Timelessness And The Reality Of Fate
The Universe Is Created From Non-Existence
Materialism is a system of thought that holds matter to be an absolute entity and denies the existence of anything but matter. Having its roots in ancient Greece and gaining increased acceptance, particularly in the 19th century, and becoming famous with the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx, this system of thought claims that matter has existed forever and that it will exist for all eternity. Since it maintains that matter is not created, it does not accept the existence of a Creator.
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The founder of dialectical materialism: Karl Marx
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As we have just stated, materialism became popular mainly in the 19th century. One of the principal reasons for this is the "static universe" model that was then produced in response to the question of "how the universe had come about". This model answered the question by stating that the universe had not come about, it had existed forever and would continue to exist forever. The universe was accepted to be a stable, constant and unchanging collection of matter and the notion was promoted that such a universe did not require us to believe in a Creator.
The confirmation of the opposite of this universe model, that is, the discovery that the universe had a beginning and that it was alterable, unquestionably proved the existence of a Creator. In his book"Principes Fondamentaux de Philosophie", renowned materialist philosopher Georges Politzer accepted this fact in his denial of creation on the basis of this "boundless universe" model:
The universe is not a created object. If it were, then it would have to have been created instantaneously by God and brought into existence from nothing. To admit creation, one has to admit, in the first place, the existence of a moment when the universe did not exist, and that something came out of nothingness. This is something to which science cannot concede.2
In saying, "this is something to which science cannot concede," Georges Politzer is actually referring to the materialist world view, not to science. As a matter of fact, one of materialists' most-known false beliefs is the error that science has to be materialist. In writing these lines, Politzer imagined that science was on his side and that subsequent progress would confirm the idea of the boundless universe. At the end of a period that started in the second quarter of the 20th century, modern science, however, proved the fact admitted by materialists when they said: "If it was so, then we would perforce agree that a Creator existed,"-that is, that the universe had a beginning. This fact was revealed after a number of stages.
The Expansion of the Universe
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Edwin Hubble, next to his giant telescope.
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The 1920s were important years in the development of modern astronomy. In 1922, the Russian physicist Alexandra Friedman produced computations showing that the structure of the universe was not static and that even a tiny impulse might be sufficient to cause the whole structure to expand or contract according to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. George Lemaitre was the first to recognize what Friedman's findings meant. Based on these computations, the Belgian astronomer Lemaitre declared that the universe had a beginning and that it was expanding as a result of something that had triggered it. He also claimed that radiation surviving from that initial moment would also be detected. In fact, working on a different research, Vesto Melvin Slipher, had already determined, in 1913, before Lemaitre, that some galaxies near us were rapidly moving away from the Earth. This discovery by Slipher was the first clue to show that the universe was expanding.
The theoretical musings of these scientists did not attract much attention and probably would have been ignored except for new observational evidence that rocked the scientific world in 1929. That year the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, working at the California Mount Wilson observatory, made one of the most important discoveries in the history of astronomy.
What Hubble initially wanted to do was to study far-off galaxies and to try to establish the movements of the stars and their chemical structures based on the information regarding the light they emitted. Hubble and his team analyzed the light rays arriving from distant galaxies one by one and made significant discoveries. One of these was that the commonest elements in the galaxies were hydrogen and helium. This discovery confirmed information put forward by previous scientists, and was accepted without controversy by the scientific world. Hubble's other discovery stunned the scientific world, however: He noted that light emitted from stars shifted toward red.
According to the physical law known as the Doppler effect, the wavelength of the light is "contracted" as it approaches the observer and is "stretched" when moving away from him. In other words, the light moving toward the observer is seen as shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum, while that of light moving away from the observer shifts towards the red end of the spectrum. (In the same way that the sound of a train whistle moving away from an observer is thinned out.)
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The universe came into being with the explosion of a single point of zero volume. And that shows that the universe had a beginning.
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That being the case, Hubble and his team's discovery indicated that all the galaxies were moving away from us and the stars and galaxies were not just moving away from us, but also from each other. The greater the distance, the greater the speed. Hubble designed a mathematical equation to express this, known as "Hubble's law." This law was once again conformed by every new piece of information from distant galaxies.
The only possible conclusion in a universe in which everything is moving away from everything else was that the universe is "expanding." And that meant the collapse of the idea that "the universe is stable and boundless," which had reigned in the scientific world for many years and been fiercely defended by materialists. Indeed, at first Hubble's findings attracted strong reactions. The science writer David Filkin describes the reaction from materialist and atheist scientists to Hubble's discoveries in his book Stephen Hawking's Universe: The Cosmos Explained:
An expanding universe was a difficult concept for the majority of atheistic scientists who had become firmly wedded to the idea of an unchanging infinite and eternal universe. Anything that was expanding could hardly be unchanging. So there was a huge temptation to play down or dismiss Hubble's perception.3
But no matter how much materialists sought to play down Hubble's discoveries, new findings and data obtained shortly after once again confirmed the irrefutable fact that the universe is expanding.
The Reality Shown by the Expansion of the Universe: The Big Bang
Hubble's discovery that the universe was expanding led to the emergence of another model that needed no fiddling around with to make the equations work right. If the universe was getting bigger as time advanced, going back in time meant that it was getting smaller; and if one went back far enough, everything would shrink and converge at a single point.
Scientists unable to refute this state of affairs theoretically imagined they could do so with mathematical data. The Oxford University mathematician Roger Penrose worked on various hypotheses using Einstein's mathematics. Penrose's research inflicted a terrible disappointment on materialists, because mathematical formulas showed that gravitational attraction would cause a large amount of matter to collapse, becoming an increasingly denser and smaller "single point."
Penrose's findings were expanded by Stephen Hawking. Penrose and Hawking mathematically proved that the universe came into being from a single point they referred to as a "singularity." Bill Bryson described the concept of the singularity in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything:
… outside the singularity there is no where. When the universe begins to expand, it won't be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no "around" around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there-whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.And so, from nothing, our universe begins.4
The conclusion to be derived from the calculations was that at some time, all the matter in the universe was compacted in a single point-mass that had "zero volume" because of its immense gravitational force.
In an announcement issued in 1970, Penrose and Hawking revealed that the universe had come into being through the explosion of this "point" with zero volume. The formulas they discovered left no room for any alternative proposition. In this way, the theory known as the "Big Bang" had been proved mathematically.
Another fact shown by the Big Bang was this: Since zero volume means "nothing," the universe had come into "being" from "nothing." This, in turn, meant that the universe had a beginning and invalidated the materialist assumption that "the universe had existed for ever." This led to intense debates among materialist scientists. Professor of cosmology Andrei Linde set out the questions needing to be answered in the wake of the Big Bang theory:
In its standard form, the big bang theory assumes that all parts of the universe began expanding simultaneously. But how could all the different parts of the universe synchronize the beginning of their expansion? Who gave the command?5
The answer to Linde's question is in fact quite clear. Something coming into "being" from "nothing" demonstrates one single fact: Creation. Allah created matter and the whole universe from nothing, by commanding it to "Be!" Allah makes this pronouncement about His sublime creative power in this verse from the Qur'an:
[He is] the Originator of the heavens and earth. When He decides on something, He just says to it, "Be!" and it is." (Surat al-Baqara, 117)
Why Were Materialist Scientists Unable to Accept the Big Bang?
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A photograph taken by the Hubble telescope.
Every luminous point in the picture is a galaxy. It is estimated that there are approximately 300 billion galaxies in the entire universe. It is predicted that there are on average 250-300 billion stars in each galaxy. All of the matter and energy making up this giant universe is created from nothing and this is very clear evidence for creation. |
The Big Bang theory quickly gained wide acceptance in the scientific world due to the clear-cut evidence for it. Nevertheless scientists who favored materialism and adhered to the idea of an infinite universe that materialism seemingly demanded held out against the Big Bang in their struggle to uphold a fundamental tenet of their ideology. The reason was made clear by the English astronomer Arthur Eddington, who said "Philosophically, the notion of an abrupt beginning to the present order of Nature is repugnant to me".6 In other words, materialist scientists continued to espouse an error, not out of scientific concerns, but from ideological ones.
Reactions against the Big Bang theory were expressed in different forms. For example, asked for his view of the Big Bang theory, the German chemist Walter Nernst claimed that to accept these findings "would be to betray the very foundations of science." 7 The concern that Nernst expressed in these words was nothing else than a fear of a betrayal of materialism. That is because although the scientific findings indisputably proved the Big Bang, Nernst and others who shared his views were still reluctant to accept it, and thus flew in the face of science. MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) professor of physics Phillip Morrison said in a BBC film, "I find it hard to accept the Big Bang theory; I would like to reject it."8 Allan Sandage, from the Carnegie Observatories, who made significant discoveries showing that the universe was expanding at a constant speed, expressed his amazement at the findings in the words, "it cannot really be true!"9
As expressed in an article titled "Big-Bang Theology" by the New Yorker writer Jim Holt, "the big bang is probably the only idea in the history of science that was ever resisted because of its [supporting creation by God]."10 In "The Religion of Science" chapter of his book God and the Astronomers, the eminent astrophysicist Robert Jastrow examines the reasons why materialist scientists are reluctant to accept the Big Bang theory, despite all the findings that confirm it. Jastrow interprets these responses as follows (the scientists Jastrow refers to here are materialist scientists):
There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions. … This religious faith of the scientists is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized. As usual when faced with trauma, the mind reacts by ignoring the implications…Consider the enormity of the problem [for the scientists]. Science has proven that the Universe exploded into being at a certain moment. … Who or [W]hat put the matter and energy into the Universe? Was the Universe created out of nothing …?This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians.11
Jastrow's analysis clearly reveals the astonishment and despair of materialist scientists. A fact clearly verified by all scientific findings is rejected solely out of ideological concerns, and the search for an alternative view is insistently maintained. These words from another astrophysicist, Barry Parker, express this very well:
We do, of course, have an alternative. We could say that there was no creation, and that the universe has always been here. But this is even more difficult to accept than creation.12
Materialist scientists preferred the difficult alternative and persisted in the denial of Creation. One of the theories proposed against the Big Bang was the "steady state theory," which was espoused most determinedly for a time, despite all the scientific realities.
The Invalidity of the "Steady State" Theory Proposed Against the Big Bang
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Fred Hoyle
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Another astronomer who opposed the Big Bang theory was Fred Hoyle. Around the middle of the 20th century he came up with a model, which he called "steady-state", that was an extension of the 19th century's idea of an infinite universe. According to Hoyle's model, as the universe expanded new matter was continuously coming into existence by itself in just the right amount to keep the universe in a "steady state". In fact, the theory launched by Hoyle and his team contained a number of internal inconsistencies. More importantly, these constituted the basis of new developments that would soon demolish the theory.
Hoyle wanted to account for the emergence of certain chemicals that gave rise to all the matter in the universe. He maintained that stars had moments of birth and death and that they produced all chemical elements throughout their lives. According to this view, the stars came into being when hydrogen atoms in space were pulled together under the force of gravity into increasingly larger spheres. As these spheres grew, so the inward pressure of gravity increased, with the pressure eventually reaching such a point that some of the hydrogen atoms fused together, thus producing helium atoms.13 This conversion happens on a constant basis, and stars are exposed to processes of fusion that give rise to the next heaviest chemical element. These progressive reactions continue with the production of numerous light elements as far as iron, and eventually a hot iron core remains.
This stage is one in which the star continues to emit light, known as the white dwarf stage. When the star turns into a cold mass of iron that does not emit light, it moves to become what is known as the brown dwarf. If this final remnant of a star is not pulled into collision by the gravitational force of other bodies in the universe, then it remains in space.
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George Gamov
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In large stars, as their lives come to an end, high temperatures and pressure sufficient to give rise to heavier elements arise in direct proportion to the gravitational force. During this process, elements are thrown off reaching far and wide as a very hot shining dust cloud is blown out into space.
When these claims by Hoyle and his team were backed up by observations, scientific circles imagined for a moment that they supported the idea of the infinite universe. The fact is, however, that there was an important question that could not be answered by Hoyle's concept, which said that all the elements came in a cycle from hydrogen. The question concerned how hydrogen, the basis of all the elements and that gave rise to stars, first appeared. That is because an extraordinarily high-temperature explosion would be needed to produce hydrogen. The scientific answer to that question, which Hoyle ignored, once again came as a disappointment to materialists.
New Evidence for the Big Bang: Cosmic Background Radiation
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Eta Carinae star is destroyed by a supernova explosion. This and similar explosions always cause disorder. However, the Big Bang, known as the most drastic explosion ever to have taken place, has given way to a space based on extremely precise balances and all the systems therein. This extraordinary balance and order can by no means be explained away by coincidences and it all proves yet again that the entire universe has been created by an exalted and mighty Creator Who is Allah.
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In a radio program in 1940s, Hoyle said, "If the universe began with a hot Big Bang, then such an explosion would have left a relic. Find me a fossil of this Big Bang."14 The fossil that Hoyle and materialists never imagined would ever be discovered was in fact found soon after.
In 1948, the physicist George Gamow launched a new theory in order to find the traces of the Big Bang. The formation of the hydrogen necessary for the first stars to emerge could be explained by the Big Bang setting up extraordinarily high temperatures. In fact, findings from the traces of the earliest galaxies showed that a cosmic makeup of 80% hydrogen and 20% helium formed at the moment of the great explosion. That being the case, the radiation caused by the high temperatures that gave rise to those elements should still be in existence, despite the passage of billions of years. Since the universe was expanding in all directions, like a balloon being inflated, low-level background radiation should have radiated out in all directions, and that now needed to be detected. Those traces were soon after identified, and the fossil that Hoyle was so certain would never be found was in fact discovered.
In 1965, two researchers by the name of Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered these waves, though they were not actually looking for them. This radiation, called "cosmic background radiation", was different from radiation coming from a particular point in space. It was extraordinarily uniform. In other words, it did not seem to radiate from a particular source but rather pervaded the whole of space. Thus, it was revealed that the heat waves that were uniformly radiated from all around space had been left over from the initial stages of the Big Bang. Penzias and Wilson were awarded a Nobel prize for their discovery.
In 1989, George Smoot and NASA team sent a satellite into space. Called the "Cosmic Background Emission Explorer" (COBE), it took only eight minutes for the sensitive instruments on board the satellite to detect and confirm the levels of radiation reported by Penzias and Wilson. These results conclusively demonstrated the existence of the hot, dense form remaining from the explosion out of which the universe came into being.Cosmic background radiation was invisible to the naked eye, but it was everywhere in the universe and present everywhere we could see. If we could have seen these waves, the whole of the sky, in all directions, would have been equally brightly illuminated by it.
One piece of information discovered in 1992 by George Smoot from data obtained from COBE once again proved the truth of the Big Bang and the false nature of the "steady state theory." Following discoveries by Penzias and Wilson, the adherents of the steady state theory came up with a new claim. They said that cosmic background radiation temperature was uniform and that there would have to be variations, in other words, small differences in temperature, in order for galaxies to form in the wake of a giant explosion. They suggested that so long as this temperature difference could not be identified, cosmic background radiation could not be used as evidence for the Big Bang. It was this temperature difference that the exponents of the steady state theory said was lacking that George Smoot determined in 1992. There were very small differences between the data sent by COBE in 1992 and the old map of the universe. The details in the picture were closely examined. The computerized maps revealed very small temperature differences in background radiation. For example, some regions had a temperature of 2.7251 Kelvin and others of 2.7249 Kelvin. The Big Bang had once again been confirmed by scientific findings and observations.
