Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

Chapter 10: Dad! But...Who Made God?!

Bertrand Arthur William Russell; the British philosopher and mathematician of the 20th century (died in 1970) with his emphasis on logical analysis influenced the course of 20th century philosophy.

He is a well known in the West for his anti-religious attempts. His work ‘What I believe' which was published in 1925 barred him from teaching at the College of the City of New York, for his attacks on religion.

In his lecture ‘Why I Am Not a Christian' delivered at the Battersea Town Hall in London in 1927, he argues the existence of God by refuting the argument of the First Cause as presented by Christian theologians.

This chapter aims at addressing his argument and unveiling the fallacy of it. I will also elaborate on the misleading theological roots to his misconceptions of God.

Part of his lecture on ‘Why I Am Not a Christian' reads:

“ Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of Causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God. That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be.

The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality that it used to have; but apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity.

I may say that when I was a young man, and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question, Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?"

That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant, and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject."

The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause” .

The main elements of Russell's arguments rest under the following questions:

1. If everything has a cause, then why not God?

2. Has the world always existed or not?

My aim in this chapter is to show that it is not true that everything has a cause, and also the timely eternity of the world does not make it needless to God.

Who Has Made God?!

There are three different approaches to this question.

1. Questioning is an innovation (Just have faith)

The first attitude towards such very basic religious questions is to blame, stop, prevent and condemn the questioner. This attitude is observed by mainstream Christians when they are asked about issues such as Trinity, as well as Traditional Muslim scholars.

Malik Ibn Anas one of the four jurisprudential leaders of the Traditional Muslims was asked once about the meaning of the Aya 5 in Chapter 20 of the Holy Quran which says:“ The Most Gracious (Allah) rose over the Throne.”

He became so upset that had never been seen like that. The questioner with a face down full of regrets had sweats on his head. Malik then said:“ All what we know is that He rose over His Throne, but HOW it is unknown and the question is an innovation .”

I remember when I was eighteen I developed some doubts and questions about the existence of God. Eventually, I put my questions in writing and send them to one of the Islamic institutions that I was aware of.

Unfortunately, to my extreme surprise the sole answer I received was that apparently I had been captured by Satan and need to seek refuge with God by reciting some of the Chapters of the Quran!

Well, perhaps the only benefit of that style of answer for me was to make me more enthusiastic to discover the Truth by myself and made me determine to begin my spiritual journey.

Needless to say that I found later on that the above attitude has no confirmation in the Quran nor in the lifestyle of the Prophet of Islam and his twelve successors. They have always been addressing all questions in the best manner without condemning or labeling the questioners with heresy or innovation.

2. Denial

The second attitude is to deny the existence of God as Russell and many others perhaps do when they fail to find any answer for the question.

As a matter of fact, the first and the second group have a similar problem in that they have both failed to find any answer for the question. The difference however between them is that the first group have just censored their minds and convinced themselves that they should have just faith in it. You tell them how can you prove it. They tell you we can't for it is beyond logic! And then you are speechless.

3. Answer

I believe the above question is one of the very basic questions about the existence of God and if this does not have any answer, then no religious issue shall be analysed logically.

The Fallacy of the Question

As a matter of fact, there is a fallacy in the question as presented by Russell. It is very disappointing to see a thinker such as Russell misinterpret the argument of the First Cause and assumes that the Creator of the world is part of the world, even though the first part!

I may however justify the fallacy of Russell's argument by the misrepresentation of many Christian theologians from whom Russell is quoting.

The concept of God for a typical Christian from childhood is a humane concept. The Old Testament teaches that God has created man of His own image and the central doctrine of Christianity, which suggest that Jesus Christ is incarnate son of God and is believed to be embodiment of God in human form.

Such wrong concepts of God are, I believe, one of the major reasons for declination of religion in the West and the prevalence of atheism.

Let us remember that Russell's title of lecture was ‘Why I Am Not a Christian', not why he does not believe in God.

Every possible being needs a cause

All what we perceive in this world enjoy inevitably the following characteristics.

1. Limitation: all the objects around us from a tiny atom to the giant galaxies have occupied a limited space. They may wary in size and volume but they are all in common is the fact that they all have a limit. In other words they all belong to a specific time and place.

2. Change: Einstein's theories implied that the universe was not static, but dynamic. Everything in this world is subject to change and transformation and alteration. No condition is permanent in this world. Nothing in this world remains unchanged.

