Episode 51 – Can Science Prove God’s Existence?

Peace be upon you and the mercy of God.

Does science point to the existence of God, or is it neutral?

Does science neither point to the existence of God nor deny the existence of God? You cannot scientifically prove that there is a God in the first place, scientifically in terms of the sciences that we humans have built over the past 400 or 500 years, or even before that, sciences that are based on experiments and on the things we have observed and so on. You cannot prove God through them scientifically.

And science itself, brothers—science simply as science, I mean, pure observational and experimental science—neither proves nor disproves God’s existence. Let us examine this precisely.

Definition of science (observational and experimental science)

Science is observational and experimental knowledge. Observation includes studying phenomena, observing their mechanisms, probing the world of the cell and the world of the atom all the way to planets and galaxies, and exploring the laws. Experimentation includes formulating hypotheses and conducting experiments according to scientific methodologies.

Therefore, when we say “science” in this episode, we mean both types: the experimental and the observational, with focus on the observational, which is the basis of experimentation. You observe phenomena and relationships, then formulate hypotheses on that basis, and experiment to verify them.

Does observational and experimental science prove or deny the existence of God?

Fine, does observational and experimental science, by this definition, prove or deny the existence of God? First, can the existence of God be proven experimentally? The answer is no, but experimentation is not everything in science. Science includes observing phenomena and observations, and deriving laws, as we mentioned.

Fine, can the existence of God be proven observationally? As for observing His Essence, Glory be to Him, no. Fine, in the end then, does this mean that observational and experimental science does not point to God? The answer: rather, it points to Him definitively, without doubt or uncertainty, not only to His Essence, but also to His attributes.

The role of reason and sources of knowledge in science

How? We say, dear people: we established in previous episodes that science, observational and experimental science, rests on a system of four sources that together generate science as a whole through their interaction with one another. Science is not confined to sensory inputs. A human being is not merely a camera that captures an image and then that image is called science, or records a sound and then that recording becomes science.

Sensation alone, dear people, does nothing; using reason, accepted premises, and reports from researchers whose truth has been demonstrated by evidence is an inseparable part of the definition of observational and experimental science, as we explained in detail. And when the British Science Council defined science, in what it said was the first official definition, it defined it as the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world through following a systematic methodology grounded in evidence.

Knowledge, understanding, methodology, evidence, all of these are terms that involve the use of reason. So science, observational and experimental science, relies on reason. Allow me here to reconstruct the diagram so as to highlight the role of reason and clarify its relationship with the other sources of knowledge on the one hand and with science on the other.

Reason begins from self-evident premises, such as causal necessity, and from confidence in the existence of order in the universe. It then builds upon scientific reports from researchers, analyzes sensory inputs, and links them together, employing all of this to produce science. Reason has a central role in this system, and science is one form of knowledge that depends on reason.

Knowledge is broader than science

Knowledge is not science alone. There are other matters that rational people agree are part of knowledge, even if they are not included in the definition of science. For example, mathematics: mathematics is a field of knowledge grounded in reason, not experimental or observational in itself, yet many observational and experimental sciences depend on it.

Corroborating historical reports are knowledge: for example, the existence of the civilizations of the pharaohs, Persians and Romans. Their remains, mutually supporting accounts of their history and exploits, and books agreeing on details of their lives establish not merely their existence but much more. Affirming these civilizations’ past existence is knowledge, even if it falls outside the definition of empirical science.

Indeed, in your daily life you know with certainty the existence of things you have neither observed nor experimented with, but whose reports from others have converged in a way that leaves no room for doubt about fabrication or error in them. So knowledge is a broader circle, science is one of its forms, and all these forms of knowledge are built on mental processes. Mathematics is rational, accepting reports based on verifying their evidence is a rational process, and science itself is built on rational processes. Outside the circle of knowledge lie ignorance, illusion, conjecture, and misinformation.

