Episode 5, Part 1 – How Atheism Undermines Reason and Science

Introduction: Atheism and the Denial of Self-Evident Rational Principles

Peace be upon you, dear friends. In the previous episode, we explained that when the atheist denied the Creator’s existence, this led him to strip the innate components a person finds within himself of their reliability. We will see how this leads to a chain of denials: denying rational axioms, morality, the question of purpose, and free will—either denying that these components exist innately or denying that they possess any value.

Why? Could he not deny the Creator while retaining these axioms, which the atheist finds within himself despite himself, instead of entering this chain of obstinacy and confusion? No, he cannot. Why? We shall see, beginning with self-evident rational principles.

This episode will be highly beneficial. We will discuss:

• How self-evident rational principles point to the existence of God, Most High.
• How does atheism undermine the experimental method?
• Does atheism respect reason or undermine it?
• The contradictions of atheists.
• The claim that truth is relative and that no absolute truth exists: where did it come from, and what are its consequences?
• Are created things evidence for God, or is God the evidence by which everything is known?

Faith and Atheism: Two Views of Existence and Reason

To begin, brothers, faith grounds everything in the existence of God, Most High. In the perspective of faith, God created the heavens and earth in truth, established [for them] fixed laws through His wisdom, and endowed the human being with a fitrah that produces necessary rational axioms. From these, the human mind proceeds to discover the realities of things.

The atheist has a problem with every one of these nine expressions: created, God, in truth, through His wisdom, fixed laws, fitrah, necessary rational axioms, the human mind, and the realities of things. We will explain this in detail.

From the perspective of faith, God, Most High, says: “We have certainly created man in the best of stature.” [At-Tin 95:4]. That is, He placed within the human being an innate attraction and ability to recognize truth in matters of knowledge and morality and to search for the true purpose of life. He places these meanings in the soul of every person entering life so that learning begins from them. “Our Lord is He who gave each thing its form and then guided [it].” [Ta-Ha 20:50]. This is one form of guidance. We said that this human fitrah resembles a computer’s operating system.

From the atheist perspective, the human being is a product of chance and randomness, created for no wisdom, and there is no such thing as fitrah. But atheists, how do you explain the existence of something like an operating system for the human being? First, how do you explain rational intuitions—that is, rational axioms and necessities—such as the principle that a part is smaller than the whole, that 1+1=2, that contradictions cannot both be true, and that every event has a cause? These are rational rules upon which a person builds knowledge and which themselves rest on nothing prior. Someone must therefore have placed within the human soul a fitrah that recognizes them.

The Atheist Journey of Confusion and the Denial of Causality

Here begins the atheist journey of confusion. Some atheists said: “These rational rules are formed from sensory inputs—what a person sees and hears—through induction.” A person sees one apple joined by another and they become two apples. His eyes inductively observe many similar scenes, and from them rational rules form within him: a part is smaller than the whole. A child is struck by his brother and feels pain, so he learns that the blow causes pain. An object hits glass in front of him and breaks it, so he learns that collision causes breaking. He sees everything occur through a cause, so the principle of causality forms within him: every event has a cause.

But the atheist has reversed the matter by making inputs shape rational rules and equations. This resembles claiming that feeding large amounts of data into a computer creates the programs capable of analyzing those inputs and producing results. Imagine entering two adjacent columns into an Excel sheet, each containing many numbers. Will the computer write for itself an equation saying that the [first] number plus the second equals the result? It will not, even if we increase each column to a thousand or a million numbers. If we enter two adjacent columns, the first containing a preceding event and the second a later event, will the computer infer by itself that the former caused the latter and produce the principle of causality?

Atheists recognized this problem, yet persisted in evading the idea that there is programming which may be described as true: programming that analyzes sensory inputs on the one hand and activates reason on the other to reach true conclusions. Such programming requires someone to place it within the human soul, so they insisted that the programming itself was produced by the senses.

Fine—regardless of where this programming came from, let us suppose your senses produced it. What matters is that it reached conclusions, foremost among them the principle of causality: every event has a cause. The universe must therefore have a cause.

Here, some atheists were forced to say that the conclusions of this programming need not be truths. They are only the result of inductions, and inductions may be incomplete. Within the range of their observations everything has a cause, but nothing prevents something from occurring without a cause in some corner of the universe.

As believers, we say: every event has a cause. This is an absolute and certain truth confirmed by all observation. They say: the most we can claim is that the events we observe have causes. We ask them: should the universe’s very existence not have a cause—someone who brought it into existence? They answer no, because they do not regard causality as a universal absolute truth whose implications must be accepted in every matter.

These people recognized the extent of their contradiction. They adhere to causality in daily life, exploration, the construction of scientific theories, and everything else; yet when the issue reaches the greatest truth—the cause of all these causes and the source of the universe—they deny causality.

What did they do to escape this contradiction? They denied self-evident rational principles altogether at their foundation, including the truth that every event has a cause. They said that things we think are causes merely occurred in conjunction with things we think are effects. They are no more than two successive events, with no relationship between them. They then imagined they had escaped the dilemma of the universe’s cause, claiming that the universe could exist without any cause or could bring itself into existence.

Among those who made such claims were the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, the physicist Stephen Hawking, and Lawrence Krauss. Krauss said that nothing called necessary rational principles can ever be relied upon, in the context of justifying the thesis of his book A Universe from Nothing: although the universe arose from nothing, it could have caused itself to exist. A number of natural scientists followed him in this claim and celebrated his book.

Atheism and the Destruction of Experimental Science

They fled from contradiction only to fall into madness. Brothers, although this position is a kind of madness, you find people boasting about it and celebrating the names of the “scientists” who theorize for it. It is one of atheism’s costs and a natural consequence of it.

Although these people begin by venerating experimental science and saying that they do not believe in anything beyond nature because it cannot be tested, their argument ends by destroying experimental science at its foundation. All discovery rests upon observing causal relationships and deriving universal scientific conclusions. By their principle, if a million experiments combining an acid and a base produced salt and water, they would prevent themselves from deriving a generalization and an absolute scientific truth from that result. According to them, nothing prevents the million-and-first experiment from producing something other than salt and water. If they derive a scientific rule and treat it as an absolute truth, they have built it upon self-evident rational principles—such as considering that the universe has fixed laws and that the interaction of these two substances causes salt and water to form.

Who established these laws? Who made this causation a fixed, established truth? Randomness and chance neither establish laws nor produce absolute truths. That is why they denied rational axioms. On this basis, experimental science becomes futile, and applying its results becomes futile as well. The AIDS virus does not cause the disease; the two merely occur together. Diseases have no causes, and treatment does not cause recovery. If a new disease appeared, it would be futile and wasteful to spend billions identifying its cause, since we might eventually discover that this disease, like the universe, has no cause.

Atheists who evaded contradiction by denying causality cannot avoid contradicting their own claim in practice. If an atheist’s car is struck by another and the other driver says, “My car hitting yours did not cause the damage; the two events merely occurred together without any causal connection, so do not ask me for compensation,” will the atheist accept that? If someone stabs him and then says, “My stabbing did not cause your bleeding,” will he accept that? Of course not. In their lives and sciences, atheists are forced to acknowledge necessary rational principles despite themselves. But when the matter reaches the greatest truth—the existence of the Creator, Mighty and Majestic—they disavow those principles.