The majority of scientists interpreted the COBE data as verifying the Big Bang in an incontrovertible manner. In an article titled "Stephen Hawking, the Big Bang and God," the Nobel Prize candidate professor of chemistry Henry F. Schaefer described what happened when the results of the COBE research were announced:
About the 1992 observations, which were from the COBE (the NASA satellite Cosmic Background Explorer), there was a story on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the world. The thing that the London Times, New York Times, etc. seemed to pick up on was a statement by George Smoot, the team leader from the Lawrence-Berkeley Laboratory. He said, "It's like looking at [the signs of creation by] God." Obviously, this captured the public's attention.A[nother] … assessment of the findings was given by Frederick Burnham, a science-historian. He said, "These findings, now available, make the idea that God created the universe [much more different] … today than at any time in the last 100 years."15
More evidence for the Big Bang was forthcoming. One piece had to do with the relative amounts of hydrogen and helium in the universe. Observations indicated that the mix of these two elements in the universe was in accord with theoretical calculations of what should have been remained after the Big Bang. That drove another stake into the heart of the steady state theory because if the universe had existed for eternity and never had a beginning, all of its hydrogen should have been burned into helium.
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Data obtained from George Smoot's COBE satellite enabled the Big Bang Theory to be irrefutably confirmed.
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Confronted by such evidence, the Big Bang gained the near-complete approval of the scientific world. In an article in its October 1994 issue, Scientific American noted that the Big Bang model was the only one that could account for the constant expansion of the universe and for other observational results.
Defending the steady-state theory alongside Fred Hoyle for years, British scientist Dennis Sciama described the final position they had reached after all the evidence for the Big Bang theory was revealed. Sciama stated that he had taken part in the heated debate between the defenders of the steady-state theory and those who tested that theory with the hope of refuting it. He added that he had defended the steady-state theory, not because he deemed it valid, but because he wished that it were valid. Fred Hoyle stood out against all objections as evidence against this theory began to unfold. Sciama goes on to say that he had first taken a stand along with Hoyle but, as evidence began to pile up, he had had to admit that the game was over and that the steady-state theory had to be dismissed.16
Further confirmation of the data obtained by the COBE came from other, subsequent studies. One such was the result obtained in 2000 from an observation balloon known as BOOMERANG (Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics), launched at the end of 1998. Loaded with sensitive equipment and traveling 37,000 meters (120,000 feet) above the Antarctic, the balloon made it possible to obtain extremely detailed and clear data regarding cosmic background radiation. The equipment on BOOMERANG was sufficiently sensitive to detect tiny temperature variations-only 100-millionths of a degree Celsius. The results obtained once again verified the truth of the Big Bang and allowed scientists to obtain more detailed information about the earliest days of the universe. One of the scientists who analyzed the data from BOOMERANG that confirmed the Big Bang, Michael Turner of the University of Chicago, says:
The big bang framework and Einstein's general relativity have passed a major new test.17
The Big Bang's Victory
All of this compelling evidence caused the Big Bang theory to be embraced by the scientific community. The Big Bang model is the latest position reached by science on the formation and beginning of the universe.
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Prof. George Abel from the University of California states that currently available evidence shows that the universe originated billions of years ago with the Big Bang. He concedes that he has no choice but to accept the Big Bang theory.18
With the Big Bang's victory, the concept of "eternal matter" that constituted the basis of the materialist philosophy has been thrown on to the trash-heap of history. What, then, came before the Big Bang and what was the power that brought the universe into "being" with this big explosion when it was "non-existent"? This question certainly reveals the existence of a Creator-that is, the existence of Almighty Allah. The renowned atheist philosopher Antony Flew comments on the issue:
Notoriously, confession is good for the soul. I will, therefore, begin by confessing that the Stratonician atheist has to be embarrassed by the contemporary cosmological consensus. For it seems that the cosmologists are providing a scientific proof of what St. Thomas contended could not be proved philosophically; namely, that the universe had a beginning. So long as the universe can be comfortably thought of as being not only without end but also without beginning, it remains easy to urge that its brute existence, and whatever are found to be its most fundamental features, should be accepted as the explanatory ultimates. Although I believe that it remains still correct, it certainly is neither easy nor comfortable to maintain this position in the face of the Big Bang story.19
Many scientists who do not blindly condition themselves to be atheists have admitted the existence of Almighty Allah in the creation of the universe.
Roger Penrose, a physicist who has done extensive research on the origin of the universe, has also stated that the universe rests where it is not by mere coincidence, and this shows that it definitely has a purpose. For some people, "the universe is just there" and it just goes on being there. We just happened to find ourselves right in the middle of this whole thing. This viewpoint would probably not help us in understanding the universe. According to Penrose's view, there are many deep affairs going on within the universe whose existence we cannot today perceive.20
The WMAP Satellite Once Again Proved the Big Bang
The WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) satellite launched into space in 2001 and that enabled the clearest results to be obtained in 2003 also verified the accuracy of the Big Bang theory and enabled discoveries of the greatest significance to be made. Science magazine chose the studies on the basis of the data obtained from the WMAP as the breakthrough of the year 2003.21 The great majority of scientists agreed that the data sent back by WMAP represented a turning point in cosmology.
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This image prepared from data from the WMAP satellite in 2006 represents the expansion of the universe from the first moment of the Big Bang to the present day.
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The cosmic background, the map of which was extracted from WMAP, dated back 13 billion years. WMAP determined the state of the universe when it was 390,000 years old. The data from this background enabled a great many questions about the formation of the galaxies to be answered. The importance of the mission was summarized as follows on a NASA web page:
The WMAP mission addresses fundamental questions in cosmology: What is the geometry of the Universe? How did structures, such as galaxies and galaxy clusters, that we see in today's sky come about? How old is the Universe, and what are its constituents?Answers to these questions lie in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the remnant background radiation left over from the Big Bang… 22
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Cosmic background radiation, one of the greatest proofs of the Big Bang, was discovered in 1965 and has also been studied by the COBE (1992) and WMAP (2003) space satellites.
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Because of the lower sensitivity of the equipment on COBE, only the main lines of the cosmic background radiation in the universe had been mapped. The WMAP, however, was designed and launched specifically to measure the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang.
The advanced equipment on the WMAP produced a more detailed map of the cosmic background radiation and permitted definitive results to be obtained in many spheres regarding the universe. These data also clarified many subjects of debate such as the universe's expansion rate, its composition and its density.
Some of the information revealed by WMAP is as follows:
The universe is 13.73 billion years old. The margin for error here is around 1%. Prior to this, space was estimated to be 15-20 billion years old.23
The first stars began shining about 400 million years after the Big Bang.24 Such an early dating astonished scientists.
The universe is made up of 4.6% ordinary atoms, 23.3% dark matter and 72.1% dark energy. These new measurements will enable significant data to be obtained about the nature of the dark energy, which pulls galaxies apart.25
Scientists say that this information support and reinforce the theories of the Big Bang and the expanding universe. "This is a beginning of a new stage in our study of the early Universe," said one WMAP team member from Princeton University, N.J. "We can use this portrait … to understand the first moments of the Big Bang."26
Discoveries That Have Put an End to the Big Bang Debate
Two separate study groups made up of British, Australian and American scientists produced a three-dimensional map of some 266,000 galaxies in the wake of many years of research. The scientists compared the data they collected about the distribution of the galaxies with those of the cosmic background radiation disseminated throughout the universe, and obtained important findings about the origin of the galaxies. Researchers analyzing the studies concluded that galaxies formed where matter relatively clustered some 350,000 years after the Big Bang and took shape due to the gravitational force. The findings in question provided new evidence for the Big Bang theory.
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One study carried out over 10 years by the Anglo-Australian Observatory in New South Wales, Australia determined the positions in space of around 220,000 galaxies using a three-dimensional mapping technique. The mapping procedure, carried out using the observatory's 3.9 meter-diameter telescope, was nearly ten times larger than previous similar surveys.27 A team of scientists led by the director of the observatory, Dr. Matthew Colless, determined galaxies' positions relative to one another and the distances between them. They then modeled the distribution patterns and examined minute fluctuations in these models in great detail.
In a similar study conducted by the Apache Point Observatory in the US state of New Mexico - of another region of space - some 46,000 galaxies were three-dimensionally mapped and their distribution examined. The study, which used the 2.5 meter-diameter Sloan telescope, was led by Daniel Eisenstein from the University of Arizona.28
Both groups' findings were announced at a meeting held by the American Astronomical Society in San Diego on 11 January, 2005. Colless and Eisenstein's teams determined a correlation between fluctuations in the distances between galaxies and the fluctuations observed in background cosmic radiation. It was thus established that the galaxies were seeded around 350,000 years after the Big Bang in areas where matter was slightly more intensely clustered together.
The findings obtained from these studies further reinforced the Big Bang theory. Dr. Russell Cannon, a team member of the latter survey, emphasized this support in the words:
We've known for a long time that the best theory for the universe is the Big Bang - that it started in some enormous explosion in a tiny space and it expanded ever since. … What we can now be much more confident about is that it is the right basic idea, it all bolts together very nicely. 29
Facts Announced By The Qur'an 14 Centuries Ago
To sum up, the definite conclusion reached by astrophysics was that the entire universe, with its matter and time dimensions, came into being at a moment of zero with a big explosion (Big Bang). Before the Big Bang, there was no such thing as time. Matter, energy, and time came into existence out of a state of nothingness where neither matter, nor energy, and nor time was existent this event can be defined as entirely metaphysical. However, this great reality discovered by modern physics only at the end of the 20th century was announced to us in the Qur'an 14 centuries ago.
Gökleri ve yeri bir örnek edinmeksizin yaratandır... (Enam Suresi, 101)
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We are so peaceful on the Earth where we live that we never realize we exist on a tiny planet moving at thousands of kilometers an hour in a boundless, airless cavity. The fact to be kept in mind, however, is that Earth is a special shelter created for man so that he may live thereon.
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To Him is due the primal origin of the heavens and the earth... (Surat al-Anaam, 101)
The Big Bang theory showed that, in the beginning, all the objects in the universe were of one piece and then were parted. This fact, which was postulated by the Big Bang theory was stated in the Qur'an 14 centuries ago, when people had a very limited knowledge about the universe:
Do not the Unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined together (as one unit of creation), before we clove them asunder? We made from water every living thing. Will they not then believe? (Surat al-Anbiya, 30)
As stated at the beginning of this chapter, the expansion of the universe is one of the most important pieces of evidence that the universe was created out of nothing. Although this fact, which has existed since the universe was created, was not discovered by modern science until the 20th century, Allah informed us of this reality in the Qur'an which was revealed 1,400 years ago:
It is We who have built the universe with (Our creative) power, and, verily, it is We who are steadily expanding it. (Surat adh-Dhariyat, 47)
The Explosion That Brought Order
In reality, the Big Bang caused much greater trouble for the materialists and atheists, than the above confessions of the atheist philosopher, Antony Flew. The Big Bang proved not only that the universe was created out of nothing, but also that it was brought into being in a very planned, systematic and controlled manner.
Perfect order arose after the Big Bang, which was an explosion. Explosions, however, never bring about order. All of the observable explosions tend to harm, cause to disintegrate, and destroy what is present. For example, the atom and hydrogen bomb explosions, fire-damp explosions, volcanic explosions, natural gas explosions, solar explosions all have destructive effects.
If, however, we are introduced to a very detailed order after an explosion, we then conclude that there is an intellect, an intervention behind this explosion and that all the pieces dispersed by the explosion are made to move in a very controlled way.
The following statement made by Sir Fred Hoyle, who accepted his mistake after many years of opposition to the Big Bang Theory, expresses this situation very well:
The big bang theory holds that the universe began with a single explosion. Yet, an explosion merely throws matter apart, while the big bang has mysteriously produced the opposite effect - with matter clumping together in the form of galaxies.30
While stating that the Big Bang's giving way to order is contradictory, he surely interprets the Big Bang with a materialistic bias and assumes that this was an "uncontrolled explosion." In reality, however, he was the one who contradicted himself by making such a statement simply to dismiss the existence of a Creator, Who is Allah. If great order has arisen as the result of an explosion, then the concept of an "uncontrolled explosion" must be set aside and it must be accepted that the explosion was extraordinarily controlled.
This order holds true for all stages after the Big Bang. The matter that has emerged with the Big Bang is in the form of the particles we call "atomic particles". But these have come together in an orderly manner and formed atoms everywhere and in every part of the universe. Being composed in great order, these atoms have formed galaxies by concentrating in certain parts of the universe. In these galaxies stars have formed stars, and around these stars, star systems and planets have come into existence. All these vast heavenly bodies are extraordinarily organized. If we think that there are approximately 300 billion galaxies in the universe, and 300 billion stars in each one of them, we can better understand the degree of the extraordinariness of the order and balance in question.
Delicate Balances
Another aspect of this amazing order formed in the universe following the Big Bang is the creation of a "habitable universe". The conditions for the formation of a habitable planet are so many and so complex that it is almost impossible to think that this formation is coincidental.
Paul Davies, a renowned professor of theoretical physics, calculated how "fine tuned" the pace of expansion after the Big Bang was, and he reached an incredible conclusion. According to Davies, if the rate of expansion after the Big Bang had been different even by the ratio of one over a billion times a billion, no habitable star type would have been formed:
Careful measurement puts the rate of expansion very close to a critical value at which the universe will just escape its own gravity and expand forever. A little slower and the cosmos would collapse, a little faster and the cosmic material would have long ago completely dispersed. It is interesting to ask precisely how delicately the rate of expansion has been "fine-tuned" to fall on this narrow dividing line between two catastrophes. If at time I S (by which time the pattern of expansion was already firmly established) the expansion rate had differed from its actual value by more than 10-18, it would have been sufficient to throw the delicate balance out. The explosive vigour of the universe is thus matched with almost unbelievable accuracy to its gravitating power. The big bang was not, evidently, any old bang, but an explosion of exquisitely arranged magnitude.31
The amazing balance in the universe is thus explained in a scientific magazine:
If the density of the universe matter had been a little more, then the universe, according to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, would never expand due to the attraction forces of atomic particles, and have would have recollapsed to turn into a spot. If the density had initially been a little less, then the universe would have expanded at the highest speed, and the atomic particles would not have been able to attract and capture one another and stars and galaxies would never have been formed. Naturally, we, too, would not have existed! According to the calculations made, the difference between the initial real density of the universe and the critical density beyond which there is no likelihood of its formation is less than a quadrillion of a hundredth. This is like placing a pen on its sharp end so that it can stay so even after one billion years. Moreover, this balance gets more delicate as the universe expands.32
The famous physicist Prof. Stephen Hawking makes this comment on the balance in the speed of expansion in his book A Brief History of Time:
If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed before it ever reached its present size.33
As regards this interesting situation Paul Davies states:
It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in the numbers, has been rather carefully thought out… The seemingly miraculous concurrence of numerical values that nature has assigned to her fundamental constants must remain the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design.34
In relation to the same set of facts, an American professor of astronomy, George Greenstein, writes in his book The Symbiotic Universe:
As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency–or, rather Agency–must be involved (in the formation of the universe).35
We must conclude, when we examine the glorious system in the universe, that the existence of the universe and its workings rest on extremely delicate balances and an order too complex to be explained away by coincidental causes. As is evident, it is by no means possible for this delicate balance and order to have been formed on its own and by coincidence after a great explosion. The formation of such an order following an explosion such as the Big Bang could only have been possible as a result of conscious interventions at each step. This is the creation of Allah, Who created the universe out of nothing and Who at every moment keeps it under His control and guidance.
Objections to the Fact of Creation and Why These Are Invalid
As we have seen this far, the Big Bang theory means that the universe came into being from nothing, and obviously therefore proves Creation. For that reason, astronomers and physicists who espoused materialist philosophy have tried to come up with alternative accounts in order to be able, in their own eyes, to reject this reality. The "steady state" theory, one such instance, is a hopeless alternative produced by a number of scientists "philosophically" uneasy at the idea of the creation of the universe.
Two other alternatives proposed by materialists consist of models that accept the Big Bang but seek to interpret it in ways that exclude creation. One is the "oscillating universe model," and the other is the "quantum model of universe." Let us now consider these theories in turn, and see why they are invalid.
The oscillating universe model was advanced by the astronomers who disliked the idea the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe. In this model, it is claimed that the present expansion of the universe will eventually be reversed at some point and begin to contract. This contraction will cause everything to collapse into a single point that will then explode again, initiating a new round of expansion. This process, they say, is repeated infinitely in time. This model also holds that the universe has experienced this transformation an infinite number of times already and that it will continue to do so forever. In other words, the universe exists for eternity but it expands and collapses at different intervals with a huge explosion punctuating each cycle. The universe we live in is just one of those infinite universes going through the same cycle.