Science as evidence for the Creator and His attributes

Fine, this reason that is the basis of knowledge, if we apply it to the observations of science, where will it lead? Let me remind you, dear people, of observations we discussed in previous episodes. I am not here to speak in detail about these observations, for we have already detailed them in full episodes. Rather, we are tying their threads together so we can call them back to your memory, along with the beauty, wonder, precision, and mastery we laid out, and answer the question we kept raising each time: do these observations point to absurdity, nihilism, randomness, blindness, and chance? Or do they point to will, knowledge, wisdom, and measure?

Examples of precision and mastery in the universe

• The length of genetic material, which if stretched from a single human body would reach billions of kilometers, and yet it remains active and subject to copying around the clock.
• Genetic coding, whereby the nucleus of each cell contains an enormous amount of information that is transformed into proteins, that is, into tangible matter.
• The manufacture of billions of different protein forms in humans from only 20 to 25 thousand genes thanks to processes such as alternative splicing and post-translational modifications.
• The existence of billions of forms of living beings, each of them precise, coherent, and interdependent, with no traces among them of blind, purposeless randomness.
• Bacterial resistance to antibiotics through the production of proteins composed of hundreds of precisely arranged amino acids.
• What the length of the giraffe's neck requires in terms of the size of its heart and the thickness of its walls, the valves of its blood vessels, the remarkable rete mirabile, the thickness of its leg skin, and the genetic coding that produces all of this.
• The great similarity between placental and marsupial animals, despite the great difference in their genetic coding.
• The eye and its structure and the placement of its retina.
• The penguin and the structure of its wings and more...

These are only a few examples from the world of living beings alone, which, as we said, has every point saturated with examples of precision and mastery. And we have not spoken about the earth, its layers, its atmosphere, and its elements, or about the heavens and the galaxies.

What sound reason, free from barriers and psychological influences, would judge, do you think, that all of this is evidence of absurdity, nihilism, randomness, blindness and chance? Or evidence of knowledge, wisdom, power, and measure? Would reason conclude that all of this is the work of nothingness, of nonexistence? Or that it is the act of an agent?

This agent, possessing the knowledge, wisdom, power and greatness demonstrated by scientific observations, is the One called “Allah” in Islam, glorified and exalted is He. We do not assume God’s existence. Rather, the same reason used in observational and experimental science infers from it another form of knowledge: knowledge of the Creator and His attributes.

If we remove reason, science falls with it, and if we use it, it leads us more than anything else to the Creator and His attributes. So either you accept reason and what results from it, or you cast it aside and cast aside what results from it. The relationship is inseparable, and it is neither a scientific nor a rational position to use reason to produce observational and experimental science, then prevent reason from taking you one additional step to infer from this science the Creator and His attributes. This is selectivity with no justification from reason or knowledge.

You are not required, in order to infer God’s existence, to use an additional source of knowledge that you did not use in building science; it is your very own reason. All that is required of you is not to forbid it from moving one step forward in inferring the existence of the Creator and His attributes. All that is required of you is not to be closed-minded and narrow in outlook.

Science is not captured images, nor sounds, nor mere numbers, and the human being is not an inert machine that captures an image and then there is no reason, no analysis, and no inference. Science is knowledge, and as long as we have said the word knowledge, then there are mental processes, and as long as reason has entered, it has no choice but to acknowledge the existence of a Creator.

Critique of materialism and its effect on the understanding of science

Fine, what exactly has materialism done? First: materialism prevented reason from inferring the Creator and His attributes from science, under the claim that this does not belong within material, sensory knowledge, and it manipulated words so that it confined knowledge to science, then considered everything outside science to be: not knowledge, ignorance, arbitrary faith, superstitions.

After materialism confined knowledge to science, it used the fallacy known as the false dichotomy: either science, within which knowledge has been confined, or ignorance. So if a scientist wants to go beyond the boundaries that materialism artificially imposed on science, materialists describe him as having begun to abandon scientific thinking and move toward emotions and superstitions... they describe him as unscientific.

