ghaib’ (the unknown); but their weary, enquiring minds would return to them more troubled and discomfitured! Man, even if he will be assisted by armies of jins and devils, has no choice but to tarry at the divine curtain -the point where the ’cause’ itself of all caused beings, has to have no ’cause’ itself. All effronteries have to end here, because any further enquiry takes man only to what is termed ‘infinite regress’. Because there will be no end to asking to know the ’cause of every other ’cause’. Man labors in vain traveling this infinity space. There shall no end be on this shuttle! The brain of a chicken can only take what the brain of a chicken can take! If the chicken knows that some day it’ll be killed and eaten, it can ever have peace!
Many, in fact, say that God actually created Himself. And they naively think that, that line of reasoning should end the ‘infinite regress’. But no. Even that cannot! Because it too is logically regressable into infinity. To say that God created Himself, is not only to suggest that He had a beginning, but that in fact there was a particular time when He was not there! Nothing can be more abominable! Or by the way, how could ‘nothing’ (a non-being), have, from ‘nothing’, suddenly willed itself into ‘something’? We just cannot crack it; because we are not capacitated to crack it! And just because you cannot see a thing it will not necessarily mean that, that thing is not there!
The only thing that makes rational sense is that the ‘un-caused cause’ (whether you call it God or some metaphysical energy) has always been there. Meaning there was never a time it or he was not there. It is the only rational explanation to the existence of God. And to the religious mind, this has to remain in the realm only of ‘belief’; not ‘knowledge’! It is ‘unknown’, and as long as we sojourn here on earth, it will remain ‘unknowable’! Long as the chicken still carries that puny, little brain of its, it will still be unknowable to it that the man who throws corn daily at it, will one day kill it!
Beings cannot reason above their capacities for reasoning. And this logical ‘surrender’ that is typical of the religious mind, is what the atheists are incapable of comprehending! It is what they are constantly troubled by -that we, believers (or theists) are able to grasp and contented actually, to apprehend God by faith not necessarily by knowledge. And it is the reason they seem unable to let the camp of the believers rest. They poke, they sneer and they jeer even though they do not need to. And it troubles them the more that we are unperturbed even by the most rocket of their ‘scientific’ proofs that there is no God.
Or can’t you see that it is perfectly in God’s divine wisdom that there be schisms by us, His creatures, about whether or not He exists. Or why do you think that God, considering the nature of the divine purpose for creation, is not bound to leave a gossamer of clutch by which arrogant atheistic unbelief may still proudly hang? That God is bound to leave something at work to tickle their arrogant unbelief? I say ‘arrogant unbelief’ strictly, in order to contrast it with the humble, innocent, soul searching type of un-belief that God is always sure -someday- to guide into belief. Or isn’t it the reason the scriptures are replete with God saying that He guides only whom He wills? Yes, He guides only who He wills. Meaning that He guides only the earnest seeker, not the arrogant repudiater of a Maker!
If God wanted man to have no doubt that He exists, He would not choose the prophetic wavelength as medium to relate with man. He would just simply have made Himself incontrovertibly manifest. So that then it obviates the necessity to have to seek to prove Him in the first place; or the necessity for equipping man with a free will to believe or not to believe. If God had manifested Himself without leaving an iota of doubt in the soul of man, who then would’ve dared not to believe, or not to do his will?
Atheists are desperate for scientific evidence to prove the metaphysical. This can never happen. Science itself is the creation of God. And He has not designed that it should prove Him. But by the agency of science He even ups the ante both of belief and of un-belief. Because just as the knowledge of science takes the haughty and arrogant ones away from faith in a creator, so does the knowledge of science bring the meek and humble among them to God. And just as those who believe in God will never be able to prove Him to atheists using the agency of faith and belief, so will atheists never be able to disprove God using the agency of science and empiricism.
I take it that it is for fun alone that we believers debate with atheists and agnostics over the existence of a creator. It is not so that we prove God using their criteria of empiricism. It is to educate them about the futility of proving God through empirical scientism! The mind of man can never comprehend God through the agency of science. Try as it may it can never unlock the fortress of the unknown (ghaib) to glean what it probably has not the stamina (for now), to withstand. And this will stay that way; no matter how much disbelieving man may poke or provoke the realm of the divine.
When Benito Mussolini, in the hay days of his atheistic communist craze, publicly challenged God to strike him dead if it was true that He existed, Mussolini exposed the station of the atheists of his days as an abysmally low one. By that singular action he proved the poorest grasp of the Majesty of the God that we believe in and the God that atheists deny. To imagine that a covenant-respecting God would break his divine promise and remove the veil by striking every pelting, petty atheist who denies or doubts that He exists, is not to know the gravity of the divine precepts of the mechanistic Clock Master.
God has an appointed time for everything. Man has not enough glory or power, or even the daredevilry of a thousand Satans to influence a shift of God’s divine timing forward or to push it further even by the infinitesimalest of a fraction of a second! Atheists will do themselves a world of good to just chill and wait for that hour. They should stop wasting their time trying to destroy religion while at the same time turning atheism into a religion of a sort. They have neither the duty to believe in God, nor the obligation to drag believers into un-belief. Lakum deenakum, the Quran says, waliyaddeen! Meaning ‘Let their way be their way, and ours, be ours!”
That’s fair!
