 أعوذ بالله من الشيطان الرجيم بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم وصلاته والسلام على أشرف الأنبياء والمرسلين سيدنا والنبينا أب القاسم محمد الأمين وعلى أحل بيته الطيبين الطاهرين المعصومين المفلومين بسرعة أشعر شكرا لك for joining us once more on this your show from the holy city of Karbala back to the basics in which we are discussing the concept of engaging in dialogue disputation and indeed dispute with others who do not follow the same religion or belief system as ourselves or necessarily the same sect so to speak we have been discussing the conceptualization of a comprehensive framework a methodology by which we will be able to continue engaging with those who do not follow the same set of core beliefs as ourselves and we've called this the concept of the world view which is of course a interconnected set of beliefs which dictates how we think about ourselves the nature of God in relation to ourselves and of course our relationship with others in this universe it of course will dictate every single way in which we view the world around us and how we ought to act it doesn't necessarily dictate how we should act but it dictates how we ought to act or indeed if there is even a way we ought to act of course we've spent much time trying to demonstrate some particular specific aspects of this approach to religious discussions but we were unable to we were incapable of rather producing the legwork or the groundwork required in order to really launch this model of ground so tonight insha'Allah that's what we hope to do we hope to start off with the first big question which is of course what is the nature of God and can we know anything about God what is the nature of Allah can we know anything about Allah and how do we have confidence that there is such a concept known as Allah so how do we engage with this question of course in the past few episodes we've been discussing one of the very key points which is that instead of addressing individual soul questions like this and analyzing a specific detail of someone's world view we're able to look at the entire package so that's tonight what we're going to be doing in regards to the question of Allah's existence how are we confident that we are or should be rather feasts when it comes to the existence of Allah the law of non-excluded middle states that there can only be two positions there either is a God or there is not a God and therefore these are the only two options that lie in front of us when it comes to the intellectually dishonest position of agnosticism the position that I don't know and I'm going to say sitting on the fence of course there are some that would go down that angle but really to the question as to whether or not Allah exists there is only one of two answers yes or no we may be able to say that we don't know in terms of where we have reached a conclusion on but it is certain that there is only two possibilities God either exists or he does not exist and therefore we want to look at this question thoroughly and understand whether or not we can take atheism as a serious position when it comes to the discussion of world views it is my claim it is my personal position that atheism alongside the Salafi school of theology which we've already looked at in this series and shall continue to look at when we reach the section on Islamic theology Insha'Allah to Allah is the most absurd world view that cannot be taken seriously due to the fact that again to believe in it is literally the equivalent if you understand the foundations of this world view of committing Russian roulette with all six bullets loaded within the gun it's the intellectual equivalent of doing that and what do I mean by that what do I mean that atheism is the intellectual equivalent of playing Russian roulette with all six bullets loaded before we get fully into this topic allow me to say the following that when it comes to discussing all of these issues all of these rational positions all of these questions these big questions which affect us and of course shape the very foundations of the world view we are engaging in something known as rationality or what the western world knows as philosophy of course when we say philosophy in an Islamic context we are talking about something very different and so I want to highlight right now that we are not talking about the philosophy which is taught in some parts of the Muslim world that is a completely different concern from the concern we have tonight our concern tonight is of course philosophy in the sense of rationality philosophy is of course something that every adult human being who is sane and functioning will eventually start thinking about as they reach a level of maturity they would conceptualize the very experiences they have had in their childhoods and these experiences would allow them to go on to think to themselves why is it that this happened to me why is it that I have observed certain things in a particular way and through observing all these different trends, experiences and each situation leads to a new question in regards to is this just probability is this chance and where do chance and probability even come from these questions would lead to a person trying to develop a more comprehensive way of looking at life and a more comprehensive framework by which we could explain away our assumptions and engagement with reality this is what we would call a world view in relation to philosophy we would try to come up with a view of life which unifies the varying experiences into a coherent outlook and what philosophy would do or rationality rather what rationality would do is take those claims take those assumptions cross-examine them and see are they really befitting of the experiences we've had in the world I've given several examples over the past few nights I don't want to get too deep into this particular topic but what this rationality would ask is what are the ultimate principles by which we answer philosophical questions about reality knowledge and morality what are the principles what are the factors which render our