Materialism excluded from this binary division sciences that it practically acknowledges, even though they do not fall within the circle of science, such as mathematics and documented history, for which materialists produce documentaries and pay close attention. We may ask: what justifies this selectivity? Why has materialism dealt with the existence of the Creator and His attributes differently from how it has dealt with other matters established by reason, not science, such as mathematics and history, for example?

And when reason and innate disposition pressed insistently with the question of explaining the origin of the universe and life, and explaining the state of precision, mastery, and order, materialism proposed explanations such as random evolution, a universe that brought itself into being, infinite universes, and microbial intelligence, and inserted these explanations into the circle of science, even though they are neither sensory nor supported by reason; rather, they collide with it. So they are not science in any sense and do not belong to its circle; rather, they are ignorance and superstition. Yet materialism made these explanations alternatives to the existence of the Creator, which is knowledge indicated by reason.

Besides this, brothers, we showed that materialism abolishes all the sources of knowledge on which science rests. Do not be surprised that, when abbreviating, I insist on the English word “science”. In Arabic I either say “observational and experimental knowledge” in full or use “science” as a shorthand, rather than simply saying “knowledge”: restricting knowledge to science is the first step into materialism’s trap.

When we understand that the matter revolves around this system and the centrality of reason within it, we realize that the indication of the Creator is knowledge... knowledge supported by evidence, including science. So the one who infers the existence of the Creator from science is a person who has rejected the imaginary boundaries fabricated by materialism and has given his reason free rein to elevate him one rank higher in knowledge, higher than confining the self to the sensory. The issue is not a leap of faith, a belief unsupported by evidence, but a mental leap, a rational, scientific, demonstrative, inferential process.

And we have already shown you that the very sources of knowledge, including observational and experimental science, are not trustworthy except within the approach based on belief in a Creator. And note, dear people, that here we are speaking about one of the proofs of God’s existence specifically related to science, namely the proof of precision and mastery. Otherwise, we have already detailed the proof of creation and origination, which is a rational proof, and we also previously detailed the innate proofs of God’s existence.

May God have mercy on Ibn Taymiyyah when he said: "The more people need something, the more generous the Lord is with it." So servants are in the greatest need of knowing their Creator and His attributes; thus He placed the proofs of Him in the cosmic signs and in minds and innate dispositions.

Why did many scientists not believe?

Fine, if science definitively points to God and His attributes, then why did many scientists not believe? Is it as one of them says: [Stephen Hawking is a brilliant scientist, an exceptional scientist, but he is not a philosopher, I know what I am saying, and not a great theologian. And science in itself, brothers, science as science like this, science in the abstract means, does not prove the existence of God and does not deny the existence of God. Do you know why? Because science is not metaphysics, science does not care about what is beyond nature if it believes in it at all, science cares only about the observable world, and therefore all scientific facts can be used as logical premises, I mean in syllogisms, brothers, in thinking, in inferences that prove what? Things... and perhaps prove their opposites... according to what? According to the scientific or theological philosophy or the metaphysical position from which the scientist proceeds.]

Regardless of what the speaker intended by this statement, some may understand it as though scientific observations in themselves do not point to anything, are neutral, and only take shape according to the world-view of the scientist, because the same scientific fact can be open to multiple philosophical interpretations: the believer infers from it his belief, and the atheist infers from it his atheism, as though the believer's reason led him to the existence of God while the atheist's reason led him to deny the existence of God.

So we say, brothers: reason cannot lead to a thing and its opposite; reason cannot judge a thing and its contrary, cannot judge that this universe is an effect of wisdom, knowledge, and greatness, and at the same time judge that the universe is the product of randomness, chance, and blindness. Whoever reaches the denial of the Creator, his philosophy cannot be called scientific, and reason is not what led him to this result; rather, this result nullifies reason.

Reasons some scientists do not believe

Fine, these scientists evidently seem rational, not mad, and even intelligent. So what led them to what they ended up with? What disabled their minds from reaching the Creator and His attributes? There are many reasons we established in previous episodes:

• Psychological complexes stemming from church behavior.
• Falling into the ominous dichotomy: either a distorted religion or materialism and atheism, without searching for a religious system that addresses reason and innate disposition.
• Arrogance, vanity, and preferring worldly life.
• Fear of the Darwinian lobby's power or greed for its temptations, as we explained.
• Falling into logical fallacies and psychological tricks, like the 15 fallacies and tricks we established against them.

