Right now I am having a semi-friendly “discussion” in a Facebook group with a bunch of rather committed Islamic folks. It’s their thing, they have this concept called Da‘wah. That literally means “issuing a summons” or “making an invitation”. If this is not something you are aware of, well think of it as being similar to the evangelical thing of spreading the message. Basically, you get bonus points in the eyes of God and your fellow believers for doing this.
Most of the dominant mind-viruses that infect humans will have some means of motivating those that are infected to go and infect others. This is because over the ages the mind-viruses that have become the most successful at propagating will have been naturally selected to thrive, so this is exactly what we should expect to find within such arenas.
What is interesting is that one of the most common claims I trip over is the “God did it” claim, it goes something like this …
- Everything must have a creator
- Since the universe must have a creator, then “God did it”
There are a few very obvious flaws here which hopefully most readers are familiar with. The most immediate observation is that this is paleolithic thinking – when faced with a mystery, something unknown and mysterious, then you just declare “God did it”. Our ancestors did exactly this when faced with the sun, the moon, thunder, weather, seasons, etc… For each of these we now understand and have an answer that does not involve a God, so the historical track record for the “God did it” answer being right is exactly zero.
Today we face the, “Where did the Universe come from?” question and so of course the religious claim “God did it”. Interestingly enough, in every such case, the specific God they have in mind is their specific concept of a god (they will happily dismiss all other Gods).
Anyway, basically they have …
- A rule that says everything must have a creator … but no evidence that this is actually true
- A claim that God is the creator … and so they have simply (as usual) invented a god concept to explain everything
When I pointed this out in the latest debate, the chap quickly back peddled and said this …
I said every creature has a creator!!
God is not a creature or creation! He’s the CREATOR!!
Even if we agree everything has a creator, that’s fine because god is not a thing!
He’s not comparable to anything. He’s unseen and unimaginable!!
Sigh! … yep, it’s a face-palm moment … so apparently he is introducing some wiggle room here … not quite everything has a creator, and now apparently his god concept is an exception to this rule … and need I point out, the actual evidence for any of this is (as usual) exactly zero.
The most honest and correct answer when faced with an unknown is to simply observe, “I don’t know”. Making up a supernatural answer is not a real answer and tells you nothing at all about reality. In fact the harm that it does is to stop you seeking the correct answer.
So why do this, why do I have dialogues in such groups, is it because I have some scientific missionary zeal? Nope, not at all, personally I enjoy having my ideas challenged, it helps me to think things through. I’m also under no illusions that those I directly engage with will change their minds, the zealots tend not to do so. If they encounter a question that rattles them, they will simply rush off to some cleric who will whisper some religious babble into their ears to pacify the concern. Instead the folks that such dialogues are really for are those that sit quietly on the fence, have not taken a public stance, but instead just listen in and ponder over what is being said.
Nobody is beyond reach, and while they still breath even the most fanatical can be reached. The Islamic founder of one specific Facebook group, a true fanatic, threw in the towel one day and openly declared himself to have renounced Islam … he could do so because he lived in the west out of reach … but as you might imagine he was on the receiving end of a lot of threats and abuse when he did so, so I do applaud both his courage and his honesty.
If you are curious about the FB group I’m having this latest dialogue in, well this latest one is called ATHEISM DEBUNKED BY MUSLIMEEN and yes, that is the one where they have a rule against logic and reason (thats rule 4). If you pop in, you will find all the usual stuff, Zakir naik YouTube clips, evolution is a lie claims, god did it claims, you are all going to burn claims, and heaps of quran quotes, and the usual sprinkling of folks who appear to have extreme difficulty manging to get to grips with turning their caps-lock key off.
Oh and since it is supposed to be debunking atheism, you might be curious to ask, “How much actual debunking of non-belief has been achieved?” … you can guess the answer, so far exactly zero. They might beg to differ, but you need to remember that is their approach where they post a daft claim, have it debunked, then respond with some quran quotes and claim victory. They might delude themselves, but nobody is fooled.
Hi. I am Muslim. I have some questions which I wanna ask.
I feel that Theists position makes more sense to me than atheists. As whenever I ponder about my surroundings and the Universe I see that there is some kind of Law and Order governing them meaning if I want to fly I need wings. I can’t fly because I don’t have wings. Every human, animal & bird come into existence through Reproduction. There has not been observed any process other than Reproduction for bringing these living creatures into existence. And lastly I do not deny evolution but I find it hard to accept evolution as a fact as I have only read about evolution in science textbooks or scientific websites but have not actually observed it with my own eyes. Like never heard in any newspaper or saw any News channel giving breaking news that a monkey has a given birth to baby monkey with wings or a bird has given birth to baby bird having hands like humans or snake giving birth to baby snake with legs.
Whatever about evolution is what I have heard but not actually saw with my own eyes. I may be wrong but am willing to hear you clear my misunderstanding and lack of knowledge. Thank you and waiting for your reply.