experiences intelligible or rational rather are the principles consistent in and of themselves are they something that we can articulate within the framework of human language and are they something that we can justify can we say that yes this seems something reasonable or are they just arbitrary is that something that is to say do we just say no this is how reality is and reality is what it is how should we understand nature is there a unity or an underlying series of laws which underpin nature or is it just a coherent bag of randomness these are all questions that concern us when it comes to the issue of rationality now one interesting thing about the history of human rationality is we can dictate how we can chart rather how the atheist or godless movements have always viewed reality and how their very world views have led to absurdity and contradiction Epicurus who was born in the year 341 BC was a materialistic atomist he like many materialists today believed that the universe was comprised of physical atoms which swerve around in motion and cause the decisions we make today he was essentially someone that was a hedonist when it came to morality and he held that we essentially don't have free will but the universe is composed of an infinite set of atoms this particular philosophy of course had a contradictory world view because if our thoughts were just atoms flowing in motion then again the question would need to be raised why should we even trust our thoughts because if I have no control over my thoughts and there's no real objective process going on in understanding my brain then what would be the point of trusting that very thought process so this is where the proto-afiest philosophers began their thought process in regards to human knowledge in the human mind of course as we progress we see that they don't really get much stronger either you have of course a very interesting Scottish philosopher he's from my hometown he's from Scotland who is called David Hume now David Hume he shapes much of contemporary discourse in the philosophy of religion against beliefs and things such as miracles and of course he raised a very interesting problem in the philosophy of science which we shall come to as well this problem is known as the problem of induction that is to say that the things we have experienced in the past we can trust them in order to create laws or objective observations by which we can base facts David Hume gave the classical example of or sometimes this is used in satire rather in comedy the turkey which observes other turkeys every day about to he notices that other turkeys every day are being snatched but he's around daily so based upon this he creates the assumption that well tomorrow I'll still be around and another turkey is going to be taken but of course for that turkey it's an assumption because there might come the day where that particular turkey is taken and slaughtered so David Hume had this particular problem when it came to the issue of induction he stated that we can never use our past experiences to justify a law because our past experiences are limited and therefore we cannot derive a general ruling from them to put it much simpler the problem of induction according to David Hume is that we cannot take a limited sample of evidence and come up with a general principle from that limited sample because it would require us to have experienced the entirety of evidence so because we haven't lived infinite lives we could never use our past experiences to make an inference more importantly in order to even do induction we would have to trust our memories and we would have to trust the process of induction itself so David Hume argued that this was a very circular process he utilizes a similar argument in his arguments against human miracles and the miracle claims of religion he states that essentially when it comes to miracles we can never trust that they are accurate because these miracles are things which have been claimed by a small group of people and they're not common nor are they normal his argument is essentially that we can never trust the testimony of those who witnessed the miracles because they're not great enough for us to put our trust into such phenomenon but the problem of such a claim is that essentially what he's telling you is that we can never trust anything because David Hume doesn't trust induction in the first place so David Hume's very arguments actually turn over onto their heads and end up becoming contradictions and so what we find constantly when looking at these atheists thinkers is that their thoughts are generally built upon the existence of contradictions when we look at these contradictions it's not surprising for us because you see when you remove the existence of God out of a picture you generally will fall into contradictory opinions dear viewers we're going to go quickly for a break but when we get back we'll continue discussing this phenomenon Insha'Allah dear viewers thank you for joining us once more before the break we were discussing the history of development of atheist philosophy and we went through Epicurus and we went through to David Hume and now we're reaching one of the favourite contemporary philosophers of the 20th century a man that died in the 1970s after having a very long life might I add and someone revered in the history of 20th century philosophy his name is of course Bertrand Russell or he's known in some circles as and I'm not going to go into the reasons for why he's known as that but needless to say a character of dare I say sketchy moral reasoning or a more sinister nature when it came to more unsavory character when it came to his choices in morality Bertrand Russell again came up with several methods of how to obtain knowledge but again one thing that people find is that all such attempts were largely incoherent he based his assumptions upon the fact that we can trust scientific facts and again mathematical facts but when it came to his evidence for these scientific and mathematical facts he fully concedes that these are just principles