For a person to be a scientist in his field does not necessarily mean that he is neutral or trustworthy. And it is not our concern to analyze the reasons for the atheism of those who became atheists; the important thing is that we do not rent out our minds to anyone out of fascination with their titles and achievements, and that we know that their inference from the observations of science to their atheism does not mean that these observations are in themselves open to this use, nor that they are neutral. Rather, they decisively point the rational person who has stripped away barriers to the Creator and His attributes.

That is why our work in the Journey of Certainty was to explain to you the scientific facts clearly and free of extraneous influences so that you would not rent out your reason to us nor to the atheists, and would not imitate us nor imitate them, but rather we left judgment to your minds. Do these facts and natural observations point to randomness, chance, blindness, and nihilism? Or to the creation of a Self-Sustaining, Wise, Powerful, Knowing, Great Creator?

We explained to you what Escherichia coli bacteria do in the process of copying the gene it needs, and placing the copy in the appropriate place in its genetic material, so that it can capture and digest citrate in steps of extreme precision resembling genetic engineering. We explained to you how they completely inverted its indication and made it an example of useful randomness, and how they turned examples of the greatness of creation in the retina of the eye, the wings of the penguin, and the hind bones of the whale into examples of design errors and organs without benefit, and how they responded to all the wonder and precision in the cell by saying that perhaps extraterrestrial beings sowed the seed of life on Earth, along with the logical fallacies and the falsification they use in all of this.

Does their behavior prove that these scientific facts are open to different interpretations? Or does all of this prove that, as God the Exalted said: “Say, ‘Observe what is in the heavens and the earth.’ But of no avail will be signs or warners to a people who do not believe.” [Yunus 10:101]

You will say to me: you are citing Quranic verses; suppose I do not believe in the Quran. I will say to you: rather, I am citing reality to you as proof of the truth of the Quran. I cited reality to you as proof of the truth of the Quran. I laid out for you in previous episodes the scientific facts so that we may say to you: now that you have seen the wonder of these observations, what description is there for one who takes them as evidence for denying the Creator except what the Quran described him with when it said: “And none reject Our verses except the wrongdoers.” [Al-‘Ankabut 29:49]

Reality testifies to the truth of the Quranic verses in describing these people, and to the extent that you understand the scientific facts, you realize the truth of the Quran's description of the one who denies them as a kafir, meaning one who has covered over the truths. We made the facts clear to you so that when you see someone who denies their indication of the Creator, and even takes them as proof of his atheism, you know that he is a liar and a betrayer of the trust of knowledge, as God the Exalted said: “And none reject Our signs except everyone treacherous and ungrateful.” [Luqman 31:32] meaning one who is treacherous and ungrateful. Then your resolve rises so that you do not leave natural science to them, but instead learn it so as to be trustworthy with it.

Guidance for Muslims: natural science is not neutral

After this address to the general public with rational evidence, we turn in conclusion to Muslims who may have been afflicted by the notion that natural science is neutral, meaning that it neither points to the existence of God nor denies the existence of God, while at the same time they do not realize the extent of the contradiction between this assumption and the Quran in which they believe. We say to them: most of what the Quran referred to in arguing and demonstrating the truths of faith are the manifest cosmic observations, and this is science, observational science. Modern observational science is an entry into the details of these manifest observations in a way that reveals even more of their beauty, wonder, and amazement.

