I was, am, and always will remain a big fan of the eminent philosopher and Christian apologist Professor William Lane Craig who has played a bombastic role in illustrating the rationality of believing in God. One of my favorite works of his is his stunning take on “Absurdity of Life without God”. Who are we? Why are we here? Where did we come from? Where are we going? In the name of progress, modern man has tried to answer those questions without reference to God, but the answers that came back were not exhilarating but dark and terrible. You are the accidental byproduct of nature. There is no reason for your existence. All you face is death. The modern man assumed that by ‘killing’ the concept of God, he had freed himself from everything that repressed and stifled him. Instead, he discovered that by doing so, he had ended up killing himself. For If God does not exist, man’s life is ultimately absurd. If God does not exist, then man and the universe are inevitably doomed to death. His life is but a spark in the infinite darkness. The spark appears flickers and then dies forever. If God does not exist, then on account of the second law of thermodynamics (that the universe is slowly but steadily approaching a state of heat death), we are all inevitably doomed to extinction.
If each individual passes out of existence when he dies, what ultimate significance can be assigned to his life? His life might be important relative to certain other events, but if all the events are ultimately meaningless, what can be the ultimate significance of influencing any of them? Mankind is probably no more significant than a swarm of mosquitos for their end is all the same. Because he ends up in nothing, he ultimately is nothing, but it gets even more distressing. For if life ends in the grave, it makes no difference whether you live as Joseph Stalin or Mother Teresa. If your destiny is ultimately unrelated to your behavior, then you may as well just live as you please. Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or else the byproducts of biological evolution and social conditioning. With the distinction between right and wrong being ever subjective and there being a complete dearth of objective morality, it would be virtually impossible to condemn war, oppression, or pride as evil. It would be virtually impossible to live happily and consistently with such a worldview. If death awaits you at the end of the road, is there no reason for life? We need to snap out of our hibernation modes and comprehend the gravity of the repercussions associated with the choices that are manifested to us. If God exists, there is hope for man, otherwise, all we are left with is despair.
They will bury you just like they did your ancestors. You are not ready to live until you are ready to die. You leave all at the grave. Your life is a vapor that appeareth for a while and then vanishes away. Your days are as a hand’s breath. All the glory of man is as the flower of the grass. All flesh is as grass. The grass withereth and the flower thereof falleth away, but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.
For the most part of my life, I was a Muslim by name only. Born into an Islamic household by mere chance. It wasn’t until recently that I began to introspect on the matter. Was the whole point of life just getting a degree, finding a woman, working, and paying bills or was there something even more grandiose in the background that I was possibly missing? What was my destiny? Could I, a mere mortal, turn the tables, stem the tide, and rewrite the annals of history like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table?
One time, I was chilling with my best mate in a park, having a few drinks (Halal). It was a clear night with zero cloud cover, illuminated brilliantly by the full moon. Photochemical smog has destroyed the air quality and atmosphere in Lahore, yet we were fortunate to get a fleeting glimpse of the sky. I couldn't factor in its dazzling magnitude. That stunning thing! A perfect handiwork of God. There are so many stars in the first heaven that if we were to count one star per second, it would take us 300 trillion years to count all of them. To quote Dave Tomlinson in his book “Black Sheep and Prodigals”, how could I begin to comprehend the immense distances stretched out before me? Even the nearest star is four light years away (approximately 24 trillion miles). The pinpoint of light from the galaxy Andromeda, which we can just about detect with the naked eye, began its journey to Earth 2.5 million years ago. I was literally peering through history across eons of time and space. Little wonder I shuddered with that mental vertigo I first sensed as a child when I lay in a dark bedroom trying to imagine eternity.
In the previous blog, we defined God as a maximally perfect, self-sufficient, independent, necessary, eternal, and Almighty Creator of the Heavens and the Earth. I believe that God symbolizes love among many other virtues, and he would want to communicate with us, guide us and ensure our spiritual well-being and constant connection with him. Therefore, we need to navigate toward the divine religion, ordained by Him. Famous Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw once said “There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it".