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This is nothing but a feeble attempt to accommodate the fact of the Big Bang to notions about an infinite universe. The proposed scenario is unsupported by the results of scientific research, which show that it is impossible for such an "oscillating" universe idea to come into being. Furthermore the laws of physics offer no reason why a contracting universe should explode again after collapsing into a single point: it ought to stay just as it is.36
Even if we allow that there is some mechanism by which this cycle of contraction-explosion-expansion does take place, the crucial point is that this cycle cannot go on for ever, as is claimed. Calculations for this model show that each universe will transfer an amount of entropy to its successor. In other words, the amount of useful energy available becomes less each time and every "opening" universe will open more slowly and have a larger diameter. This will cause a much smaller universe to form the next time around and so on, eventually petering out into nothing. Even if "open and close" universes can exist, they cannot endure for eternity. At some point it becomes necessary for "something" to be created from "nothing."37
Put briefly, the "oscillating" universe model is a hopeless fantasy whose physical reality is impossible.
The "quantum model of universe" is another attempt to purge the Big Bang of its creationist implications. Supporters of this model base it on the observations of quantum (subatomic) physics. In quantum physics, it is to be observed that subatomic particles appear and disappear spontaneously in a vacuum. Misinterpreting this observation as "matter can originate at quantum level, this is a property pertaining to matter," some physicists try to explain the origination of matter from non-existence during the creation of the universe as a "property pertaining to matter" and present it as a part of laws of nature.
However this syllogism is definitely out of question and in any case cannot explain how the universe came into being. William Lane Craig, the author of The Big Bang: Theism and Atheism explains why:
A quantum mechanical vacuum spawning material particles is far from the ordinary idea of a "vacuum" (meaning nothing). Rather, a quantum vacuum is a sea of continually forming and dissolving particles, which borrow energy from the vacuum for their brief existence. This is not "nothing," and hence, material particles do not come into being out of nothing.38
So in quantum physics, matter "does not exist when it was not before". What happens is that ambient energy suddenly becomes matter and just as suddenly disappears becoming energy again. In short, there is no condition of "spontaneous existence from nothingness" as is claimed.
In physics, no less than in other branches of the sciences, there are materialist scientists who do not hesitate to disguise the truth by overlooking critical points and details in their attempt to support their own views and achieve their ends. For them, it is much more important to defend materialism and atheism than to reveal scientific facts and realities.
In the face of the reality mentioned above, most scientists dismiss the quantum model of universe. C. J. Isham explains that "this model is not accepted widely because of the inherent difficulties that it poses."39 Even some of the originators of this idea, such as R. Brout and Ph. Spindel, have abandoned it.40
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A recent and much-publicized version of the quantum model of universe was advanced by Stephen Hawking. In his book A Brief History of Time, Hawkingstates that the Big Bang doesn't necessarily mean existence from nothingness. Instead of "no time" before the Big Bang, Hawking proposed the concept of "imaginary time." According to Hawking, there was only a 10-43 second "imaginary" time interval before the Big Bang took place and "real" time was formed after that. Hawking's hope was just to ignore the reality of "timelessness" before the Big Bang by means of this "imaginary" time.
As a concept, "imaginary time" is tantamount to zero or non-existence-like the imaginary number of people in a room or the imaginary number of cars on a road. Here Hawking is just playing with words.
One of the claims made by materialist scientists in the face of scientific advances that confirm the flawless creation of the universe from nothing is the idea that "maybe there are an infinite number of universes and one of these, the one we inhabit, by chance became capable of supporting life." This theory, known as the "multiverse," is no more than a figment of the imagination launched for the purpose of propping up materialism, and one not supported by any scientific findings. In an article titled "A Brief History of the Multiverse," published in The New York Times on 12 April, 2003, the well-known astrophysicist Paul Davies attempted to defend the claim. But Davies's article is full of discrepancies, and he himself recognizes the existence of Allah:
Why is nature so ingeniously, one might even say suspiciously, friendly to life? What do the laws of physics care about life and consciousness that they should conspire to make a hospitable universe? It's almost as if a Grand Designer [Allah] had it all figured out.41
In addition, Davies also admits that the multiverse theory is purely speculative. According to Davies, "It is but a small extra step to conjecture" the multiverse theory. However, he also admits that "credibility reaches a limit" and "As one slips down that slope, more and more must be accepted on faith."
What all this shows is that alternative models to the Big Bang such as steady-state, the oscillating universe model, multiverse theory, and quantum universe models in fact spring from the philosophical prejudices of materialists. Scientific discoveries have demonstrated the reality of the Big Bang and can even explain "existence from nothingness." And this is a definitive piece of evidence of creation by Allah.
Ken Miller from Columbia University describes the light the Big Bang sheds on the origin of the universe by saying:
One of the most remarkable findings of cosmological science is that the universe did have a beginning, and a spectacular beginning at that. Discussions of first causes used to be dry philosophical constructs, theoretical arguments against an infinite regression of events backwards in time. The big bang made the first cause real. It placed a wall at the beginning of time, closing to inquiry (but not, of course, to speculation) all events that might have occurred before that cosmic explosion. In the view of many scientists, the big bang casts a distinctly theological light on the origin of the universe.42
Materialists' Reactions to the Big Bang Are a Sign of Their Defeat-
An example of the opposition to the Big Bang is to be found in an essay by John Maddox, the editor of Nature (a materialist magazine), that appeared in 1989. In "Down with the Big Bang", Maddox declares the Big Bang to be philosophically unacceptable because it helps theologists by providing them with strong support for their ideas. The author also predicted that the Big Bang would be disproved and that support for it would disappear within a decade.43 Maddox can only have been even more discomforted by the subsequent discoveries during the next twenty years that have provided further evidence of the existence of the Big Bang.
This fact came as a most disturbing and even totally undermining one to materialists who maintained that the universe is infinite and eternal. That is why materialist scientists embarked on a search for models they thought would rule out the Big Bang and keep the idea of the eternal universe alive. But all their efforts along these lines ended in failure. Some materialists do act with more common sense on this subject. The British Materialist H. P. Lipson accepts the truth of creation, albeit "unpleasantly", when he says:
If living matter is not, then caused by the interplay of atoms, natural forces, and radiation, how has it come into being?…I think, however, that we must…admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it. 44
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In conclusion, the truth disclosed by science is this: Matter and time have been brought into being by our Creator, Possessor of immense power and unbound by neither time nor matter. It is Omniscient and Almighty Allah Who created the universe in which we live.
The End of Materialism
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Modern science proves the reality of the creation of the universe by Allah, contrary to what outdated materialists philosophy maintains. Newsweek made "Science Finds God" the cover story of its July 27th 1998 issue.
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All these facts indicate that the claims of the materialist philosophy, which is simply a 19th century dogma, are invalidated by 20th century science. By erroneously deeming everything to consist of nothing but matter, materialism made the great mistake of denying the evident existence of a Creator Who brought matter into being and ordered it. By exposing the great intellect and order prevalent in the material sphere, modern science has proved the existence of an almighty Creator Who rules over the material sphere, that is, Allah. The order we encounter in the universe is also revealed in the world of living beings, causing the greatest support of materialism, Darwin's theory of evolution, to be literally demolished.
Materialism could have held sway over a great number of people for centuries, having even disguised itself with the mask of "science" in the 19th century. Yet it seems that in the 21st century, it will be remembered as a superstitious belief opposing science. Humanity has rid itself of such superstitious beliefs as that the world stands on the horns of an ox, or that it is flat, and so will it rid itself of materialism.
The Secret Beyond Matter
Warning
The chapter you are now about to read reveals a crucial secret of your life. You should read it very attentively and thoroughly, for it is concerned with a subject that is liable to make a fundamental change in your outlook upon the external world.
The subject of this chapter is not just a point of view, a different approach, or a traditional philosophical thought: it is a fact which everyone, believing or unbelieving, must admit and which is also proven by science today.
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AN IMPORTANT STATEMENT
The Secret Beyond Matter is Not Wahdatul Wujood
The topic called "The Real Essence of Matter" has been criticized by some people. Having misunderstood the essence of the subject, these people claim that what is explained as the secret beyond matter is identical to the teaching of Wahdatul Wujood. Let us state, before all else, that the author of this book is a believer strictly abiding by the doctrine of Ahlus Sunnah and does not defend the view of Wahdatul Wujood.
However, it should also be remembered that Wahdatul Wujood was defended by some leading Islamic scholars including Muhyiddin Ibn al-'Arabi. It is true that numerous significant Islamic scholars who described the concept of Wahdatul Wujood in the past did so by considering some subjects found in these books. Still, what is explained in these books is not the same as Wahdatul Wujood.
Some of those who defended the view of Wahdatul Wujood were engrossed by some erroneous opinions and made some claims contrary to the Qur'an and the doctrine of Ahlus Sunnah. They, for example, completely rejected the creation of Allah. When the subject of the secret beyond matter is told, however, there is definitely no such claim. This section explains that all beings are created by Allah, and that the originals of these beings are seen by Him whereas people merely see the images of these beings formed in their brains.
Mountains, plains, flowers, people, seas-briefly everything we see and everything that Allah informs us in the Qur'an that exists and that He created out of nothing is created and does indeed exist. However, people cannot see, feel or hear the real nature of these beings through their sense organs. What they see and feel are only the copies that appear in their brains. This is a scientific fact taught at all schools primarily in medicine. The same applies to the article you are reading now; you can not see nor touch the real nature of it. The light coming from the original article is converted by some cells in your eyes into electrical signals, which are then conveyed to the sight center in the back of your brain. This is where the view of this article is created. In other words, you are not reading an article which is before your eyes through your eyes; in fact, this article is created in the sight center in the back of your brain. The article you are reading right now is a "copy of the article" within your brain. The original article is seen by Allah.
In conclusion, the fact that the matter is an illusion formed in our brains does not "reject" the matter, but provides us information about the real nature of the matter: that no person can have connection with its original.
There Is Matter Outside Of Us, But We Cannot Reach It
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… [S]aying that matter is an illusion does not mean it does not exist. Quiet the contrary: whether we perceive the physical world or not, it does exist. But we see it as a copy in our brain or, in other words, as an interpretation of our senses. For us, therefore, the physical world of matter is an illusion.
The matter outside is seen not just by us, but by other beings too. The angels Allah delegated to be watchers witness this world as well:
And the two recording angels are recording, sitting on the right and on the left. He does not utter a single word, without a watcher by him, pen in hand! (Surah Qaf: 17-18)
Most importantly, Allah sees everything. He created this world with all its details and sees it in all its states. As He informs us in the Qur'an:
… Heed Allah and know that Allah sees what you do. (Surat al-Baqara: 233)
Say: "Allah is a sufficient witness between me and you. He is certainly aware of and sees His servants." (Surat al-Isra': 96)
It must not be forgotten that Allah keeps the records of everything in the book called Lawh Mahfuz (Preserved Tablet). Even if we don't see all things, they are in the Lawh Mahfuz. Allah reveals that He keeps everything's record in the "Mother of the Book" called Lawh Mahfuz with the following verses:
It is in the Source Book with Us, high-exalted, full of wisdom. (Surat az-Zukhruf: 4)
… We possess an all-preserving Book. (Surah Qaf: 4)
Certainly there is no hidden thing in either heaven or Earth which is not in a Clear Book. (Surat an-Naml: 75)
Knowing The Real Essence Of Matter
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People who contemplate their surroundings conscientiously and wisely realise that everything in the universe—both living and non-living—must have been created. So the question now is "Who is the creator of all these things?"
It is evident that "the fact of creation", which reveals itself in every aspect of the universe, cannot be an outcome of the universe itself. For example, a bug could not have created itself. The solar system could not have created or organised itself. Neither plants, humans, bacteria, erythrocytes (red-blood corpuscles), nor butterflies could have created themselves. The possibility that these could all have originated "by chance" is not even imaginable.
We therefore arrive at the following conclusion: Everything that we see has been created. But none of the things that we see can be "creators" themselves. The Creator is different from and superior to all that we see with our eyes, a superior power, invisible but Whose existence and attributes are revealed in everything that exists.
This is the point at which those who deny the existence of Allah demur. They are conditioned not to believe in His existence unless they see Him with their own eyes. They may disregard the fact of "creation", but they cannot ignore the actuality of "creation" manifested all throughout the universe and find themselves forced to prove —falsely—that the universe and the living things in it have not been created. Evolutionary theory is a key example of their vain endeavours to this end.
The basic mistake of those who deny Allah is shared by many people who in fact do not really deny the existence of Allah but have a wrong perception of Him. These people, who make up the majority of the society in some countries, do not openly deny creation, but have superstitious beliefs about "where" Allah is. Most of them think that Allah is "up in the sky." They falsely imagine that Allah is behind a very distant planet and interferes with "worldly affairs" once in a while. Or perhaps that He does not intervene at all: He created the universe and then left it to itself and people are left to determine their fates for themselves. (Surely Allah is beyond that.)
Still others know the fact that Allah is "everywhere" as revealed in the Qur'an, but they cannot perceive exactly what this means. They think that Allah surrounds everything like radio waves or like an invisible, intangible gas. (Surely Allah is beyond that.)
However, this notion and other beliefs that are unable to make clear "where" Allah is (and maybe unwisely deny His evident existence because of that) are all based on a common mistake. They hold a prejudice without any grounds and then are moved to wrong opinions of Allah. What is this prejudice?
This prejudice is about the nature and characteristics of matter. Some people are so conditioned to suppositions about the real essence of matter that they may have never thought about it thoroughly. Modern science demolishes the prejudice about the nature of matter and discloses a very important and imposing reality. In the following pages, we will try to explain this great reality to which the Qur'an points.
The World of Electrical Signals
All the information that we have about the world we live in is conveyed to us by our five senses. The world we know of consists of what our eye sees, our hand feels, our nose smells, our tongue tastes, and our ear hears. We never think that the "external" world can be other than what our senses present to us, as we have been dependent only on those senses since the day of our birth.
Modern research in many different fields of science, however, points to a very different understanding and creates serious doubt about our senses and the world that we perceive with them.
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Stimulations coming from an object are converted into electrical signals and cause an effect in the brain. When we "see", we in fact view the effects of these electrical signals in our mind.
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The starting-point of this approach is that the notion of an "external world" shaped in our brain is only a response created in our brain by electrical signals. The only information you have about the redness of the apple, the hardness of the wood, -even, your mother, your father, your family, and everything that you own, your house, your job, and the lines of this book, are comprised only of electrical signals. In other words, we can never know the true color of the apple in the outside world, nor the true structure of wood there, nor the real appearance of our parents and the ones we love. They all exist in the outside world as Allah's creations, but we can only have direct experience of the copies in our brains for so long as we live.
In order to clarify the subject, let us consider our sense of sight, which provides us with the most extensive information about the external world.
How Do We See, Hear, And Taste?
The act of seeing is realised in a very progressive way. Light clusters (photons) that travel from the object to the eye pass through the lens in front of the eye where they are broken up and fall in reverse on the retina at the back of the eye. Here, the impinging light is turned into electrical signals that are transmitted by neurons to a tiny spot called the centre of vision in the back part of the brain. This electrical signal is perceived as an image in this centre in the brain after a series of processes. The act of seeing actually takes place in this tiny spot at the posterior part of the brain, which is pitch-dark and completely insulated from light.
Now, let us reconsider this seemingly ordinary and unremarkable process. When we say that "we see", we are in fact seeing the effects of the impulses reaching our eye and induced in our brain after they are transformed into electrical signals. That is, when we say that "we see", we are actually observing electrical signals in our mind.
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Bundles of light coming from an object fall on the retina upside-down. Here, the image is converted into electrical signals and transmitted to the centre of vision at the back of the brain. Since the brain is insulated from light, it is impossible for light to reach this centre. This means that we view a vast world of light and depth in a tiny spot which receives no light whatsoever.