They are either growing, moving and developing up or declining, perishing and decaying. Once upon a time, you are young, energetic and flourishing and after a while your health declines until you loose your energy and become so weak as your infancy period.“And he whom We grant long life, we reverse him in creation (with weakness after strength)”

3. Dependence: Another universal characteristic of the living things in this world is that they are all dependant and conditional to others. In other words, everything in this world does exist if and only if one or many other things already exist.

Thus, the existence of things in this world is ‘IF existing'. There is nothing in this world that exist unconditional and irrespectively. You only exist if you had parents and if there is oxygen for you to breath and if and if.

4. Need: when everything in this world is conditional in their existence, they are also in need of other elements. Every object in this world is needy to numerous other objects to exist. There is nothing in this world that is needless of others. We are all needy and indigent. Our existence is fully covered by the universal cloak of poverty no matter how rich we assume we may be.

5. Relativity: All the sensational objects in this world are relative whether in their degrees of existence, their size, ability, power, beauty, age etc. When we say for instance that ‘the Sun is large'. This is true only in comparison to planets like earth or mars, not if compared to super giant stars with diameters that are more than 400 times that of the Sun.

The true concept of the argument of the First Cause is that all the living things in this world with their characteristics of being finite and limited in their extent, changeable, dependant, needy and relative need in their existence something which is unlimited, doesn't change, is independent, needless and absolute.

This Being is not part of this world or else would suffer from the same characteristics. At the same time, objects with the above-named characteristics cannot exist by themselves. As numerous zeros do not make any number.

In conclusion, the fallacy of Russell's argument is what he maintained that ‘ If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause .' The answer is that everything in this material world has a cause. Therefore, his main mistake is that he assumed God exist along with other things in this world, and because of that assumption maintain to refute Him as the First Cause.

Does the World Have any Beginning?!

In spite of different theories about the beginning of the universe, still science has no confirmation about the matter.

On the one hand we read from Albert Einstein in his theory of General Relativity which is considered the most accurately tested theory known to science, that the universe is expanding away from a point and if so then it had a beginning at that point. If the universe had a beginning then it must have a Beginner.

Dr. Wendy L. Freedman in his article ‘The Expansion Rate and Size of the Universe' published in Scientific American July 2001 edition :

“ At present, several lines of evidence point toward a high expansion rate, implying that the universe is relatively young, perhaps only 10 billion years old. The evidence also suggests that the expansion of the universe may continue indefinitely. Still, many astronomers and cosmologists do not yet consider the evidence definitive. We actively debate the merits of our techniques” .

On the other hand, according to Carl Sagan in his introduction to Stephen Hawking's best sell; ‘A Brief History of Time', the book represents an effort to posit ‘a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do'.

One should however, bear in mind that all of these are just proposals.

The number of stars visible to the naked eye from earth has been estimated total 8000; 4000 for each hemisphere. The astronomers have calculated that the stars in the Milky Way number in the hundred of billions. The Milky Way in turn is also one of several hundred million such galaxies. Astronomers estimated that there are about 50 billion galaxies in the universe.

The question of why the universe exists remains the ultimate mystery. Professor Derek Parfit, a contemporary philosopher and a senior lecturer at New York University , declares that "No question is more sublime than why there is a Universe: why there is anything rather than nothing."

Derek Parfit, "Why Anything? Why This?" London Review of Books 20/2 (January 22, 1998), p.24.

Does the world need a Creator because it is timely finite?

Russell in his refute of the first Cause has also assumed that the reason because of which this world needs a Creator is that it is timely finite and a beginning for its existence. Part of his lecture reads:

‘There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination'.

Similarly Hawking also states:“ The universe would not be created, not be destroyed; it would simply be. What place, then for a Creator?” (A Brief History of Time)

If the Big Bang theory is such a good theory, why doesn't it explain the origin of life?

Because it isn't designed to do so, nor will it ever be, at least not in the way you want it to. You are asking too much of a single physical theory, and perhaps not realizing that no single theory can ever explain ALL aspects of reality at any arbitrary scale.

Big Bang theory will help us answer the BIG questions of the general conditions of matter, space and time. It will, hopefully, tell us why certain physical constants are as they are, and how galaxies were formed.

It will not be able to tell us how individual stars and planets formed because that is covered by a second rank of physical theories which only depend on very local physics at a scale millions of times smaller than a galaxy in size.