So if you say: the observations of modern science do not point to the Creator, then that means: “Then do they not look at the camels—how they are created?” [Al-Ghashiyah 88:17] do not point to anything, and everything the Quran says about them in terms of observations: "Indeed in that are signs..." is not signs. Reflect, for example, on the endings of the verses in Surah Ar-Rum after speaking about scientific observations in the souls and the horizons: “Indeed in that are signs for a people who give thought.” [Ar-Rum 30:21] “Indeed in that are signs for those of knowledge.” [Ar-Rum 30:22] “Indeed in that are signs for a people who use reason.” [Ar-Rum 30:24]

The indication of the manifest and detailed scientific observations that natural science has elaborated is that they point to the Creator, which is among the greatest cosmic truths and the first self-evident and rational necessities. The Quran infers from cosmic observations not only the existence of the Creator, but also His oneness from the order of His dominion, and His greatness, wisdom, mercy, sustaining power, and His power to resurrect and raise the dead. The inference is about these matters, and it is a decisive inference. So imagine when someone makes scientific observations not even indicative of the very existence of the Creator... imagine the loss and misguidance of the one who says: "Do not bring faith into science!"

You, my brother, are religiously commanded to reflect on observational science - the cosmic signs of God - so that you may strengthen your faith, and as a Muslim you must not be drawn into the framing that separates them from God, and you must not confine your reason at the imaginary boundaries set by materialism, thereby being deprived of benefiting from God’s cosmic signs and also from the Quranic verses that direct you to benefit from these cosmic signs. Indeed, perhaps part of God's perfect justice and mercy is that as time advances and people move farther from the era of prophecy, these scientific proofs multiply so that they become new arguments against us, granted to us when those who first saw the Prophet, or were close in time to him, did not have them.

God the Exalted said: “Say, ‘With Allah is the far-reaching argument.’” [Al-An’am 6:149] So the problem is not a lack of arguments and proofs; rather, they are convincing and subduing to the sound mind and sound heart. Therefore, if we see that many natural scientists are materialists, this should not make us doubt the strength of the proofs established by God the Exalted. Some of these are brilliant scientists in their fields, but that has nothing to do with soundness of heart, which, if absent, disables that scientist's ability to benefit from his mental capacities, and he ends up completely excluding recognition of God and instead believing in utterly trivial theories, “But their hearing and vision and hearts availed them not from anything of the punishment when they were continually rejecting the signs of Allah.” [Al-Ahqaf 46:26]

Those who deny the Creator, according to the Quranic description, do not reason even if they apply their minds in science and excel in it; they do not reason because they have disabled their minds from benefiting from science and from inferring through it the greater knowledge of the existence of the Creator and His attributes. God the Exalted said: “Have they not looked at the earth—how much We have produced therein from every noble kind? Indeed in that is a sign, but most of them were not to be believers.” [Ash-Shu’ara’ 26:7–8]. This is observational science, and modern observational sciences have revealed to us more of its details and wonder. Indeed in that is a sign... indeed in that is a sign... affirmation upon affirmation... indeed... a sign... so science contains indication without a doubt.

Fine, where is the problem then? The verse continues: they have no readiness for faith. If one blind man is told: what do you think of this beautiful natural scene? and he says to you: I do not see the beauty you are talking about. Is that due to a problem with the scene or a problem with the blind man? Do we say: in fact, the matter is relative, so the natural scene exists relative to the sighted person and is beautiful relative to the sighted person, but it does not exist and is not beautiful relative to the blind man? No, rather it certainly exists and is certainly beautiful, but the problem lies with the one who does not see it and does not perceive its beauty. So it is no wonder that the Quran often describes these people as blind and that their blindness is blindness of hearts and inner sight, for the one blind in body may compensate for the loss of sight with hearing, reason, and innate disposition, and be rewarded for patience. As for these:

Conclusion: science is conclusive evidence for the existence of God

In conclusion, if we are asked: does science point to the existence of God? The answer is: science does not lead the rational human being to anything the way it leads him to the existence of God and the attributes of God. The individual facts and diverse observations of science each point separately to particulars of the truths, and all of them together point to a great, wise, sustaining, knowing Creator who has perfected everything He created, “The work of Allah, who perfected all things. Indeed, He is Acquainted with that which you do.” [An-Naml 27:88]

And peace be upon you and the mercy of God.