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Even at the moment when we see the light and feel the heat of a fire, the inside of our brain is pitch dark and its temperature never changes.
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All the images we view in our lives are formed in our centre of vision, which makes up only a few cubic centimetres of the volume of the brain. Both the book you are now reading and the boundless landscape you see when you gaze at the horizon fit into this tiny space. Another point that has to be kept in mind is that, as we have noted before, the brain is insulated from light; its inside is absolutely dark. The brain has no contact with light itself, which exists outside.
We can explain this interesting situation with an example. Let us suppose that there is a burning candle in front of us. We can sit across from this candle and watch it at length. However, during this period of time, our brain never has any direct contact with the candle's original light. Even as we see the light of the candle, the inside of our brain is pitch dark. We watch a colourful and bright world inside our dark brain.
R.L. Gregory gives the following explanation of the miraculous aspect of seeing, an action that we take so very much for granted:
We are so familiar with seeing, that it takes a leap of imagination to realise that there are problems to be solved. But consider it. We are given tiny distorted upside-down images in the eyes, and we see separate solid objects in surrounding space. From the patterns of simulation on the retinas we perceive the world of objects, and this is nothing short of a miracle.45
The same situation applies to all our other senses. Sound, touch, taste and smell are all transmitted to the brain as electrical signals and are perceived in the relevant centres in the brain.
The sense of hearing functions in the same manner. The outer ear picks up available sounds by the auricle and directs them to the middle ear; the middle ear transmits the sound vibrations to the inner ear by intensifying them; the inner ear sends these vibrations to the brain by translating them into electrical signals. Just as with the eye, the act of hearing finalises in the centre of hearing in the brain. The brain is insulated from sound just as it is from light. Therefore, no matter how noisy it is outside, the inside of the brain is completely silent.
Nevertheless, even the subtlest sounds are perceived in the brain. The precision of this process is such that the ear of a healthy person hears everything without any atmospheric noise or interference. In your brain, which is insulated from sound, you listen to the symphonies of an orchestra, hear all the noises in a crowded place, and perceive all the sounds within a wide frequency band ranging from the rustling of a leaf to the roar of a jet plane. However, if the sound level in your brain were to be measured by a sensitive device at that moment, it would be seen that complete silence prevails there.
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We perceive a perfume, a flower, food we enjoy, the smell of the sea and all other smells we like or dislike in our brains.
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Our perception of odour forms in a similar way. Volatile molecules emitted by things such vanilla or a rose reach the receptors in the delicate hairs in the epithelium region of the nose and become involved in an interaction. This interaction is transmitted to the brain as electrical signals and perceived as smell. Everything that we smell, be it nice or bad, is nothing but the brain's perceiving of the interactions of volatile molecules after they have been transformed into electrical signals. You perceive the scent of a perfume, a flower, a food that you like, the sea, or other odours you like or dislike in your brain. The molecules themselves never reach the brain. Just as with sound and vision, what reaches your brain is simply electrical signals. In other words, all the odours that you have assumed to belong to external objects since you were born are just electrical signals that you feel through your sense organs. You can never have direct experience of the true nature of a scent in the outside world.
Similarly, there are four different types of chemical receptors in the front part of a human being's tongue. These register salty, sweet, sour, and bitter tastes. Our taste receptors transform these perceptions into electrical signals after a chain of chemical processes and transmit them to the brain. These signals are perceived as taste by the brain. The taste you get when you eat a chocolate bar or a fruit that you like is the interpretation of electrical signals by the brain. You can never reach the object on the outside; you can never see, smell or taste the chocolate itself. For instance, if taste nerves that travel to your brain are cut, nothing you eat at that moment will impinge upon your brain; you will completely lose your sense of taste.
And here is another interesting fact: We can never be sure that what we feel when we taste a food and what another person feels when he tastes the same food, or what we perceive when we hear a voice and what another person perceives when he hears the same voice are the same. On this point, Lincoln Barnett says that no one can know that another person perceives the colour red or hears the C note the same way as he himself does.46
Our sense of touch is no different than the others. When we touch an object, all information that will help us recognise the external world and objects are transmitted to the brain by the sense nerves on the skin. The feeling of touch is formed in our brain. Contrary to general belief, the place where we perceive the sense of touch is not at our finger tips or skin but at the relevant centre in our brain. As a result of the brain's assessment of electrical stimulations coming from objects to it, we sense different properties these objects such as hardness or softness, or heat or cold. We derive all details that help us recognise an object from these stimulations. Two famous philosophers, B. Russell and L. Wittgeinstein, have this to say:
For instance, whether a lemon truly exists or not and how it came to exist cannot be questioned and investigated. A lemon consists merely of a taste sensed by the tongue, an odour sensed by the nose, a colour and shape sensed by the eye; and only these features of it can be subject to examination and assessment. Science can never know the physical world.47
It is impossible for us to reach the original physical world. All objects around us are apprehended through one or more means of perception such as seeing, hearing, and touching. By processing the data in the centre of vision and in other sensory centres, our brain, throughout our lives, confronts not the "original" of the matter existing outside us but rather the copy formed inside our brain. We can never know what the original forms of these copies are like.
"The External World" Inside Our Brain
As a result of our scientific investigation of the physical facts described so far, we may conclude the following: we can never have direct experience of the original of anything we see, touch, hear, and perceive as matter, "the world" or "the universe." We merely know their copies in our brain.
Someone eating a fruit in fact is aware not of the actual fruit itself but of a 'picture' of it in the brain. The object considered to be a "fruit" actually consists of an electrical impression in the brain which includes the shape, taste, smell, and texture of the fruit. If the sight nerve travelling to the brain were to be severed suddenly, the image of the fruit would suddenly disappear. Similarly a disconnection in the nerve travelling from the sensors in the nose to the brain would completely destroy the sense of smell. Simply put, the fruit is nothing but the interpretation of electrical signals by the brain.
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All the things we see in our lives are formed in a part of our brain called the "vision center", which is only a few cubic centimetres in size. Both the book you are now reading and the boundless landscape you see when you gaze at the horizon fit into this tiny space. That is to say that when we look at objects, it is the interpretation of our brain which gives an idea of their size since, for obvious pysical reasons, the images formed of them in the centre of vision cannot be on the same scale as the objects themselves.
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Another point to be considered is the sense of distance. Take, for example, the distance between you and this book. It is only a feeling of emptiness formed in your brain. Objects that seem to be distant to the human being likewise exist in the brain. For instance, someone who watches the stars in the sky assumes that they are millions of light-years away from him. Yet what he "sees" are really the stars inside himself, in his centre of vision. While you read these lines, you are, in fact, not inside the room you assume you are in; on the contrary, the room is inside you. Your seeing your body makes you think that you are inside it. However, you must remember that you have never seen your original body, either; you have always seen a copy of it formed inside your brain.
The same applies to all your other perceptions. For instance, when you think that you hear the sound of the television in the next room, you are actually experiencing the sound inside your brain. Both the sound you imagine to be coming from metres away and the conversation of a person right next to you are perceived in a centre of hearing measuring a few cubic centimetres inside your brain. Within this centre of perception, no concept such as right, left, front or behind exists. That is, sound does not come to you from the right, from the left or from the air; there is no direction from which the sound comes.
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The same is true of odour. Just as a rose will appear as an image in the centre of vision, so will its fragrance be sensed in the centre of smell. Whether the source of the odour is near or far, and whether the odour is sour, sweet, acrid, pleasant, etc. are likewise matters for the brain to interpret.
The "external world" presented to us by our perceptions is merely a collection of the electrical signals reaching our brain. Throughout our lives, these signals are processed by our brain and we proceed without recognising that we are mistaken in assuming that these are the "original" versions of matter existing in the external world. We are misled because we can never directly reach matter itself by means of our senses.
Moreover, it is again our brain that interprets and attributes meaning to the signals about the "external world" and we assume to be dealing with its original. For example, let us consider the sense of hearing. It is in fact our brain that transforms the sound waves in the "external world" into a symphony. That is to say, we know music as interpreted by our brain, not the original music that exists outside. In the same manner, when we see colours, what reaches our eyes are merely electrical signals of different wavelengths. It is again our brain that transforms these signals into colours. The colours in the "external world" are unknown to us. We can never have direct experience of the true red of an apple, the true blue of the sky or the true green of trees. The external world depends entirely on the perceiver.
Even a slightest defect in the retina of the eye causes colour blindness. Some people perceive blue as green, and some red as blue. In these cases, it does not matter whether the object outside is coloured or not.
The World of Senses Can Occur Without Outside World's Existence
One factor which reveals that everything we see and experience exists in our brain and that we can never know the original of the matter that exists outside is that we do not need an outside world for senses to occur in the brain. Many technological developments such as simulators and also dreams are the most important evidences of this truth.
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As a result of artificial stimulations, a physical world as true and realistic as the real one can be formed in our brain. Thus, a person may think that he is flying an airplane, while he is actually sitting at home.
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Science writer, Rita Carter, states in her book, Mapping The Mind, that "there's no need for eyes to see" and describes at length an experiment carried out by scientists. In the experiment, blind patients were fitted with a device that transformed video pictures into vibrating pulses. A camera mounted next to the subjects' eyes spread the pulses over their backs so they had continuous sensory input from the visual world. The patients started to behave as if they could really see, after a while. For example, there was a zoom lens in one of the devices so as to move closer the image. When the zoom is operated without informing the patient beforehand, the patient had an urge to protect himself with two arms because the image on the subject's back expanded suddenly as though the world was looming in.48
As it is seen from this experiment, we can form sensations even when they are not caused by material equivalents in the outside world. All stimuli can be created artificially.
"The World of Senses" that We Experience in Dreams
A person can experience all senses vividly without the presence of the outside world. The most obvious example of this is dreams. A person lies on his bed with closed eyes while dreaming. However, in spite of this, that person senses many things which he or she experiences in real life, and experiences them so realistically that the dreams are indistinguishable from the real life experience. Everyone who reads this book will often bear witness to this truth in their own dreams. For example, a person lying down alone on a bed in a calm and quiet atmosphere at night might, in his dream, see himself in danger in a very crowded place. He could experience the event as if it were real, fleeing from danger in desperation and hiding behind a wall. Moreover, the images in his dreams are so realistic that he feels fear and panic as if he really was in danger. He has his heart in his mouth with every noise, is shaken with fear, his heart beats fast, he sweats and demonstrates the other physical affects that the human body undergoes in a dangerous situation.
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THE WORLD IN THE DREAMS
For you, reality is all that can be touched with the hand and seen with the eye. In your dreams you can also "touch with your hand and see with your eye", but in reality, you have neither hand nor eye, nor is there anything that can be touched or seen. There is no material reality in your dream that makes these things happen except your brain. You are living in an illusory world.
What is it that separates real life and dreams from one another? Ultimately, both aspects of life are experienced within the brain. If we are able to live easily in an unreal world during our dreams, a similar state of affairs can be equally true of the world we live in. When we wake up from a dream, there is no logical reason for not thinking that we have entered a longer dream that we call "real life". The reason we consider our dream to be fancy and the world as real is nothing but a product of our habits and prejudices. This suggests that we may well be awoken from the life on earth which we think we are living right now, just as we are awoken from a dream.
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A person who falls from a high place in his dream feels it with all his body, even though he is lying in bed without moving. Alternatively, one might see oneself slipping into a puddle, getting soaked and feeling cold because of a cold wind. However, in such a case, there is neither a puddle, nor is there wind. Furthermore, despite sleeping in a very hot room, one experiences the wetness and the cold, as if one were awake.
Someone who believes he is dealing with the original of the material world in his dream can be very sure of himself. He can put his hand on his friend's shoulder when the friend tells him that "it isn't possible to deal with the original of the world", and then ask "Don't you feel my hand on your shoulder? If so, how can you say that you don't see the original matter? What makes you think in this way? Let's take a trip up the Bosphorus; we can have a chat about it and you'll explain to me why you believe this." The dream that he sees in his deep sleep is so clear that he turns on the engine with pleasure and accelerates slowly, almost jumping the car by pressing the pedal suddenly. While going on the road, trees and road lines seem solid because of the speed. In addition, he breathes clean Bosphorus air. But suppose he is woken up by his ringing alarm clock just when he's getting ready to tell his friend that what he's seeing is the original matter. Wouldn't he object in the same manner regardless of whether he was asleep or awake?
When people wake up they understand that what they've seen until that moment is a dream. But for some reason they are not suspicious about the real nature of the life that starts with a "waking" image (what they call "real life") can also be a dream. However, the way we perceive images in "real life" is exactly the same as the way we perceive our dreams. We see both of them in the mind. We cannot understand they are images until we are woken up. Only then do we say "what I have just seen was a dream". So, how can we prove that what we see at any given moment is not a dream? We could be assuming that the moment in which we are living is real just because we haven't yet woken up. It is possible that we will discover this fact when we are woken up from this "waking dream" which takes longer than dreams we see everyday. We do not have any evidence that proves otherwise.
Many Islamic scholars have also proclaimed that the life around us is only a dream, and that only when we are awakened from that dream with "a big awakening", will people be able to understand that they live in a dreamlike world. A great Islamic scholar, Muhyiddin Ibn al-'Arabi, referred to as Sheikh Akbar (The greatest Sheikh) due to his superior knowledge, likens the world to our dreams by quoting a saying of the Prophet Muhammad (may Allah bless him and grant him peace):
The Prophet Muhammad [may Allah bless him and grant him peace] said that "people are asleep and wake up when they die." This is to say that the objects seen in the world when alive are similar to those seen when asleep while dreaming...49
In a verse of the Qur'an, people are told to say on doomsday when they are resurrected from the dead:
They will say, "Alas for us! Who has raised us from our sleeping-place? This is what the All-Merciful promised us. The Messengers were telling the truth." (Surah Ya Sin: 52)
As the verse demonstrates, people wake up on doomsday as if waking from a dream. Like someone woken from the middle of a dream in deep sleep, such people will similarly ask who has woken them up. As the verse points out, the world around us is like a dream and everybody will be woken up from this dream, and will begin to see images of the afterlife, which is the real life.
Who Is The Perceiver?
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The following question appears on the cover of the American science magazine New Scientist which dealt with this fact in its 30 January 1999 issue: "Beyond Reality: Is the Universe Really a Frolic of Primal Information and Matter Just a Mirage?"
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As we have explained so far, we can never have experience of the original of the material world we think we are inhabiting and that we call the "external world." However, here arises the question of primary importance. If we cannot reach the original of any of the material existence that we know of, what about our brain? Since our brain is a part of the physical world just like our arm, leg, or any other object, we cannot reach its original either.
When the brain is analysed, it is seen that there is nothing in it but lipid and protein molecules, which also exist in other living organisms. This means that within the piece of meat we call our "brain", there is nothing to observe the images, to constitute consciousness, or to form the being we call "myself".
R.L. Gregory refers to a mistake people make in relation to the perception of images in the brain:
There is a temptation, which must be avoided, to say that the eyes produce pictures in the brain. A picture in the brain suggests the need of some kind of internal eye to see it - but this would need a further eye to see its picture… and so on in an endless regress of eyes and pictures. This is absurd.50
This is the very point which puts the materialists, who do not hold anything but matter as real, in a quandary. To whom belongs "the eye inside" that sees, that interprets what it sees and reacts to it?
Karl Pribram also focused on this important question in the world of science and philosophy about who the perceiver is:
Philosophers since the Greeks have speculated about the "ghost" in the machine, the "little man inside the little man" and so on. Where is the I -- the entity that uses the brain? Who does the actual knowing? Or, as Saint Francis of Assisi once put it, "What we are looking for is what is looking".51
Now, think of this: The book in your hand, the room you are in, in brief, all the images in front of you are seen inside your brain. Is it the atoms that see these images? Blind, deaf, unconscious atoms? Why did some atoms acquire this quality whereas some did not? Do our acts of thinking, comprehending, remembering, being delighted, being unhappy, and everything else consist of the electrochemical reactions between these atoms?
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The brain is a heap of cells made up of protein and fat molecules. It is formed of nerve cells called neurons. There is no power in this piece of flesh to observe the images, to constitute consciousness, or to create the being we call "myself".