Big Bang will tell us why certain 'life' issues were settled by nature the way they were such as the initial hydrogen to helium abundance ration, and the age of the universe being comfortably longer than it takes for chemistry to create living systems.

But the details of how these chemistries led to life...and particular sentient life...are not covered by the physics of Big Bang theory because the timescales and length scales that are relevant to life are trillions upon trillions of times smaller than the scales covered by Big Bang theory.

Historical Background

There are so many literature and on going debates amongst Christian theologians tackling such naturalistic assumption that the universe has always existed.

Christian as well as Muslim theologians believed that the world is timely finite and limited and in this way they proved the existence of God. In other words, the assumed the sole reason they can prove the existence of God is if the universe has beginning and then it needs a Beginner. According to theologians the reason of being in need of a cause is that something was not and then it is.

Muslim philosophers by contrast, proved that the reason because of which a being needs a cause is not that it is timely limited. According to Muslim philosophers the reason for the Creator is possibility of being and essential need.

This is considered of the causes of the glories of Islamic philosophy. Muslim philosophers believe that the discussion about whether all things must have a beginning or not is an imaginary discussion. The outstanding contemporary Muslim philosopher Professor Al-Tabataba’i in his ‘ The Fundamentals of Philosophy & the Methods of Realism ' states:

“ Our mind is used to timely events and hence, imagines a hollow space and an unlimited time for the beginning of the world, then imagines a being like an infant in the cradle of space which is handed over to the nurse of the time who was ready in advance to develop it .”

Therefore, Russell is correct in that the idea that things must have a beginning is due to the poverty of our imagination as the late Al-Tabataba’i also stated, but he is wrong in concluding that this would make the world needless to any Creator. For according to Muslim philosopher all beings are divided into two: possible beings and Necessary Being. Possible beings is in need of Necessary being for its being.

Chapter 11: The Fingerprints of God

‘ We certainly show them Our Signs in the universe, and in their own selves, until it becomes manifest to them that it is the Truth. Is it not sufficient in regard to your Lord that He is a Witness over all things ? '1

Introduction

We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world around us. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible for us. The gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend.

Maybe except in our childhood, few of us get a chance to wonder why nature is the way it is. We have taken everything in this world so much for granted that do not realize what would happen to all our daily activities if life on this melting planet was otherwise.

The purpose of this chapter is to share with you the testimony of all living things including every single cell in your body that there is an Omni-intelligent Creator who has designed them and there is no room for chance or dice playing in the story of creation.

If you have ever been wondering where can you find God, this chapter is a must for you to read. Nevertheless, all I can do is to show you the Signs for His presence and His fingerprint on every being including yourself.

His Fingerprint on Atom

Atom is the smallest physical building block of nature. In ancient Greek philosophy the word "atom" was used to describe the smallest bit of matter that could be conceived of. This "fundamental particle", to use the present-day term for this concept, was thought of as indestructible; in fact, the Greek word for atom (atoms) means "not divisible".

All atoms of any given element behave in the same way chemically. Thus, from a chemical viewpoint, the atom is the smallest entity to be considered.

The lightest of all atoms, hydrogen, has a diameter of approximately 10 -8 cm and a mass of about 1.7 × 10 -24 g. An atom is so small that a single drop of water contains more than a thousand billion billion atoms. Since atoms are hundreds of times smaller than the wavelength of visible light, they could not even be revealed by any optical microscope, no matter how powerful.

Each atom has two particles; proton with a positive charge and neutron which is an uncharged particle. The number of proton and neutron in every atom is exactly the same. The mass of a proton is 1.6726 × 10 -27 kg, or approximately 1,836 times that of an electron. In a simple language a proton weigh nearly one million billion of a gram and still an electron is 1836 times lighter than proton!

The structure of an atom is explained in quantum physics in that electrons move in definite orbits at a considerable distance from the nucleus with the speed of 3000 kilometers per second. This means in every second an electron moves two million times around itself.

Having considered all sophisticated and superlative structural design of an atom, is not just the matter of a common sense to acknowledge the intelligence of its Designer? And if every atom is to be considered a word of God and a fingerprint of His creation, imagine how many uncountable signs is already out for you to know Him.

Let us now recite together:

“And if all the trees on the earth were pens and the sea were ink (wherewith to write), with seven seas behind it to add to its supply, still the Words of God would not be exhausted. Verily, God is All-Might, All-Wise.” 2

His Fingerprint on Insects

Perhaps with the exception of mainly bees and earthworms our usual response to insects is to ignore or to annihilate them. Most people, if they could, would deny insects’ planetary citizenship.