What if kids didn't need to learn about God's existence? What if they have that prefabricated idea ingrained in them from birth? Born Believers, a 2012 book by psychologist Justin L. Barrett, makes this claim. Barrett has devoted his career to studying children and religion; he is presently a researcher at Fuller Theological Seminary. He arrived at the idea that babies are born with an inclination to assume that there is some type of supernatural agency behind this order after seeing that youngsters tend to believe that the world has order and purpose. Makes sense! Virtually, all the major religions in the world share the common belief that the universe had its inception at the hands of an All-Powerful Creator. Interpretations of this Creator vary from religion to religion and so does whether he has any partners or deities with him in his dominion over the Heavens and the Earth. There is no concept of God in Buddhism and other similar philosophies. Yet even Buddhist countries like Myanmar and Cambodia had the younger echelons of their society possessing a natural predisposition to believe in God. Take the case of the Fibonacci sequence too and we realize that belief in God is grounded in factual reality whereas atheism requires faith.
As we mentioned in the previous blog, it is difficult to contemplate the presence of multiple Gods. This negates polytheistic religions like Hinduism. Many priests stopped believing in multiple gods as they came to realize that marketing for a single god is easier than marketing for countless gods. Just like too many cooks spoil the broth, similarly, the entire universe would have been in a state of utter chaos if there were multiple creators. The gods would compete to establish superior strength, leaving the Heavens and the Earth in ruins. If one of two gods willed an act to occur, then the other god would either be forced to submit to that will or oppose it. After all, belief in religion must be rational and logical. Therefore, there must be only one All-Powerful Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. By the process of elimination, we arrive at the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Here, there are two schools of thought, especially in matters concerning the Abrahamic religions. Do we gauge a religion on the basis of its followers, or do we derive its strength from its scriptural sources? I would go for the latter. Yes, that does not mean that we do blind preaching as actions speak louder than words and we must implement our own faith ourselves first before we pass on the baton. Since the time of Adam and Eve, religions have always produced their prodigals: people who have swum against the tide thought outside the box, or disobeyed the rules in their pursuit of greater understanding. Faith isn’t primarily about words but actions. We can argue till the cows come home about words and beliefs, but it is how we live that demonstrates the sincerity and legitimacy of our faith.
In my humble opinion, it would be erroneous to make sweeping judgmental calls about a faith, based on the attitudes of some of its adherents or certain historical events. Hindutva doesn’t represent all the Hindus on this planet neither is ISIS a role model for the average Muslim (in fact the exact opposite). It would be wrong to label Christianity as the motherlode of bad ideas on account of the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, colonialism, the World Wars, anti-Jewish Pogroms as well as the Lord’s Resistance Army that committed heinous and atrocious crimes in Uganda in the name of Jesus Christ.
In the post covid-19 world, despite fresh cases appearing every now and then, how often do we see employees wearing face masks? Very rarely. That doesn’t mean that the policies for safeguarding have not been enacted by the administration. The imperative truth of the matter is that if one is to judge a religion, he or she must do it based on scripture. Let us examine the scriptures of the Abrahamic religions. Jews follow the Old Testament. Christians believe in the New Testament. The Old Testament and New Testament are collectively known as the ‘Holy Bible’. Muslims embrace The Last Testament, known as the 'Holy Quran'. Each denomination claims that their scripture is the only means to attain eternal life and salvation in the Hereafter while vehemently rejecting the other groups.