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When we ponder these questions, we see that there is no sense in looking for will in atoms. It is clear that the being who sees, hears, and feels is a supra-material being. This being is "alive" and it is neither matter, nor an image of matter. This being associates with the perceptions in front of it by using the image of the body.
This being is the "soul".
It is the soul that sees, hears, feels, perceives and interprets the copies in the brain of the matter existing on the outside. The intelligent beings that write and read these lines are not each a heap of atoms and molecules-and the chemical reactions between them-but a "soul".
The Real Absolute Being
All these facts bring us face to face with a very significant question. Since we can never know anything about the original of the material world and since we only have direct experience of replica images in our brains, then what is the source of these images?
So, who makes our soul watch the stars, the earth, the people, our body and all else that we see?
It is very evident that there exists a supreme Creator, Who has created the entire material universe and Who continues His creation ceaselessly. Since this Creator displays such a magnificent creation, He surely has eternal power and might.
This Creator introduces Himself to us. He has sent down a book and through this book has described Himself, and the universe and has explained the reason for our existence.
This Creator is Allah and the name of His Book is the Qur'an.
The fact that the universe, the heavens and the earth, are not stable, that their presence is only made possible by Allah's creation and that they will disappear when He ends this creation, is all explained as follows:
It is Allah Who sustains the heavens and the earth, lest they cease (to function): and if they should fail, there is none – not one – who can sustain them thereafter: Truly, He is Most Forbearing and Oft-Forgiving. (Surah Fatir, 41)
As we mentioned at the beginning, some people have no genuine understanding of Allah and so, as a result of terrible ignorance, they imagine Him as a being present somewhere in the heavens and not really intervening in worldly affairs. (Surely Allah is beyond that.) The basis of this corrupt logic actually lies in the mistaken thought that the universe is merely an assembly of matter and Allah is "outside" this material world, in a faraway place. (Surely Allah is beyond that.)
The only real absolute being is Allah. That means that only Allah exists; matter is not absolute being. The material world on the outside is one of the works of Allah's sublime creation. Allah is surely "everywhere" and encompasses all. This reality is explained in the Qur'an as follows;
Allah! There is no god but He,-the Living, the Self-subsisting, Eternal. Neither slumber nor sleep can overtake Him. His are all things in the heavens and on earth. Who can intercede in His presence except as He permits? He knows what (appears to His creatures as) before or after or behind them. Nor shall man grasp anything of His knowledge except as He wills. His Throne extends over the heavens and the earth, and He feels no fatigue in guarding and preserving them, for He is the Most High, and the Supreme (in glory). (Surat al-Baqara, 255)
The facts that Allah is not bound by space and that He encompasses everything are stated in another verse as follows:
To Allah belong the east and the West: Wherever you turn, there is the presence of Allah. For Allah is all-Pervading, and all-Knowing. (Surat al-Baqara, 115)
The fullness of faith consists of understanding this truth, avoiding the mistake of associating others with Allah and acknowledging Allah as the One Absolute Being. Someone who knows that, apart from Allah, everything is a shadow existence, will say with certain faith (at the level of Haqq-al yakin - truth of certainty) that only Allah exists and there is no other deity (or any being with strength) besides Him.
The materialists do not believe in the existence of Allah, because they cannot see Him with their eyes. But their claims are completely invalidated when they learn the real nature of matter. Someone who learns this truth understands that his own existence has the quality of an illusion, and grasps that a being which is an illusion will not be able to see a being which is absolute. As it is revealed in the Qur'an, human beings cannot see Allah but Allah sees them.
Eyesight cannot perceive Him but He perceives eyesight... (Surat al-An'am: 103)
Certainly, we human beings cannot see the Being of Allah with our eyes but we know that He completely encompasses our inside, our outside, our views and our thoughts. For this reason, Allah reveals Himself in the Qur'an as "controlling hearing and sight" (Surah Yunus: 31) We cannot say one word, we cannot even take one breath without Allah's knowing it. Therefore, Allah knows everything we do. This is revealed in the Qur'an:
Allah - Him from Whom nothing is hidden, either on earth or in heaven. (Surah Al 'Imran: 5)
As we imagine we have direct experience of the original of matter and watch the copy world in our brains, as we live our lives in other words, the closest being to us is Allah Himself. The secret is concealed in this reality: "It was We Who created man, and We know what dark suggestions his soul makes to him: for We are nearer to him than (his) jugular vein." (Surah Qaf: 16) Allah has encompassed man and He is "infinitely close" to him.
Allah informs men that He is "infinitely close" to them with the verse: "When My servants ask you concerning Me, I am indeed close (to them)" (Surat al-Baqara, 186). Another verse relates the same fact: "We told you that your Lord encompasses mankind." (Surat al-Isra, 60).
Man is misled by thinking that the being that is closest to him is himself. Allah, in truth, is closer to us even more than ourselves. He has revealed this fact in the verse "Why do you not intervene when it (the soul) comes up to the throat, under your very eyes. We are nearer to him than you, but you do not see it." (Surat al-Waqia, 83-85). As we learn from this verse, some people live unaware of this phenomenal fact, because they do not see it with their own eyes.
Some people are unaware of this great fact. They accept that Allah created them, but think that the work they do belongs to them. However, every action performed by a human being is created with the permission of Allah. For example, a person who writes a book writes it with the permission of Allah; every sentence, every idea, and every paragraph is composed because Allah wishes it. Allah reveals this very important principle in several verses; one of these verses is, "... Allah created both you and what you do?". (Surat as-Saffat: 96) In these words "... when you threw; it was Allah Who threw... ", (Surat al-Anfal: 17) Allah reveals that everything we do is an act that belongs to Him.
This is the reality. One may not want to concede this; but this does not change a thing.
Understanding the Reality of Matter Removes Worldly Ambitions
What we have described so far is one of the most profound truths that you have heard in your whole life. We have shown that the whole material world is really a shadow, and that this is the key to understanding the existence of Allah, His creation, and the fact that He is the one absolute Being. At the same time, we have presented a scientifically undeniable demonstration both of how helpless human beings are and a manifestation of Allah's wonderful artistry. This knowledge compels people to belief making it impossible for them not to believe. This is the main reason why some people avoid this truth.
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If one ponders deeply on all that is said here, one will soon of one's own realise how amazing and extraordinary is our situation: that we can never have direct experience of the “external world.”…
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The things that are being explained here are as true as a physical law or a chemical formula. When necessary, human beings can solve the most difficult mathematical problems and understand many very complex matters. However, when these same people are informed that matter is an appearance formed in the human mind, and that they have no connection with it, they have no desire at all to understand. This is an exaggerated case of an inability to understand, because the idea discussed here is no more difficult than the answer to the questions, "What is two times two?" or "How old are you?", If you ask any scientist or professor of neurology where they see the world, they will answer you that they see it in their brains. You will find this fact even in high school biology text books. But despite the fact that it is clearly evident, information pertaining to the fact that we perceive the material world in our brains and the results that this information entails for human beings can be overlooked. It is of major significance that one of the most important scientifically proven facts is so carefully hidden from people's eyes.
The fundamental reason why people easily accept all scientific facts, yet are so afraid to accept this one, is that learning the truth about matter will basically change the way everyone looks at life. Those who believe that matter and the self are absolute beings will discover one day that everything they have worked for and protected based on this idea - their spouses, their children, their wealth, even their own personalities - is an illusion. People are very afraid of this reality and pretend not to understand it even if they do. They try with determination to disprove the facts, which are simple enough for even a primary school child to understand. The reason behind this opposition is that they are afraid to lose what this world offers.
For someone who is attached to his possessions, his children, or the transient offerings of this world, the illusory nature of matter is cause for great fear. At the moment such a person understands this, he will have died before his natural death, and he will have surrendered his possessions and his soul. In the verse, "If He did ask you for it (all your wealth) and put you under pressure, you would be tight-fisted and it would bring out your malevolence." (Surah Muhammad: 37), Allah reveals how human beings will behave with meanness and rancor when He demands their possessions from them.
But when a person learns the real nature of matter, he will understand that his soul and his possessions already belong to Allah. If he knows that there is nothing to give or to resist giving, he will submit himself and all he possesses to Allah before he dies. For sincere believers, this is a beautiful and honorable thing and a way to draw nearer to Allah. Those who do not believe or whose faith is weak cannot recognize this beauty and stubbornly reject this reality.
The Environment That Will Come To Be When the Real Nature of Matter Is Not Kept Secret
Those who know that they have no connection with the actual material things, and that they are in the presence only of images that Allah presents to them, will change their whole way of living, their view of life and their values. This will be a change that will be useful both from the personal and social point of view, because someone who sees this truth will live without difficulty according to the high moral qualities that Allah has revealed in the Qur'an.
For those who do not regard the world as important and who understand that matter is an illusion, it is spiritual things that deserve to be given importance. Someone who knows that Allah is listening to him and watching him at every moment, and is aware that he will render an account of his every action in the hereafter, will naturally live a morally virtuous life. He will be very careful about what Allah has commanded and what He has forbidden. Everyone in society will be filled with love and respect for one another, and everyone will compete with one another in the performance of good and noble deeds. People will change the values according to which they judge others. Material things will lose their value and therefore, people will be judged not according to their standing and position in society but according to their moral character and their piety. No one will pursue those things whose source is illusion; everyone will seek after truth. Everyone will act without worrying about what others will think; the only question in their minds will be whether or not Allah will be pleased with what they do. In the place of the feelings of pride, arrogance and self-satisfaction that come from possessions, property, standing and position, there will be a sense of the understanding of humility and dependence. Therefore, people will willingly live according to those examples of good moral qualities spoken of in the Qur'an. Eventually, these changes will put an end to many problems of today's societies.
In place of angry, aggressive people, anxious even about small profit, there will be those who know that everything they see is an image shown by Allah. They will be well aware that reactions of anger and loud shouting make them look foolish. Well-being and trust will prevail in individuals and societies and everyone will be pleased with his life and possessions. These, then, are some of the blessings that this hidden reality will bring to individuals and societies. Knowing, considering and living according to this reality will bring many more goodnesses to human beings. Those who wish to attain these goodnesses should consider this reality well and endeavor to understand it. In one verse, Allah says,
Clear insights have come to you from your Lord. Whoever sees clearly, does so to his own benefit. Whoever is blind, it is to his own detriment... (Surat al-An'am: 104)
Logical Deficiencies of the Materialists
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Some people accept that when they touch a bus, they feel the cold metal in their brains. On the other hand, they do not accept that the feeling of pain at the moment the bus hits them forms in the brain. However, a person will feel the same pain if he sees himself falling under a bus in his dream.
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From the beginning of this chapter, we have seen through scientific evidence that matter is not an absolute entity as the materialists claim, and that we never have direct experience of the original of the matter that exists outside us. Materialists resist in an extremely dogmatic manner this evident reality which destroys their philosophy and bring forward baseless anti-theses.
For example, one of the biggest advocates of the materialist philosophy in the 20th century, an ardent Marxist, George Politzer, gave the "bus example" as supposedly a great evidence regarding this matter. According to Politzer, philosophers who espouse the fact that we deal with the copy of matter in our brains also run away when they see a bus bearing down on them.52
When another famous materialist, Johnson, was told that we are never in contact with the original matter, he tried to deny this truth by giving stones a kick.53
There are similar examples and ill-considered statements such as "You understand the real nature of matter when you are slapped in the face," in the books of famous materialists such as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and others.
The point where materialists are mistaken is that they think the concept of "perception" only applies to the sense of sight. In fact, all sensations, such as touch, contact, hardness, pain, heat, cold and wetness also form in the human brain, in precisely the same way that visual images are formed. For instance, someone who feels the cold metal of the door as he gets off a bus, actually "feels the cold metal" in his brain. This is a clear and well-known truth. As we have already seen, the sense of touch forms in a particular section of the brain, through nerve signals from the fingertips, for instance. It is not your fingers that do the feeling. People accept this because it has been demonstrated scientifically. However, when it comes to the bus hitting someone, not just to his feeling the metal of the indoor-in other words when the sensation of touch is more violent and painful-they think that this fact somehow no longer applies. However, pain or heavy blows are also perceived in the brain. Someone who is hit by a bus feels all the violence and pain of the event in his brain.
In order to understand this better, it will be useful to consider our dreams. A person may dream of being hit by a bus, of opening his eyes in hospital later, being taken for an operation, the doctors talking, his family's anxious arrival at the hospital, and that he is crippled or suffers terrible pain. In his dream, he perceives all the images, sounds, feelings of hardness, pain, light, the colors in the hospital, all aspects of the incident in fact, very clearly and distinctly. They are all as natural and believable as in real life. At that moment, if the person who is having that dream were told it was only a dream, he would not believe it. Yet all that he is seeing is an illusion, and the bus, hospital and even the body he sees in his dream have no physical counterpart in the real world. Although they have no physical counterparts, he still feels as if a 'real body' has been hit by a 'real bus.'
In the same way, there is no validity to the materialists' objections along the lines of "You realize that the real nature of matter when someone hits you," "You cannot doubt whether you see the original of matter when someone kicks your knee," "You run away when you meet a savage dog," "When a bus has hit you, you understand whether it is in your brain or not," or "In that case, go and stand on the motorway in front of the oncoming traffic". A sharp blow, the pain from a dog's teeth or a violent slap are not evidence that you are dealing with the matter itself. As we have seen, you can experience the same things in dreams, with no corresponding physical counterparts. Furthermore, the violence of a sensation does not alter the fact that the sensation in question occurs in the brain. This is a clearly proven scientific fact.
The reason why some people think that a fast-moving bus on the motorway or an accident caused by that bus are striking proofs of the fact they are dealing with the physical existence of matter is that the image concerned is seen and felt as so real that it deceives one. The images around them, for instance the perfect perspective and depth of the motorway, the perfection of the colors, shapes and shadows they contain, the vividness of sound, smell and hardness, and the completeness of the logic within that image can deceive some people. On account of this vividness, some people forget that these are actually perceptions. Yet no matter how complete and flawless the perceptions in the mind may be, that does not alter the fact that they are still perceptions. If someone is hit by a car while walking along the road, or is trapped under a house that collapses during an earthquake, or is surrounded by flames during a fire, or trips up and falls down the stairs, he still experiences all these things in his mind, and is not actually confronting the reality of what happens.
When someone falls under a bus, the bus in his mind hits the body in his mind. The fact that he dies as a result, or that his body is completely shattered, does not alter this reality. If something a person experiences in his mind ends in death, Allah replaces the images He shows that person with images belonging to the hereafter. Those who are unable to understand the truth of this now on honest reflection will certainly do so when they die.
The Example of Connecting the Nerves in Parallel
Let us consider the car crash example of Politzer: In this accident, if the crushed person's nerves travelling from the points of impact to his brain, were connected to another person's, for instance Politzer's brain, with a parallel connection, at the moment the bus hit that person, it would also hit Politzer, who was sitting at home at that moment. Better to say, all the feelings experienced by that person having the accident would be experienced by Politzer, just as the same song is listened to from two different loudspeakers connected to the same tape recorder. Politzer would feel, see, and experience the braking sound of the bus, the impact of the bus on his body, the images of a broken arm and the shedding of blood, fracture aches, the images of his entering the operation room, the hardness of the plaster cast, and the feebleness of his arm.
Every other person connected to the man's nerves in parallel would experience the accident from beginning to end just like Politzer. If the man in the accident fell into a coma, they would all fall into a coma. Moreover, if all the perceptions pertaining to the car accident could be recorded by some sophisticated device and if all these perceptions were then transmitted to another person, the bus would knock him down many times.
So, which one of the buses hitting those people is real? The materialist philosophy has no consistent answer to this question. The right answer is that they would all experience the car accident in all its details in their own minds.
The same principle applies to the cake and stone examples. If the nerves of the sense organs of Engels, who felt the satiety and fullness of the cake in his stomach after eating a cake, were connected to a second person's brain in parallel, that person would also feel full when Engels ate the cake and was satiated. If the nerves of Johnson, who felt pain in his foot when he delivered a sound kick to a stone, were connected to a second person in parallel, that person would feel the same pain.