Yet, in the final analysis, life on earth would be impossible without insects; they are essential links in the ecological chain.

Nearly out of 11 million species of life on earth, one million species are the insects and there are still more to be discovered. Some insects are so small that can easily go through the whole of a needle.

In spite of their extreme variety in their superficial appearance, there are many common characteristics in their anatomy, reproductive systems, social structure, etc.

For instance, the eyes of all insects are compound with many facets. In the case of a housefly for example this is as many as 4000 facets.

The ways insects communicate are amazingly different. Some by increasing and decreasing of the light such as flies, or by the means of smelling such as ants, or waggle-dance as in bees.

In order for the honeybees to manufacture a kilogram of honey, every worker bee needs to ingest the nectar of the flowers 65000 times and convert it to honey in special sacs in their oesophagi and the total colony of the bees fly over 45 to 64 million flowers to complete the production of a kilogram of honey.

Really, how would a worker bee distinguish poisonous flowers from the sweet ones?

How this factory of honey manufacturing has been made within this tiny insect?

Let us recite together:

“And your Lord revealed to the bee…” 3

Many chapters of the Quran have the names of animals and insects such as ‘bee' (chapter 16), ant (chapter 27), spider (29).

His Fingerprint on Earth

“And in the earth are Signs for those who have faith with certainty.” 4

Earth is the third planet from the Sun. It is like an elliptical spaceship which weigh 6.6000 million billion tones.

The Earth has 8 different movements. In common with the entire solar system, the Earth is moving through space at the rate of approximately 72000 km/h. The Earth and its satellite, the moon, also move together in an elliptical orbit about the Sun with an approximate speed of 940,000 km over one solar year of nearly 365 days making seasons.

It also travels along it at a velocity of about 106,000 km/h. The core temperature of the Earth is up to 195000 degrees which is 35 times more than the surface of the Sun.

Atmosphere

The Earth is protected by a mixture of gases that has a gravitational field which is strong enough to prevent the gases of the Earth from escaping on the one hand, and to prevent the harmful rays of the Sun as well as many celestial meteors hitting the Earth on the other hand.

Everyday 20 million meteors with the speed of about 50 km/s are shot towards the Earth and its only due to the atmosphere of the Earth that we even do not realize their exposure and destruction. Do you know one of those 20 million meteors is enough to destroy life on earth?

Let us then recite together:

“And We have made the heaven (above the Earth) a roof, safe and well guarded. Yet, they turn away from its Signs.” 5

Do you know if the diameter and circumference of the Earth were a little bit more or less, it affects its gravity and life is destroyed on earth?

Have you ever imagined if the distance of the Earth from the Sun were a little bit more or less than it is, the Earth would be either too hot live and all the water would have been evaporated, or too cold and frozen and again no life would be possible?

Can you really say that all these are so accurately designed just by chance? Or:

“And there is a measure with Him of everything” 6

Water

Water is the major constituent of living matter. From 50 to 90 percent of the weight of living matter is water. Blood in animals and sap in plants consist largely of water and serve to transport food and remove waste material.

Ocean covers about three-quarters of the Earth's surface. Nonetheless, it is not drinkable. So how can all living organisms benefit from it?

“ God is He Who sends the winds, so that they raise clouds, and spread them along the sky as He wills, and then break them into fragments, until you see rain drops come forth from their midst.” [30:48]

When rivers of water flow towards the ocean they carry the minerals with them to make the ground suitable for farming on the one hand, and keep the ocean salty to avoid the stink. However, since such salty water is not suitable for drinking, it has to be refined.

Unlike other liquids, water has unusual physical and chemical properties. It is one of very few naturally occurring liquids with evaporation properties. Evaporation system purifies the water from all the minerals like a huge refinery and drop from the clouds.

Do you not see the intelligence behind all these natural processes?!

Imagine if the raindrops were not in their ordinary diameter sizes, and would have poured like a river, do you thing still they would be useful?! Which wisdom and intelligence had made the water cycling system in the present manner?!

His Fingerprint on Sun

The Sun is the star that by the gravitational effects of its mass, dominates the solar system, the planetary system that includes the Earth. The Sun has a diameter of 1,390,000 km. The total mass of Sun is 200 billion billion tones. The Sun is 10 million times bigger than the Earth.