//Hi. I am Muslim. I have some questions which I wanna ask.
Hi, I’m an atheist. I’ve just happened to pass by this post today. It’s from 2012 and your comment is from 2015. I think you would be more certain to get a response if you had commented on a more recent post.
But, lucky you, I came here :p
//I feel that Theists position makes more sense to me than atheists.
That’s fine.
//As whenever I ponder about my surroundings and the Universe I see that there is some kind of Law and Order governing them meaning if I want to fly I need wings. I can’t fly because I don’t have wings.
I’m guessing you are talking about the laws of nature, like F=ma and stuff like that. Yeah, nature seems to be not chaotic at some level.
The problem I see with theism is that it assumes a priori that the default state of existence is either nothingness or chaos, unless there is a god. No reasoning is given to this line of thinking. Especially since we don’t know what a chaotic universe would look like. We don’t even know how much order it could arise in a universe without gods versus one with gods, so we can’t compare the amount of order in our universe to a standard and say “this is a universe that definitly needs a god to be like this”.
//Every human, animal & bird come into existence through Reproduction. There has not been observed any process other than Reproduction for bringing these living creatures into existence.
Antecipating your next comment below, this has nothing to do with the theory of evolution. This is abiogenesis (the idea that life can come from non-life) and it’s outside the scope of evolution (the idea that, once there is life, living beings change over time through reproduction, mutation and natural selection).
We certainly don’t understand the details of how life was form, but the clues are pointing to chemical interactions between organic molecules. It’s reasonable to keep chasing these inferences, since all we know about life depends on chemical interactions.
However, we know absolutely nothing about how a god can create life, and we don’t even know what a god is. So chasing this inference is not reasonable. Claiming god did it simply terminates the persuit for knowledge. You simply say “god did it” and that’s the end of it: we still don’t know how life is formed, but we are now content.
//And lastly I do not deny evolution but I find it hard to accept evolution as a fact as I have only read about evolution in science textbooks or scientific websites but have not actually observed it with my own eyes.
You don’t need to observe something to know it’s true. There are other ways of collecting evidence, and that’s where science comes. We need instruments, microscopes, dating methods etc.
Our eyes are far from being the best tools for collection of evidence. For example, we only see one small range of light waves (everything from infrared and below and everything from ulra-violet and above are invisible to us, but we know they are there because we can detect using instruments).
And as for evolution (not to be mistaken for abiogenesis) we have a lot of evidence in favour of it, even if our eyes are not able to collect this evidence. Just visit a museum of natural history near to you, and they will show you everything we know about how organisms evolve over time and what’s the evidence for it.
Claiming there is no evidence for evolution really is just a lack of trying to look for the evidence.
//Like never heard in any newspaper or saw any News channel giving breaking news that a monkey has a given birth to baby monkey with wings or a bird has given birth to baby bird having hands like humans or snake giving birth to baby snake with legs. Whatever about evolution is what I have heard but not actually saw with my own eyes.
You don’t see these things precisely because evolution is right, not in spite of it.
You got the wrong idea of what evolution is. Evolution is a slow change in living organism that take millions of years to produce a significant change. You’ll never see a leap from monkey to bird or anything like that. If you saw it, that wouldn’t be evolution.
Take for example a picture of you. Put behind it a picture of your dad. And behind it a picture of your dad’s dad. Keep doing it for generations. The theory of evolution tells us that at one point in this pile of pictures, there will be a picture of a fish. There will be millions and millions of pictures, the first being of you and at some point being of a fish. All the pictures are from related beings. This fish is your great-great-great… (million times great)-grandfather. That’s what the theory means.
What the theory tells us is that, if you go on any part of the pile of pictures and choose two consecutive pictures (a father and his son) they will always be pictures of beings from the same species. At one point there is a picture of a primate, at another point there is a picture of a small mammal, but everywhere, father and son will be of the same species. That’s how slow evolution is. Each change is too small to notice and will never make father and son be from different species.
You can think that as you grow older. Take a picture of the first day of your life, and then one from the second, and from the third. Keep doing that until you are old with grey hair. Now, anywhere in the pile, choose two consectutive pictures: you’ll always have the same age in both. They will either be two pictures of you as a baby, or two pictures of you as child, or two as an adult or two as an elder person. There will never be a picture of you as child and the next one is of you as an adult. But you did grow older, no doubt about that.
Evolution is like that. There is no doubt it happened: we have the evidence for it. We may not fully understand all of its details and may even be wrong about some aspects of it. But it did happened one way or another.
If tomorrow a monkey gives birth to a bird, then you can be certain that evolution doesn’t work the way we thought it did, and we’ll need a new hipotesys.
//I may be wrong but am willing to hear you clear my misunderstanding and lack of knowledge. Thank you and waiting for your reply.
I don’t need or want you to leave our faith. That’s not my goal here. You gave me the impression that you were honestly trying to understand what others think, and that’s what drove me to answer you. I hope that now you have a better understanding of how atheists think and how they come to their conclusions.