I must mention at this stage that I am not a perennialist who believes that multiple scriptures have gotten it right 100%. Let us examine the following three statements:
1. Robert died at the age of 40.
2. Robert died at the age of 50.
3. Robert died at the age of 60.
All three statements cannot be true. Only one of them has to be correct if Robert really is no more in this world. Likewise, if God exists, his message will be that of the Absolute Truth. Since we have sufficient grounds for ascertaining God’s existence, therefore, it suffices to say that the Truth is only one. You can’t have different versions of the truth. God Almighty would not tell the Jews one thing, and the Christians another and then deliver the complete antithesis of the earlier two statements to the Muslims. Often being at loggerheads with each other, the Quran and the Bible can’t both be the pure, original and 100% unadulterated word of God. It begs the question? Under what circumstances can one differentiate between a divine religion and man-made religions? There are two conditions at the bare minimum: firstly, the word of God must be historically preserved. In other words, it must be available in the same form and context today as it was hundreds of years ago or when it was first revealed to the world. Secondly, since God is perfect and does not make a mistake unlike human beings, therefore the Divine Revelation should not be subject to any sort of errors or contradictions. Furthermore, God, in the Holy Quran, even challenges the disbelievers to produce their evidence if they doubt the veracity of the message revealed to Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).
As Muslims, we believe in 5 holy books, revealed by God to human messengers, courtesy of the Archangel Gabriel. These include the Scriptures revealed to Abraham, Psalms to David, Torah to Moses, Gospel to Jesus and the Quran to Muhammad (May God’s Peace and Blessings be upon all of them). Another core component of Islamic theology is the belief that barring the Quran, all the rest of these scriptures have been corrupted by men and do not remain in their original form today. The Torah and Gospel collectively constitute the Bible. History has shown that the Bible suffered changes through the ages. The Revised Standard Version 1952 and 1971, the New American Standard Bible and The New World Translation of the Holy Scripture have expunged certain verses compared with the King James Version. Reader’s Digest has reduced the Old Testament by fifty percent and the New Testament condensed by about twenty-five percent.
In the coming blogs, we will document the discrepancies in the Old and New Testaments in detail but for now, we will take one example from both sections, starting with the former.
· Two and twenty years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign. (Second Kings 8:26)
· Forty and two years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign. (Second Chronicles 22:2)
· What was the age of Ahaziah? Twenty-two or forty-two years?
Now let us examine a pair of contradictory verses in the New Testament.
· If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true. (John 5:31)
· Jesus answered and said unto them, Though I bear record of myself, yet my record is true (John 8:14)
There are many more contradictions that will be exposed in the upcoming blogs which feature the doctrines of modern Christianity like the Trinity, Divinity of Jesus Christ, Divine Sonship of Jesus, Original Sin, and Atonement not to mention the degrading of many Prophets in the Bible and worshipers of false gods and accusing them of incest, rape, and adultery.
Regarding the three primordial clauses, it says the following the Holy Quran:
· Will they not ponder on the Quran? Had it not come from someone other than God, they would have certainly found therein many contradictions (4:82)
· And if you are in doubt about what We have sent down upon Our Servant [Muhammad], then produce a surah the like thereof and call upon your witnesses other than Allah, if you should be truthful. (2:23)
· Indeed, it is We who sent down the Qur’an and indeed, We will be its guardian. (15:9)
The Quran is the only Holy Book which has not been changed one bit and is in the same condition today as it was revealed 1400 years ago to Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). It is the most widely recited book in the world (would have been the most widely read book today as well If it had not been for the tireless attempts to discredit Islam by the unholy trinity of politics, the entertainment industry, and mainstream media). If one were to dispose of all religious books in the world, the only book that would come back is the Quran because it has been memorized word for word and is preserved in the hearts of millions of Muslims all over the world.
People often ask me how to be a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim simultaneously. To quote Sheikh Hamza Yousaf, the answer is simple. Embrace Islam! Just like Christians marvel at how Jews miss Jesus (PBUH), similarly, we Muslims are surprised as to how both Jews and Christians miss Muhammad (PBUH), even though to be fair, the Jews do acknowledge him as a Providential Force and a Noahidic Messenger who paved the way for the arrival of the Messiah. To quote the Father of Orientalism Ignac Goldziher, Islam is the only religion that a man of philosophical bent would consider worthy of being embraced.
In the next blog, God Willing, we will delve into the scientific miracles of the Quran and uncover the prophecies made about the state of the end times by Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) while assessing the truth on an objective scale. Stay blessed. Assalamalaikum!
Great script. Worth reading