Sun: the main supporter of life on earth

The Sun furnishes directly or indirectly all of the energy supporting life on Earth. Some of its very obvious benefits are:

1) The Sun is made up primarily of hydrogen. Every second it generates more than 657 million tones of hydrogen, which by the radiation of its electromagnetic energy supports life on Earth. This is because all foods and fuels are derived ultimately from plants that are using the energy of sunlight.

2) All planets in the solar system are moving on their orbits around the Sun due to the gravitational effects of the Sun, or else, they would destroy immediately.

3) If there were no energy released from the Sun, the Earth would have been an uninhabitable frozen planet.

4) Without the energy of the sunlight, no plants would photosynthesize, and no evaporation for raining would occur.

And the list is much longer than our patience.

Scientists believe the Sun has been generating such a vast energy for about 4.5 billion years and can continue for another 4.5 billion years! On the other hand, as I mentioned it generates 657 million tones of hydrogen every second!

Could you calculate how much energy it has generated so far?!

Where all this energy is coming from?

Let us recite together:

“And there is not a thing, but with Us are the stores thereof. And We send it not down except in a known measure.” 7

“And of His Signs are the night and the day, and the Sun and the Moon.” 8

His Fingerprint on Heavens

Let us now turn our gaze towards the starry sky above us. Do we know what is really out there? Can we find the fingerprints of God there too?

Here we are on the planet Earth that is one of the planets of the solar system. The solar system is located in the Milky Way galaxy; the large disc-shaped galaxy.

The diameter of the disc is about 100,000 light years. (unit of length used in astronomy to measure vast distances. It is equal to the distance that light travels in a mean solar or astronomical year. At the rate of approximately 300,000 km/s, a light year is approximately equal to 9,461,000,000,000 km)

The number of stars visible to the naked eye from Earth has been estimated to total 8,000, of which 4,000 are in the northern hemisphere of the sky and 4,000 in the southern hemisphere. At any one time during the night in either hemisphere, only about 2,000 stars are visible. The others are obscured by atmospheric haze, especially near the horizon, and by faint sky light.

Astronomers have calculated that the stars in the Milky Way, the galaxy to which the Sun belongs, number in the hundreds of billions.. The individual stars visible in the sky are simply those that lie closest to the solar system in the Milky Way. Andromeda is the companion galaxy to our Milky Way. Every group of galaxies makes a cluster of galaxies.

Our galaxy is one of a small group of about 20 galaxies that astronomers call the Local Group. The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are the two largest members, each with 100 to 200 billion stars.

The Milky Way and Andromeda are only two of several hundred million such galaxies visible through large modern telescopes. The largest known galaxy has about 13 times as many stars as the Milky Way.

There is a cluster which consists of about 300 galaxies amidst Great Bear moving away in an opposite direction to Milky Way with the speed of 750 miles per second.

There is also an amazing galaxy which its speed is one third of the light speed. This means, its light visible to our eyes today has left the galaxy more than 4000 million years ago, and by the time we see it, it has already moved 6500 million light years away from its previous location!

The most massive galaxy that was discovered only a year ago by NASA has something like 4 trillion solar masses. This is only our universe and still what we don't know is by far greater!

Astronomers today are suspecting parallel universes, which are yet to be detectable from within our universe!

Could there be other universes outside of our own?

Dr. Sten Odenwald (Hughes STX) for the NASA writes in response to the above question:

“ If our universe is infinite, then you can still have an infinite number of other separate universes outside it because so far as humans understand infinity, it can accommodate an infinite number of infinite things.

If the universe is finite...like a ball...then you can think of a bunch of coconuts floating in an infinite ocean, and again you end up with the possibility of having an infinite number of finite universes embedded in some vaster kind of space.

Yes there could be other universes out there, but they would be unobservable no matter how old our universe became...even infinitely old!! So, such universes have no meaning to science because there is no experiment we can perform to detect them.”

http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/ask/a11215.html

“Are you more difficult to create or is the heaven that He constructed?” 9

“This is the creation of Allah, so show Me that which those besides Him have created.” 10

Expanding Universe

Since 1929 the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble provided the first evidence that the entire universe is expanding. Later on the general theory of relativity confirmed the expansion of the universe in just the way Hubble observed.

‘Scientific American' in its current issue (July 2001) printed an article about the measurement of the expansion rate and the size of the universe.