So, which cake or which stone is the real one? The materialist philosophy again falls short of giving a consistent answer to this question. The correct and consistent answer is this: both Engels and the second person have eaten the cake in their minds and are satiated; both Johnson and the second person have fully experienced the moment of striking the stone in their minds.
Let us make a change in the example we gave about Politzer: let us connect the nerves of the man hit by the bus to Politzer's brain, and the nerves of Politzer sitting in his house to that man's brain, who is hit by the bus. In this case, Politzer will think that a bus has hit him, although sitting at home; and the man actually hit by the bus will never feel the impact of the accident and think that he is sitting in Politzer's house. The very same logic may be applied to the cake and the stone examples.
As is evident, it is not possible for man to transcend his senses and break free of them. In this respect, a man's soul can be subjected to all kinds of representations, although it has no physical body and no material existence and lacks material weight. It is not possible for a person to realise this because he assumes these three-dimensional images to be real and is absolutely certain of their existence, because everybody depends on the perceptions stemming from his sensory organs.
The famous British philosopher David Hume expresses his thoughts on this fact:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.54
The Formation of Perceptions in the Brain is not Philosophy but Scientific Fact
Materialists claim that what we have been presenting here is a philosophical view. However, to hold that we never have direct experience of the original of the "external world" is not a matter of philosophy but a plain scientific fact. How images and feelings form in the brain is taught in detail in all medical schools. These facts, proven by 20th-century science, and particularly by physics, clearly show that matter does not have an absolute reality and that everyone in a sense is watching the "monitor in his brain".
Everyone who believes in science, be he an atheist, Buddhist, or of any other persuasion, has to accept this fact. A materialist might deny the existence of a Creator in his own limited understanding, yet he cannot deny this scientific reality.
The inability of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Georges Politzer and others to comprehend such a simple and evident fact still seems startling, even although the level of scientific understanding and range of possibilities of their times were less than adequate. In our time, science and technology are highly advanced and recent discoveries make it easier to comprehend this fact. Materialists, on the other hand, are stricken with the fear of both comprehending this fact, albeit partially, and realising how definitively it demolishes their philosophy.
The Great Fear of the Materialists
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Turkish materialist writer Rennan Pekunlu says that "the theory of evolution is not so important, the real threat is this subject," because he is aware that this subject reveals how the absoluteness of matter, the only concept in which he has faith, is a grave deception.
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For quite some time now, materialists have been loudly giving vent to their fear and panic in their publications, conferences and panel discussions. Their agitated and hopeless discourses imply that they are suffering from a severe intellectual crisis. The scientific collapse of the theory of evolution, the so-called basis of their philosophy, had already come as a great shock to them. Now, they have come to realise that they are starting to lose matter itself, which is a greater mainstay for them than Darwinism, and the shock they experience as a result is even greater. They declare that this issue is the "biggest threat" for them, and that it totally "demolishes their cultural fabric".
One of those who expressed in the most outspoken way this anxiety and panic felt by materialist circles was Renan Pekunlu, an academician as well as contributor to Bilim ve Utopya (Science and Utopia), a periodical which has assumed the task of defending materialism. Both in his articles in Bilim ve Utopya and in the panel discussions he has attended, Pekunlu presented the book The Evolution Deceit, the first book in which this subject was brought up,as the number one "threat" to materialism. What disturbed Pekunlu even more than the chapters that invalidated Darwinism was the part you are currently reading. To his readers and (only a handful of) audience, Pekunlu delivered the message: "Do not let yourselves be carried away by the indoctrination of idealism and keep your faith in materialism," and gave Vladimir I. Lenin, the leader of the bloody communist revolution in Russia, as his reference. Advising everyone to read Lenin's century-old book titled Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, all Pekunlu did was to repeat the ignorant counsels of Lenin, stating: "Do not think over this issue, or you will lose track of materialism and be carried away by religion." In an article he wrote in the aforementioned periodical, he quoted the following lines from Lenin:
Once you deny objective reality, given us in sensation, you have already lost every weapon against fideism, for you have slipped into agnosticism or subjectivism-and that is all that fideism requires. A single claw ensnared, and the bird is lost. And our Machists have all become ensnared in idealism, that is, in a diluted, subtle fideism; they became ensnared from the moment they took "sensation" not as an image of the external world but as a special "element". It is nobody's sensation, nobody's mind, nobody's spirit, nobody's will.55
These words explicitly demonstrate that the fact which Lenin alarmingly realised and wanted to banish both from his own mind and the minds of his "comrades" also disturbs contemporary materialists in a similar way. However, Pekunlu and other materialists suffer yet a greater distress; because they are aware that this fact is now being put forward in a far more explicit, certain and convincing way than 100 years ago. For the first time in world history, this subject is being explained in a quite irresistible way.
Nevertheless, the general picture is that a great number of materialist scientists still take a very superficial stand against the fact that "we never have direct experience of the original of matter." The subject explained in this chapter is one of the most important and most exciting subjects that one can ever come across in his life. There is no chance of ever having faced such a crucial subject before. Still, the reactions of these scientists and the manner they adopt in their speeches and articles hint at how superficial their comprehension is.
The reactions of some materialists to the subject discussed here show in no uncertain manner that their blind adherence to materialism has caused some kind of a flaw in their logic and for this reason, they are far removed from comprehending the subject. For instance, Alaattin Senel, also an academician and a writer for Bilim ve Utopya, delivered himself of similar messages as Rennan Pekunlu saying: "Forget the collapse of Darwinism, the really threatening subject is this one," and issued such challenges as "so you prove what you say," sensing that his own philosophy is groundless. What is more interesting is that this writer himself has shown in his writings that he can by no means grasp this fact which he considers to be a menace.
For instance, in an article in which he exclusively discussed this subject, Senel accepts that the external world is perceived in the brain as an image. However, he then goes on to write: "I do not know whether the images in my brain have correlates in the external world or not, but the same thing applies when I speak on the phone. When I speak on the telephone, I cannot see the person I am speaking to but I can have this conversation confirmed when I later see him face to face."56
By saying so, this writer actually means the following: "If we doubt our perceptions, we can look at matter itself and check its reality." However, this is an evident misconception, because it is impossible for us to reach matter itself. We can never get out of our minds and know what is "outside". Whether the voice on the phone has a correlate or not can be confirmed by the person on the phone. However, this confirmation is also a confirmation experienced by the mind.
As a matter of fact, the same events may be experienced also in dreams. For instance, Senel may also see in his dream that he speaks on the phone and then have this conversation confirmed by the person to whom he spoke. Or, Pekunlu may in his dream feel as if he is facing "a serious threat" and advise people to read the century-old books of Lenin. However, no matter what they do, these materialists cannot deny the fact that they never experience the original of the events that have happened and the people they have talked to in their dreams.
Materialists Have Fallen Into The Biggest Trap In History
The atmosphere of panic sweeping through materialist circles in Turkey, of which we have mentioned only a few examples, shows that materialists face utter defeat, one which they have never previously suffered. That we do not have direct experience of the original matter has been proven by modern science and it is put forward in a very clear, straightforward and forceful way. It only remains for materialists to see and acknowledge the collapse of the entire material world in which they blindly believe and on which they rely.
Materialist thought has always existed throughout the history of humanity. Being very assured of themselves and the philosophy they believed in, materialists ignorantly revolted against Allah Who created them. The irrational and unscientific scenario they formulated maintained that matter has no beginning or end, and that none of its forms could possibly have a Creator. (Surely Allah is beyond that.) Because of their arrogance, they denied Allah and took refuge in the lie that matter was the absolute entity. They were so confident in this philosophy that they thought that it would never be possible to put forward an explanation proving the contrary.
That is why the facts as set forth in this book regarding the real nature of matter surprised these people to such a degree. What has been explained here has destroyed the very basis of their philosophy and left no ground for further discussion. Matter, upon which they based all their thoughts, lives, arrogance and denial, vanished all of a sudden.
One of the attributes of Allah is His plotting against the unbelievers. This is stated in the verse: "They plot and plan, but Allah too plans; and Allah is the best of planners." (Surat al- Anfal, 30)
Allah entrapped materialists by making them assume that they deal with the original of matter and, in so doing, humiliated them in hidden ways. Materialists deemed they knew the originals of their possessions, status, rank, the society to which they belonged, the whole world and everything else, of which they actually had an experience of only the copies, and ignorantly grew arrogant toward Allah in their reliance on these things. Displaying the greatest unreason, they revolted against Allah by being boastful, thereby taking their unbelief to extremes. While so doing, they totally relied on matter. Yet, they were so lacking in understanding that they failed to think that Allah totally encompasses them. Allah announces the state to which the unbelievers are led as a result of their thick-headedness:
Or do they intend a plot (against you)? But those who defy Allah shall themselves be ruined! (Surat at-Tur, 42)
This is most probably the biggest defeat in history. As they grew more arrogant, materialists were tricked and suffered a serious defeat in the struggle they attempted to wage against Allah by bringing up something monstrous against Him. The verse: "Thus have We placed leaders in every town, its wicked men, to plot therein: but they only plot against their own souls, and they do not perceive it," indicates how lacking in awareness these people who ignorantly revolt against our Creator are, and what their fate will be. (Surat al- An'am: 123). In another verse the same fact is related:
Fain would they deceive Allah and those who believe, but they only deceive themselves, and do not realise it! (Surat al-Baqarah, 9)
While the unbelievers try to plot, they do not realise a very important fact, which is stressed by the words "they only deceive themselves, and do not realise it!". This is the fact that everything they experience is a piece of copy image they deal with in their minds, and they have experience of the copies of all the plots they devise in their brains just like every other act they perform. Their folly has made them forget that they are all alone with Allah and, are thus entrapped in their own devious plans.
No less than those unbelievers who lived in the past, those living today face a reality that will shake their devious plans to their very foundations. With the statement that "…feeble indeed is the cunning of Satan" (Surat an-Nisa, 76), Allah says that these plots were doomed to end with failure the day they were hatched. He gives good tidings to believers with the assertion that "…not the least harm will their cunning do you." (Surat 'Ali Imran, 120)
In another verse Allah says: "As for the unbelievers, their deeds are like a mirage in sandy deserts, which the man parched with thirst mistakes for water; until when he comes up to it, he finds it to be nothing." (Surat an-Nur, 39). Materialism, too, becomes a "mirage" for the rebellious, just as stated in this verse; when they have recourse to it, they find it to be nothing but an illusion. Allah has deceived them with such a mirage, and shown them this whole collection of images as if they experienced their originals. All those professors, astronomers, biologists, physicists, and all others regardless of their rank and position are simply deceived like children, and are humiliated because they unwisely took matter as their god. (Surely Allah is beyond that.) Assuming the copy images they see in their brains to be absolute, they based their philosophy and ideology on it, became involved in serious discussions, and indulged in so-called "intellectual" discourse. They deemed themselves wise enough to offer an argument about the truth of the universe and, more importantly, to imagine vain thoughts about Allah with their limited intelligence. Allah explains their situation in the following verse:
And (the unbelievers) plotted and planned, and Allah too planned, and the best of planners is Allah. (Surat 'Ali Imran, 54)
It may be possible to escape from some plots; however, this plan of Allah against the unbelievers is so foolproof that there is no way of escape from it. No matter what they do or to whom they appeal, they can never find a helper other than Allah. As Allah declares in the Qur'an, "they shall not find for them other than Allah a patron or a helper." (Surat an-Nisa, 173)
Materialists never expected to fall into such a trap. Having all the means of the 20th century at their disposal, they thought they could remain obdurate in their denial and coerce people into disbelief. In the Qur'an, Allah thus describes this unremittingly stubborn mentality of the unbelievers and their end:
They plotted and planned, but We too planned, and they did not perceive it. Then see what was the end of their plot! This, that We destroyed them and their people, all (of them). (Surat an-Naml, 50-51)
This, on another level, is what the verses come to mean: materialists are made to realise that they have experience of only the copies in their brains of everything they own, and therefore everything they possess has been destroyed. As they witness their possessions, factories, gold, dollars, children, spouses, friends, rank and status, and even their own bodies, the originals of all of which they deem to know, slipping out of their reach, they are "destroyed" in a sense. At this point, they are no longer material entities but souls.
No doubt, realising this truth is the worst possible situation for materialists. This is tantamount, in their own words, to "death before dying" in this world.
With the verse, "Leave Me alone, (to deal) with the (creature) whom I created (bare and) alone",Allah reveals the fact that each human being is, in truth, all alone in His presence. (Surat al- Muddaththir, 11). This remarkable fact is repeated in many other verses:
And behold! You come to us bare and alone as We created you for the first time: you have left behind you all (the favours) which We bestowed on you… (Surat al-An'am, 94)
And each one of them will come to Him on the Day of Resurrection, alone. (Surah Maryam, 95)
This, on another level, is what the verses indicate: those who ignorantly take matter as their god (surely Allah is beyond that) have nevertheless come from Allah and must return to Him. They must submit their wills to Allah whether they want to or not. Now they must wait for the Day of Judgement when every one of them will be called to account, however unwilling they may be to acknowledge this.
Conclusion
The subject we have explained so far is one of the greatest truths that will ever be told to you in your lifetime. Proving that we never have direct experience of the original of matter, this subject is the key to comprehending the existence of and creation by Allah, and to understanding that He is the only absolute being.
The person who understands this subject realises that the world is not the sort of place it is surmised by most people to be. The world is not an absolute place, of which we know the original, as supposed by those who wander aimlessly about in the streets, who get into fights in pubs, who show off in luxurious cafes, who brag about their property, or who dedicate their lives to hollow aims. All our knowledge of the world consists of copy images we see in our brains. All of the people we have cited above are only shadow beings who watch these copy images in their minds: yet they are not aware of this.
This concept is very important, for it undermines and demolishes the materialist philosophy that denies the existence of Allah. This is the reason why materialists like Marx, Engels, and Lenin felt panic, became enraged, and warned their followers "not to think over" this concept when they were told about it. As a matter of fact, such people are in such a state of mental deficiency that they cannot even comprehend the fact that perceptions are formed inside the brain. They assume that the world they watch in their brains is the "original external world" and they cannot comprehend the obvious evidence to the contrary.
This unawareness is the outcome of the lack of wisdom given to disbelievers by Allah. As Allah reveals in the Qur'an, the unbelievers "have hearts with which they do not understand, eyes with which they do not see, and ears with which they do not hear. They are like cattle—nay more misguided: for they are heedless (of warning)." (Surat al-Araf, 179)
In the age in which we live, this fact has been empirically proven by the body of evidence put forward by science. The fact that we do not experience the original of the universe is described in such a concrete, clear, and explicit way for the first time in history.
For this reason, the 21st century will be a historical-turning point when people will generally comprehend the divine realities and be led in crowds to Allah, the only Absolute Being. In the 21st century, the twisted materialistic creeds of the 19th century will be relegated to the trash-heaps of history, Allah's existence and creation will be grasped, such facts as spacelessness and timelessness will be understood, and humanity will break free of the centuries-old veils, deceits and superstitions enshrouding the truth.
Relativity of Time and the Reality of Destiny
The foregoing arguments demonstrate that we can never have direct experience of the outside world, that we only know matter as it exists inside our brains and that one leads one's whole life in "spacelessness". To assert the contrary would be to hold a superstitious belief removed from reason and scientific truth, for the things set out here are all technical and scientific facts even described in middle school textbooks.
This fact refutes the primary assumption of the materialist philosophy that underlies evolutionary theory. This is the assumption that matter is absolute and eternal. The second assumption upon which the materialistic philosophy rests is the supposition that time is absolute and eternal. This is as superstitious as the first one.
The Perception of Time
The perception we call time is, in fact, a method by which one moment is compared to another. We can explain this with an example. For instance, when a person taps an object, he hears a particular sound. When he taps the same object five minutes later, he hears another sound. He then perceives that there is an interval between the first sound and the second, and he calls this interval "time." Yet at the time he hears the second sound, the first sound he heard is no more than a bit of information in his memory. The person formulates the perception of "time" by comparing the moment in which he lives with what he has stored in his memory. If this comparison is not made, neither can there be perception of time.