he adopts again presuppositions without any valid evidence and so what you find is that when it comes to these atheists skeptics they might talk a good game about the need for us to bring evidence but then they don't even have a coherent definition of what that canon of evidence they will bring us is even going to be what they expect as evidence so when they tell you for example that they want proof for the existence of God they're not able to tell you what one should expect as proof for the existence of God because you see when it comes to this great game they play they'll start saying that we can't be certain of anything and if I can't be certain of anything then nothing is established and if nothing is established it's going to be very hard for me to have a conversation about anything and Bertrand Russell who died in 1970 fell into this problem as well and then we get to the last of the atheist thinkers we want to look at today in this brief history of pre 21st century atheism who is called Ludwig Wittgenstein Ludwig Wittgenstein was a student of Bertrand Russell because that essentially the problem that exists within human thought is the problem of human language he claimed that essentially we have created a language which is dependent upon superstition things like a human dependence upon metaphysics that is to say a belief in that which is beyond the physical world and a belief in assumptions which are not they lack meaning objectively so he would say for example Ludwig Wittgenstein would not only say that I don't believe that God exists he would actually take that statement that God exists and say I have no clue what that means it's a meaningless term according to language it's literally something that should be removed from the dictionary because I can't even conceive this was the train of thought used by Ludwig Wittgenstein he states most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind but can only point out that they are nonsensical most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language so what Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed is that we purge human language from these irrelevant concepts and what he proposed was that our language should only encompass those things which are rational and scientific facts but there's a big problem with that because if that is how we want to address human language and we apply the theory of Ludwig Wittgenstein we would see that if a burglar comes to my house and he steals from me and I go to the police station and I try to have that conversation with a policeman according to the world of Ludwig Wittgenstein there's not much I could say I could say that you see a burglar broke into the lock on my house and he might say well these are meaningless statements because they're not statements that I could demonstrate or prove at that time I don't have CCTV these are not statements of scientific fact and so that whole conversation would be something which is a problem now that wasn't where Ludwig Wittgenstein's original downfall came his original downfall came because he initially recognized a bigger problem which was in his claim that language is meaningless and much of these terms hold no meaning he wrote his original book in the English language and in languages which utilized the very terms and language and logic that he was criticizing so many of his contemporaries came out and said that well if this is meaningless then essentially you've just refuted yourself by writing a book within this language so we try and counteract that Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a rejoinder in which he stated that he was merely using outdated language as a series of steps or like a ladder that we as human beings might try to ascend the problems of our previous thinking but once we reach the heights we would take that language like a ladder and throw it away so we see that this is the history of the promising very promising development of early pre-modern atheists philosophy now the question is why did they fall into absurdity is it not easy to say that anyone could really fall into absurdity and more importantly isn't atheism just a lack of belief in God isn't it fair to just say that an atheist is merely someone that does not believe in God when it comes to a philosophical position when it comes to assumptions about ethics when it comes to anything else they're not really bound to any particular school and they could be an atheist but believe that ethics exist or they could be an atheist and they could have certain political leanings but another atheist might have different political leanings and they could be an atheist but that atheism is merely the absence of belief in a God and affects something else well you see that's not the case as we stated everything is shaped by the bigger questions we believe so if you believe that there is no God that statement itself that belief itself will have consequences and those consequences will play out in pretty much every specific field we're going to witness that in the next few episodes in Charlotte we're going to witness how that plays out in ethics we're going to witness how that plays out when it comes to knowledge we're going to witness how that plays out when it comes to basic of human areas of inquiry so don't allow someone to tell you that this is merely my reflection as someone that doesn't believe in God in the same way that your belief in your non-belief in Santa Claus doesn't affect the way you act as well listen there's a big difference between not believing in Santa Claus and not believing in God and this is really a ridiculous claim from the atheist side by believing philosophers who wish to tarnish the atheist side but by atheist philosophers as well they admit these things in their books and it's something they very commonly say but dear viewers we're going to have to leave that all for another night I thank you so much for joining me tonight on Back to the Basics and insha'Allah we can continue this conversation tomorrow والسلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته