Quote:
Originally Posted by Sohel NR
On a more serious note, Imam Al-Ghazzali, may GOD rest his great soul in peace, explained faith as a light GOD puts inside our hearts. Those who nurture that light see overwhelming evidence of His existence in the beauty and the sheer majesty of of the natural world with all of its unraveling mysteries. Those who do not are the skeptics and will always be skeptical.
He was of the opinion that because knowledge itself is always evolving as that beauty and sheer majesty is unraveled through the erudite sciences and the arts, it is unreasonable to either prove or disprove the existence of GOD using the reason of the day. The focus instead for a believer should be on purification of the soul by being good and doing good simply because it is pleasing to GOD.
Guys like Richard Dawkins and Harun Yahiya, as much as I truly appreciate the dialectal and rhetorical elegance of their respective arguments, are using science and reason to propagate a sociopolitical agenda and ultimately address an issue that is better addressed within an exegetical framework. Scientific observation being decontextualized and modified to fit and justify a preexisting belief or hypothesis is intellectually dishonest and has very little merit as "proof" IMHO.
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Top post, brother!
What I dislike about fellows like Dawkins - and admittedly I haven't read much of his work, so perhaps I should use the example of Sam Harris (
The End of Faith,
Letter to a Christian Nation) with whom I am a bit more familiar. Men such as these are just as guilty of intellectual and rhetorical dishonesty because their central claim is that religion causes people to kill, maim, and hurt each other. Firstly, that is false because NOT a single religion teaches violence or intentional harm towards others with the exception of Satanic cults. Secondly, this violates scientific-academic principles - the guiding light of atheists, btw - since anthropology states as a fact that religion is part of a social hierarchy that CREATES order and differentiates human beings from chimpanzees. Thirdly, and most heinous, is the implication or blatant claim that in the absence of religion humanity would be all at peace with each other.
Notice, I am not saying it was Stalin's atheism that inspired him to kill millions in the gulag - an argument used by Harris and his ilk - but pointing out that Stalin's atheism DID NOT prevent him for killing, a point admitted by atheists usually.