Similarly, a person makes a comparison when he sees someone entering a room through its door and sitting in an armchair in the middle of the room. By the time this person sits in the armchair, the images related to the moments he opens the door, walks into the room, and makes his way to the armchair have been compiled as bits of information in the brain. The perception of time occurs when one compares the man sitting in the armchair with those bits of stored information.
In brief, time comes to exist as a result of the comparison made between a number of illusions stored in the brain. If man had not had memory, his brain would not have made such interpretations and therefore the perception of time would never have been formed. The reason why one determines himself to be thirty years old is only because he has accumulated information pertaining to those thirty years in his mind. If his memory did not exist, he would not be thinking of the existence of such a preceding period of time and he would only experience the single "moment" he was living in.
The Scientific Explanation Of Timelessness
Let us try to clarify the subject by quoting explanations by various scientists and scholars on the subject. Regarding the subject of time flowing backwards, the famous intellectual and Nobel laureate professor of genetics, François Jacob, states the following in his book Le Jeu des Possibles (The Possible and the Actual):
Films played backward, make it possible for us to imagine a world in which time flows backwards. A world in which milk separates itself from the coffee and jumps out of the cup to reach the milk-pan; a world in which light rays are emitted from the walls to be collected in a trap (gravity center) instead of gushing out from a light source; a world in which a stone slopes to the palm of a man by the astonishing cooperation of innumerable drops of water making it possible for the stone to jump out of water. Yet, in such a world in which time has such opposite features, the processes of our brain and the way our memory compiles information, would similarly be functioning backwards. The same is true for the past and future and the world will appear to us exactly as it currently appears.57
Since our brain is accustomed to a certain sequence of events, the world operates not as it is related above and we assume that time always flows forward. However, this is a decision reached in the brain and therefore is completely relative. In reality, we can never know how time flows or even whether it flows or not. This is an indication of the fact that time is not an absolute fact but just a sort of perception.
The relativity of time is a fact also verified by the most important physicist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein. Lincoln Barnett, writes in his book The Universe and Dr. Einstein:
Along with absolute space, Einstein discarded the concept of absolute time — of a steady, unvarying inexorable universal time flow, streaming from the infinite past to the infinite future. Much of the obscurity that has surrounded the Theory of Relativity stems from man's reluctance to recognize that a sense of time, like sense of colour, is a form of perception. Just as space is simply a possible order of material objects, so time is simply a possible order of events. The subjectivity of time is best explained in Einstein's own words. "The experiences of an individual," he says, "appear to us arranged in a series of events; in this series the single events which we remember appear to be ordered according to the criterion of 'earlier" and 'later'. There exists, therefore, for the individual, an I-time, or subjective time. This in itself is not measurable. I can, indeed, associate numbers with the events, in such a way that a greater number is associated with the later event than with an earlier one."58
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The past is composed of information given to a person's memory. If a memory is erased, her past is also. The future is composed of ideas. Without them, only the present moment of experience remains.
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Einstein himself pointed out, as quoted from Barnett's book, that "space and time are forms of intuition, which can no more be divorced from consciousness than can our concepts of colour, shape, or size." According to the Theory of General Relativity, "time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it."59
Since time consists of perception, it depends entirely on the perceiver and is therefore relative.
The speed at which time flows differs according to the references we use to measure it, because there is no natural clock in the human body to indicate precisely how fast time passes. As Lincoln Barnett wrote: "Just as there is no such thing as colour without an eye to discern it, so an instant or an hour or a day is nothing without an event to mark it."60
The relativity of time is plainly experienced in dreams. Although what we see in our dream seems to last for hours, it in fact, lasts for only a few minutes, or even a few seconds.
Let us take an example to further clarify the subject. Imagine that, for a certain unspecified period of time, we are locked up in a room with a single, specially designed window from which we can see the setting and rising of the sun, and that we have a clock by which to judge the passage of time. A few days later, our estimate of the time spent in the room will be based on our periodic clock – watching and our noting of how often the sun rose and set. At the end of our period of confinement, we come to the conclusion that we have spent three days in the room. But then our "captor" reveals that in reality if was only two days. The reason? The "sun" we had been observing had been artificially projected by a simulation machine and our clock had been regulated to run faster than normal. So our calculations had no meaning.
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IN A WORLD WHERE TIME FLEW BACKWARDS, PAST WOULD BE FUTURE
Because every event is shown to us in a definite series, we think that time always moves forward. For example, a skier always skies down a mountain, not up it. A drop of water does not rise up from a pool, but always falls down into it. In this situation, a skier's position on a mountain is in the past, while his position down the mountain is the future. However, if the information in our memories were to be displayed in reverse, as we would rewind a film, what is for us the future, that is the downhill position, would be the past and the past, that is the uphill position, would be the future. |
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This example confirms that the information we have about the rate of the passage of time is based on relative references. The relativity of time is a scientific fact also proven by scientific methodology. Einstein's Theory of General Relativity maintains that the speed of time changes depending on the speed of the object and its distance from the centre of gravity. As speed increases, time is shortened, compressed; and slows down as if coming to the point of "stopping".
Let us explain this with an example given by Einstein himself. Imagine twins, one of whom stays on earth while the other goes travelling in space at a speed close to the speed of light. When he comes back, the traveller will see that his brother has grown much older than he has. The reason is that time flows much more slowly for the person who travels at speeds near the speed of light. Similarly, in the case of a space-travelling father and his earth-bound son, if the father was 27 years old when he set out and his son 3, when the father comes back to the earth 30 years later (earth time), the son will be 33 years old, but his father will be only 30.61
It should be pointed out that this relativity of time is caused not by the slowing down or running fast of clocks or the slow running of a mechanical spring. It is rather the result of the differentiated operation periods of the entire material system, which goes as deep as sub-atomic particles. In other words, for the person experiencing it, the shortening of time is not like acting in a slow-motion picture. In such a setting where time shortens, one's heartbeats, cell replications, and brain functions, and so on, all operate more slowly than those of the slower-moving person on Earth, who goes on with his daily life and does not notice the shortening of time at all. Indeed the shortening does not even become apparent until the comparison is made.
Relativity In The Qur'an
The conclusion to which we are led by the findings of modern science is that time is not an absolute fact as supposed by materialists, but only a relative perception. What is more interesting is that this fact, undiscovered until the 20th century by science, was imparted to mankind in the Qur'an 14 centuries ago. There are various references in the Qur'an to the relativity of time.
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One twin sister takes a space trip at a speed close to the speed of light. When she returns thirty years later, the sister who stayed on the earth will be much older compared to the sister who went into space.
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The scientifically-proven fact that time is a psychological perception dependent on events, setting, and conditions is underscored in many verses of the Qur'an. For instance, as started in the Qur'an, the entire life of a person spans a very short time:
On that Day He will call you, and you will answer (His Call) with (words of) His Praise and Obedience, and you will think that you have stayed (in this world) but a little while! (Surat al-Isra, 52)
And on the Day when He shall gather them together, (it will seem to them) as if they had not tarried (on earth) longer than an hour of a day: they will recognise each other. (Surah Yunus, 45)
In some verses, it is indicated that people perceive time differently and that sometimes people can perceive a very short period of time as a very lengthy one. The following conversation of people held during their judgement in the Hereafter is a good example of this:
He will say: "What number of years did you stay on earth?" They will say: "We stayed a day or part of a day: but ask those who keep account." He will say: "You, stayed for only a little while – if you had only known!" (Surat al-Mumenoon, 112-114)
In some other verses it is stated that time may flow at different paces in different settings:
Yet they ask you to hasten on the Punishment! But Allah will not fail in His Promise. Truly, a day in the sight of your Lord is like a thousand years of your reckoning. (Surat al-Hajj, 47)
The angels and the spirit ascend to him in a day the measure of which is like fifty thousand years. (Surat al-Maarij, 4)
These verses are all manifest expressions of the relativity of time. The fact that this result, only recently understood by science in the 20th century, was communicated to man 1,400 years ago by the Qur'an is an indication of the revelation of the Qur'an by Allah, Who encompasses the whole of time and space.
Many other verses of the Qur'an reveal that time is a perception. This is particularly evident in the stories. For instance, Allah has kept the Companions of the Cave, a believing group mentioned in the Qur'an, in a deep sleep for more than three centuries. When they were awoken, these people thought that they had stayed in that state but a little while, and could not reckon how long they slept:
Then We drew (a veil) over their ears, for a number of years, in the Cave, (so that they could not hear). Then We wakened them up so that We might know which of the two parties would best calculate the time that they had tarried. (Surat al-Kahf, 11-12)
Such (being their state), we roused them (from sleep), so that they might question each other. Said one of them, "How long have you stayed (here)?" They said, "We have stayed (perhaps) a day, or part of a day." (At length) they (all) said, "Allah (alone) knows best how long you have stayed here.... (Surat al-Kahf, 19)
The situation described in the verse below is also evidence that time is in truth a psychological perception.
Or (take) the instance of one who passing by a hamlet, all in ruins and quite desolate, said: "Oh! how shall Allah (ever) bring it to life, now that it is dead?" Therefore, Allah caused him to die for a hundred years, then brought him back to life. Allah asked: "How long did you tarry (thus)?" He said: (Perhaps) a day or part of a day." He said: "No, you have tarried thus a hundred years; but look at your food and your drink; they show no signs of age; and look at your donkey: And so that We may make you a sign to the people, look further at the bones, how We bring them together and clothe them with flesh." When this was shown clearly to him, he said: "I know that Allah has power over all things." (Surat al-Baqara, 259)
The above verse clearly emphasises that Allah, Who created time, is unbound by it. Man, on the other hand, is bound by time: that is ordained by Allah. As in the verse, man is even incapable of knowing how long he remained asleep. This being so, to assert that time is absolute (just as the materialists do because of their distorted mentality), would be very unreasonable.
The Relativity of Time Explains The Reality of Destiny
As we see from the account of the relativity of time and the verses that refer to it, time is not a concrete concept, but one that varies depending on perceptions. For example, a space of time conceived by us as millions of years long is one moment in Allah's Sight. A period of 50 thousand years for us is only a day for Gabriel and the angels.
This reality is very important for an understanding of the idea of destiny. Destiny is the idea that Allah created every single event, past, present, and future in "a single moment". This means that every event, from the creation of the universe until doomsday, has already occurred and ended in Allah's Sight. A significant number of people cannot grasp the reality of destiny. They cannot understand how Allah can know events that have not yet happened, or how past and future events have already happened in Allah's Sight. From our point of view, things that have not happened are events which have not occurred. This is because we live our lives in relation to the time that Allah has created, and we could not know anything without the information in our memories. Because we dwell in the testing place of this world, Allah has not given us memories of the things we call "future" events. Consequently, we cannot know what the future holds. But Allah is not bound to time or space; it is He Who has already created all these things from nothing. For this reason, past, present and future are all the same to Allah. From His point of view, everything has already occurred; He does not need to wait to see the result of an action. The beginning and the end of an event are both experienced in His Sight in a single moment. For example, Allah already knew what kind of end awaited Pharaoh even before sending Moses to him, even before Moses was born and even before Egypt became a kingdom; and all these events including the end of Pharaoh were experienced in a single moment in the Sight of Allah. Besides, for Allah there is no such thing as remembering the past; past and future are always present to Allah; everything exists in His Sight in the same moment.
If we think of our life as a filmstrip, we watch it as if we were viewing a videocassette with no possibility to speed up the film. But Allah sees the whole film all at once at the same moment; it is He Who created it and determined all its details. As we are able to see the beginning, middle and end of a ruler all at once, so Allah encompasses in one moment, from beginning to end, the time to which we are subject. However, human beings experience these events only when the time comes to witness the destiny that Allah has created for them. This is the way it is for the destinies of everyone in the world. The lives of everyone who has ever been created and whoever will be created, in this world and the next, are present in the Sight of Allah in all their details. The written destinies of all living things-planets, plants and things-are existing together with the destinies of millions of human beings in Allah's eternal memory. They will remain without being lost or diminished. The reality of destiny is one of the manifestations of Allah's eternal greatness, power, might and His name The Preserver (al-Hafiz).
The Concept Of "Past" Comes From Information In Our Memories
Because of suggestions we receive, we think we live in separate divisions of time called past, present and future. However, the only reason we have a concept of "past" (as we explained earlier) is that various things have been placed in our memories. For example, the moment we enrolled in primary school is a bit of information in our memory and we perceive it therefore as an event in the past. However, future events are not in our memories. Therefore, we regard these things that we do not yet know about as things that will be experienced or happen in the future. But just as the past has been experienced from our point of view, so has the future. But, because these events have not been given to our memories, we cannot know them.
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Musa and his people are fleeing through the divided sea now and being saved. Pharaoh and his army are being covered by the sea now and being drowned. Nuh's ark and Sulayman's temple are being built now. All these things are now present in Allah's memory, much more vividly and clearly than we can know.
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If Allah puts future events into our memories, then, the future would be the past for us. For example, a thirty year old person has thirty years of memories and events in his memory and, for this reason, thinks he has a thirty year past. If future events between the ages of thirty and seventy were to be put into this person's memory, then, for this thirty year old individual, both his thirty years and the "future" between the ages of thirty and seventy, would become the past. In this situation past and future would be present in the memory, and each one would be lived experiences for him.
Because Allah has made us perceive events in a definite series, as if there were a time moving from past to future, He does not inform us of our future or give this information to our memories. The future is not in our memories, but all human pasts and futures are in His eternal memory. This, as we said before, is like observing a human life as if it were already wholly depicted and completed in a film. A person cannot advance the film and sees his life as the frames pass one by one. He is mistaken in thinking that the frames he has not yet seen constitute the future.
Past And Future Are News Of The Unseen
In the verses, Allah reveals that the only One Who knows what is secret, invisible, unseen and unknown is He Himself:
Say: "O Allah, Originator of the heavens and the earth, Knower of the Unseen and the Visible, You will judge between Your servants regarding what they differed about." (Surat az-Zumar: 46)
Say: "Death, from which you are fleeing, will certainly catch up with you. Then you will be returned to the Knower of the Unseen and the Visible and He will inform you about what you did." (Surat al-Jumu'a: 8)
He said, "Adam, tell them their names." When he had told them their names, He said, "Did I not tell you that I know the Unseen of the heavens and the earth, and I know what you make known and what you hide?" (Surat al-Baqara: 33)
Generally, the word "secret" is thought to refer only to something unknown about the future; however, both the past and the future are secret. Those who have lived in the past and those who will live in the future are kept in Allah's Sight. However, Allah gives some of the knowledge kept in His Sight to the memories of people and makes it known. For example, when Allah gave knowledge concerning the past in the Koran, He told the Prophet Muhammad (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) that this was news of the unseen:
That is some of the news of the Unseen which We reveal to you. Neither you nor your people knew it before this time. So be steadfast. The best end result is for those who do their duty. (Surah Hud: 49)
This is news of the Unseen which We reveal to you. You were not with them when they decided what to do and devised their scheme. (Surah Yusuf: 102)
Allah gave the Prophet Muhammad (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) information about some things that had not yet happened which was news of the unseen about the future. For example, the taking of Mecca (Surat al-Fath: 27) and the victory of the Greeks over the pagans (Surat ar-Rum: 3-4) were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) before they happened. The Prophet's (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) sayings about the signs of the day of resurrection and the end times (which were news of the unseen to people of that time) show that Allah taught these things to him.
The Qur'an explains that news of the unseen is given to prophets and some devout believers. For example, it was revealed to Joseph that the trap set for him by his brothers will come to nothing (Surah Yusuf: 15), and to the mother of Moses it was revealed that her son would escape the cruelty of Pharaoh and become a prophet. (Surat al-Qasas: 7)
Finally, all that we call past and future is news of the unseen hidden in the Sight of Allah. Allah gives some of this knowledge to the memories of those He chooses, at a time He chooses, thus making them aware of some of the unseen. The events which become visible and observable are characterized by human beings as being past events.