Don't you still see the fingerprint of the Creator?!

“ With power did We construct the heaven. Verily, We are expanding the vastness of space thereof.” 11

Prominent Scientists Find the Fingerprints of God

شهد الله انه لا اله الا هو و الملائكه و اولوالعلم قائما بالقسط

1) Dr. Ross sees the imprint of the Creator's hand in the Universe:

“Wherever we look....we see evidence of God's design... [When] we examine the cosmos on its largest scale or its tiniest, His handiwork is evident...God's fingerprints are visible.” 12

(Dr. Hugh N. Ross graduated from UBC with a B.Sc. in Physics. Subsequently he earned M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Astronomy from the University of Toronto .)

2) Professor Jay Roth of the University of Connecticut , says:

" There is so much in the physical nature of the universe we inhabit, the exact balances of everything needed to support life, the piling of coincidence on coincidence, everyone of which is vitally necessary for the development of a stable star with a planet that can support life. These physical properties of the universe lead me to favor a Designer or Creator ..."13

3) Einstein famous saying:“God does not play dice” .

"Coughlin [of the Los Angeles tabloid Illustrated Daily News, in hot pursuit of asking Einstein a provocative, headline-inducing question] found the right moment while tailing the car that was speeding the couple [the Einstein] north on the coast road to Pasadena It had stopped to let Einstein stroll over to a small headland known as Sunset Cliffs, where he stood gazing at the sea and sky.

Seizing the moment, Coughlin leaped from his car, the question on his lips, followed by Spang, his camera at the ready. "Doctor", Coughlin said, "is there a God?" Einstein stared at the water's edge some twenty feet below, then turned to his questioner.

Coughlin later wrote: "There were tears in his eyes, and he was sniffing. Spang shot the picture as Einstein was hustled away before he could answer me. "Well," I said, "the way he reacted, he believes in God. Did you ever see such an emotional face?"14

4) Stephen Hawking expresses the view:

" It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way; except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us. "

5) Paul Davies states it:

" The impression of design is overwhelming. "

6) In 1997 the leading science journal Nature published a survey of religious belief among scientists in the United States. The authors found that nearly 40 percent of the 1000 scientists surveyed said they believed in a personal God- ‘a God in intellectual and affective communication with humankind, i.e. a God to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer.'15 .

Why some scientists do not believe in God?

A survey was published in ‘Nature' in 1998 entitled ‘Leading Scientists Still Reject God'. That survey revealed that of the ‘elite' biologists of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States , approximately 95 percent were men or women who did not believe in a personal God!16 Why would this be?

There are many factors involved. I shall in this brief mention only two out of many:

1) God is not observed in my lab!

Popular scientific dogma holds that if something can't be proven scientifically, i.e.; by observation and experimentation, it really doesn't exist.

2) god of Christianity does not exist.

In many instances when a western scientist rejects the existence of God, as a matter of fact, he or she is rejecting the Christin concept of god in terms of resurrection of Jesus and being son of god or god and things like that which is of course nothing more than a myth, and has nothing to do with the true concept of a unique God who is the Creator of all including prophet Jesus. Hence, according to Christians all Jewish people and Muslims are atheists for they do not believe in Jesus as God!

References for further study

1) The Living Universe: Scientific Evidence of God's Design, Dr. Nigel Tomes

2) The Creator and the Cosmos: How the greatest scientific discoveries of the century reveal God: Dr. Hugh Ross

3) The God Factor: 50 scientists explain why they believe in God. Edited by Dr. John F. Ashton. First published in Australia in 2001

4) Mysteries & Marvels of Nature: Jennifer Owen

5) http://www.nature.com

6) http://www.sciam.com

7) http://www.nasa.gov

8) http://www.encarta.com

Notes

1. Refer to Ayah 42:53

2. Refer to ayah 31:28

3. Refer to ayah 16:68

4. Refer to ayah 51:20

5. Refer to ayah 21:32

6. Refer to ayah13: 8

7. Refer to ayah 15:21

8. Refer to ayah 41: 27

9. Refer to ayah 79:27

10. Refer to ayah 31:11

11. Refer to ayah 51:47

12. The Creator and the Cosmos , p. 146

13. Cosmos, Bios, Theos , p. 198

14. Einstein: A Life, Denis Brian, Page 206.

15. Nature, vol. 386, 1997, pp. 435-36

16. Nature, vol. 394, 1998, p.313c