The Importance Of Submission To Destiny
The fact that past and future are already created in Allah's Sight, and that everything has happened and is present at Allah's Sight, demonstrates a very important truth. Everyone is in complete submission to his destiny. Just as a person cannot change his past, so he cannot change his future, because, like the past, the future has already happened. Everything in the future is determined-when and where events will happen, what he will eat, who he will talk to, what he will discuss, how much money he will earn, what diseases he will get, and when, where and how he will die. All these things are already in Allah's Sight and already experienced in His infinite memory. But this knowledge is not yet in a person's memory.
Therefore, those who are sorry, upset, outraged and worried about the future, are anxious in vain. The future they are so worried and anxious about has already happened. And no matter what they do, they cannot change these things.
At this point it is very important to point out that it is necessary to avoid a mistaken understanding of destiny. Some people misunderstand and think that what is in their destiny will happen anyway so there is nothing they can do. It is true that everything we experience is determined in our destiny. Before we experienced an occurrence, it has been experienced in Allah's Sight and is written in all its details in the Mother of the Book (Lawh Mahfuz) in Allah's Sight. But Allah gives everyone the sense that he can change things and make his own choices and decisions. For example, when a person wants to drink some water, he does not say "If it is my destiny I will drink", and sit down without making any move. Instead, he gets up, takes a glass and drinks the water. Actually, he drinks a predetermined amount of water from a predetermined glass. But as he does this, he senses that he is acting according to his own desire and will. He senses this throughout his life in everything that he does. The difference between a person who submits himself to Allah and to the destiny created by Allah, and someone who cannot grasp this reality is this: the person who submits himself to Allah knows that everything he does is according to the will of Allah despite the sense that he has done it himself. The other person mistakenly assumes that he has done everything with his own intelligence and power.
For example, when a person who has submitted himself to Allah learns that he has contracted a disease, knows that the disease is in his destiny and he trusts in Allah. He thinks that because Allah has put it in his destiny, it will certainly bring him great good. But he does not wait without taking any measures thinking that if he is destined to get better he will get better. On the contrary, he takes all possible precautions; he goes to a doctor, pays attention to his diet and takes medicine. But he does not forget that the effectiveness of the doctor, the treatment, the medicine, as well as whether or not he will get better are all in his destiny. He knows that all this is in Allah's sublime memory and was present there even before he came into the world. In the Qur'an, Allah reveals that everything that human beings experience is written beforehand in a book:
Nothing occurs, either in the earth or in yourselves, without its being in a Book before We make it happen. That is something easy for Allah. That is so that you will not be grieved about the things that may have escaped you or exult about the things that come to you. Allah does not love any vain or boastful man. (Surat al-Hadid: 22-23)
For this reason, anyone who believes in destiny will not be troubled or despair about things that happen to him. On the contrary, he will have the utmost trust and confidence in his submission to Allah. Allah has determined in advance everything that happens to a person; He has commanded that we not be sorry for the things that happen to us, and be self-satisfied by the blessings that we receive. The difficulties that human beings experience, together with their wealth and success, is determined by Allah. All these things are in the destiny predetermined by our Lord to test human beings. As it is revealed in one verse, "... Allah's command is a pre-ordained decree." (Surat al-Ahzab: 38)
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Everything has its own appointed destiny. For example, an antique vase that breaks, does so at the moment ordained in its destiny. Who will use this vase, dating back hundreds of years, where it will stand in his house and what other objects will stand alongside it are ordained long before it is even manufactured.
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In another verse, Allah reveals that "We have created all things in due measure." (Surat al-Qamar: 49) Not only human beings but also all things animate and inanimate, the sun, the moon, mountains and trees have their destinies determined by Allah. For example, a broken antique vase was broken at the moment determined by its destiny. While it was being made, it was determined who would use this centuries-old vase, as well as in which corner of which house and with which other objects it would stand. The designs on the vase and it colors were determined in advance in its destiny. It was known in Allah's memory on which day, which hour, which minute, by whom and how it would be broken. The first moment the vase was made, the first moment it was placed in the window for sale, the first moment it was placed in the corner of the house, the moment it was broken into pieces, in short, every moment in the centuries-long life of this vase, was present in Allah's Sight as one single moment. Whereas even though the person who would break the vase was not aware that he would break it until a moment before it happened, that moment was experienced and known in Allah's Sight. For this reason, Allah tells human beings not to be sorry for the things that may have escaped them. What have escaped them escaped in accordance with their destiny, and they cannot change it. People must learn a lesson from what happens in their destiny, see the purpose and benefits that accrue to them from it. They must always incline themselves toward the endless mercy, compassion and justice of our Lord, Who creates their destiny, and spares and protects His servants.
Those who lead their lives heedless of this important reality are always anxious and fearful. For example, they are very worried about the future of their children. They are very concerned about questions such as these: What school will they go to? What profession will they follow? Will they have good health? What kind of lives will they lead? However, every moment of a person's life is determined in Allah's Sight, from the time he is a single cell to the time he learns to read and write, from the first answers he gives in a university exam to what company he will work in during his life, what papers he will sign and how many times he will sign them, where and how he will die. All of these things are hidden in the memory of Allah. For example, at this moment, a person is in the fetal stage, at primary school and at the university. These are all in Allah's memory as one single moment, along with the moment he celebrates his thirty-fifth birthday, the first day he begins his job, the moment when he sees the angels after he dies, the moment when he is buried, and the moment on the Last Day when he will give an account to Allah.
Consequently, it is pointless to worry and be fearful about a life whose every moment has been lived, experienced and is still present in the memory of Allah. No matter how hard a person tries and no matter how anxious he may be, everyone, his children, spouse, friends and relatives will live the life that is present at Allah's Sight.
If this is the case, a person of conscience and intelligence who grasps this reality must submit humbly to Allah and to the destiny He has created. Actually, everyone is already in submission to Allah, created in subservience to Him. No matter whether he likes it or not, he lives subservient to the destiny created for him by Allah. A person who denies his destiny is a denier because being a denier is written in his destiny.
Those who submit themselves willingly to Allah may hope to enjoy Allah's pleasure and mercy and to win paradise; they will live a life of well being in security and happiness both in this world and in the world to come. This is because, for a person who submits himself to Allah, knowing that there is nothing better for him than the destiny created for him by Allah, there is nothing to fear or be anxious about. This person will make every effort, but he knows that this effort is in his destiny and, no matter what he does, he will not have the ability to change what is written in his destiny.
A believer will submit himself to the destiny created by Allah. In the face of what happens to him, he will do his best to understand the purpose of these happenings, take precautions, and make an effort to change things for the better. But he will take comfort in his knowledge that all these things come to be according to destiny and that Allah had determined the most beneficial things in advance. As an example of this, the Qur'an mentions measures taken by Jacob for the security of his children. In order to make his sons beware of people with evil intentions, Jacob advised his sons to enter the city by different gates but he reminded them that this would never influence the destiny determined by Allah.
He said, "My sons! You must not enter through a single gate. Go in through different gates. But I cannot save you from Allah at all, for judgment comes from no one but Allah. In Him I put my trust, and let all those who put their trust, put it in Him alone." (Surah Yusuf: 67)
People may do what they like, but they will never be able to change their destiny. This is revealed in this verse:
Then He sent down to you, after the distress, security, restful sleep overtaking a group of you, whereas another group became prey to anxious thoughts, thinking other than the truth about Allah-thoughts belonging to the Time of Ignorance-saying, "Do we have any say in the affair at all?" Say, "The affair belongs entirely to Allah." They are concealing things inside themselves which they do not disclose to you, saying, "If we had only had a say in the affair, none of us would have been killed here in this place." Say, "Even if you had been inside your homes, those people for whom killing was decreed would have gone out to their place of death." So that Allah might test what is in your breasts and purge what is in your hearts. Allah knows the contents of your hearts. (Surah Al 'Imran: 154)
It can be seen in this verse that even if a person runs away from a task in the way of Allah in order not to die, if his death is written in his destiny, he will die anyway. Even the ways and methods resorted to in order to escape death are determined in destiny and everyone will experience those things that are written in his destiny. And in this verse, Allah reveals to human beings that the purpose of the things created in their destiny is to test them and to purify their hearts. In the Qur'an it is said that everyone's death is determined in the Sight of Allah and that the conception of a baby happens with the permission of Allah.
Allah created you from dust and then from a drop of sperm and then made you into pairs. No female becomes pregnant or gives birth except with His knowledge. And no living thing lives long or has its life cut short without that being in a Book. That is easy for Allah. (Surah Fatir: 11)
In the verses below it is revealed that everything a person does is written sentence by sentence and what those in paradise experience are also things that have already been experienced. As we said earlier, the real life of paradise is for us in the future. But the lives of those in paradise, their conversations and feasting is in Allah's memory at this moment. Before we were born, the future of humanity in this world and the next had been experienced in Allah's Sight in a moment and is being kept in Allah's memory.
Everything they did is in the Books. Everything is recorded, big or small. The heedful are amid Gardens and Rivers,on seats of honour in the Presence of a Competent Sovereign. (Surat al-Qamar: 52-55)
We can understand from this way of speaking in the Qur'an that, in Allah's Sight, time is a single moment and for Him there is no past or future. As we see, some events that will be for us in the future, are understood in the Qur'an as being long passed. This is because both the past and the future are created by Allah as a single moment. Therefore, an event which is related to occur in the future, in fact, has already occurred, but, because we cannot understand this, we think of them as future. For example, in the verses where the account to be given to Allah by human beings is described, it is understood as a long passed event.
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And the trumpet is blown, and all who are in the heavens and all who are on the earth swoon away, save him whom Allah wills. Then it is blown a second time, and behold them standing waiting! And the earth shone with the light of her Lord, and the Book is set up, and the Prophets and the witnesses are brought, and it is judged between them with truth, and they are not wronged. (Surat az-Zumar: 68-69)
Some further examples of this are the following:
And every soul came, along with a driver and a witness. (Surah Qaf: 21)
And the heaven is cloven asunder, so that on that day it is frail. (Surat al-Haqqa: 16)
And because they were patient and constant, He rewarded them with a garden and garments of silk. Reclining in the garden on raised thrones, they saw there neither the sun's excessive heat nor excessive cold. (Surat al-Insan: 12-13)
And Hell is placed in full view for all to see. (Surat an-Nazi'at: 36)
But on this day the believers laugh at the unbelievers. (Surat al-Mutaffifin: 34)
And the sinful saw the fire and realized they are going to fall into it and find no way of escaping from it. (Surat al-Kahf: 53)
In the above verses, the events we are to experience after death are described as finished. This is because Allah is not bound to the relative dimension of time and space as we are. Allah has willed all these events in timelessness; human beings have done them, experienced them all and brought them to a conclusion. The verse below reveals that every kind of occurrence, great and small, happens within the knowledge of Allah and is inscribed in a book.
You do not engage in any matter or recite any of the Qur'an or do any action without Our witnessing you while you are occupied with it. Not even the smallest speck eludes your Lord, either on earth or in heaven. Nor is there anything smaller than that, or larger, which is not in a Clear Book. (Surah Yunus: 61)
The Worry of the Materialists
The issues discussed in this chapter, namely the truth underlying matter, timelessness, and spacelessness, are, of course quite clear. As stated before, these issues are in no way any sort of a philosophy or a way of thought, but crystal-clear, indisputable scientific truths. In addition to their being a technical reality, the rational and logical evidence also admits of no other alternatives on this point: we can know only the version of the universe, with all the matter composing it and all the people living in it, in our brain.
Materialists have a hard time in understanding this issue. For instance, let us return to Politzer's bus example: although Politzer knew that technically he could not step out of his perceptions, he could only admit it for certain cases. That is, for Politzer, events take place in the brain until the bus crash, but as soon as the bus crash takes place, things go out of the brain and gain a physical reality. The logical defect at this point is very clear: Politzer has made the same mistake as the materialist philosopher Johnson who said, "I hit the stone, my foot hurts, therefore it exists" and could not understand that the shock felt after bus impact was in fact a mere perception as well.
The subliminal reason why materialists cannot comprehend this subject is their fear of the fact they will face when they comprehend it. Lincoln Barnett writes that this subject has been "discerned" by certain scientists:
Along with philosophers' reduction of all objective reality to a shadow-world of perceptions, scientists have become aware of the alarming limitations of man's senses.62
Any reference made to the facts that we do not have direct experience of the original of matter and that time is a perception arouses great fear in a materialist, because these are the only notions he relies on as absolute entities. In a sense, he takes these as idols to worship; because he thinks that he has been created by matter and time (through evolution). (Surely Allah is beyond that.)
When he feels that he only experiences the perceptions of the universe he thinks he is living in, the world, his own body, other people, other materialist philosophers whose ideas he is influenced by, and in short, everything, he feels overwhelmed by the horror of it all. Everything he depends on, believes in, and takes recourse to vanishes suddenly. He feels a desperateness which he, essentially, will experience on Judgment Day in its real sense as told about the unbelievers in the verse: "That Day they shall openly show their submission to Allah; and all their inventions shall leave them in the lurch." (Surat an-Nahl, 87)
From then on, this materialist tries to convince himself of the lie that he can reach the original of matter, and makes up "evidence" to this end; he hits the wall with his fist, kicks stones, shouts, yells, but can never escape from the reality.
Just as they want to dismiss this reality from their minds, they also want other people to discard it. They are also aware that if the true nature of matter is known by people in general, the primitiveness of their own philosophy and the ignorance of their worldview will be exposed for all to see, and there will be no grounds left on which they can rationalise their views. These fears are the reason why they are so disturbed by the fact related here.
Allah states that the fears of the unbelievers will be intensified in the hereafter. On Judgement Day, they will be addressed thus:
One day We shall gather them all together: We shall say to those who ascribed partners to Us: "Where are the partners whom you invented and talked about?" (Surat al-Anaam, 22)
Thereupon, unbelievers will bear witness to the disappearance of possessions, children and close circle whom they had assumed to be real and ascribed as partners to Allah: "Behold! how they lie against their own souls! But the (lie) which they invented will leave them in the lurch." (Surat al-Anaam, 24).
The Gain of Believers
While the reality that we do not have direct contact with the original matter and that time is a perception alarms materialists, just the opposite holds true for true believers. People of faith become very glad when they have perceived the secret behind matter, because this is the key to all questions. With this key, all secrets are unlocked. One comes to easily understand many issues that were previously difficult to understand.
As previously stated, the concepts of death, paradise, hell, the hereafter and changing dimensions will be explained, and important questions such as "Where is Allah?", "What was before Allah?", "Who created Allah?", "How long will the life in cemetery last?" "Where are heaven and hell?", and "Where do heaven and hell currently exist?" will be easily answered. The kind of system by which Allah created the entire universe from nothingness will be understood. So much so that, with this secret, the questions of "when", and "where" become meaningless, because there will be no time and no place left. When spacelessness is comprehended, it will follow that hell, heaven and earth are all actually at the same place. If timelessness is understood, it will follow that everything takes place at a single moment: nothing is waited for and time does not go by, because everything has already happened and finished.
With this secret uncovered, the world becomes like heaven for a believer. All distressful, material worries, anxieties, and fears vanish. The individual grasps that the entire universe has a single Sovereign, that He changes the entire physical world as He pleases and that all he — the believer — has to do is to turn to Him. He then submits himself entirely to Allah "to be devoted to His service". (Surah Al 'Imran, 35)
To comprehend this secret is the greatest gain in the world.
Along with this secret, another very important reality mentioned in the Qur'an is unveiled: the fact that "Allah is nearer to man than his jugular vein." (Surah Qaf, 16). As everybody knows, the jugular vein is inside the body. What could be nearer to a person than his own insides? This is easily explained by the reality of spacelessness. This verse can also be much better understood in terms of this concept.
This is the plain truth. It should be well established that there is no other helper and provider for man other than Allah. There is nothing but Allah; He is the only absolute being in Whom one can seek refuge, appeal to for help, and count on for reward.
Wherever we turn, there is the presence of Allah.
