Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD

The Huffington post reported today on April 17, 2013, “Our universe didn’t need any divine help to burst into being, famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking told a packed house here at the California Institute of Technology Tuesday night (April 16).”

Stephen Hawking has been battling the debilitating neurological disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, for 50 years.

Now, if some saintly people prayed and Hawking is cured of his illness, it would be an unprecedented event, never recorded in medical history and should prove to Stephen Hawking and his loved ones that God does exist.

I am not claiming that God is going to give me this miracle.  It is up to God to choose what prayers or miracles He grants.  And I am in no position to claim any special intimacy with the Omnipotent and the Omniscient God.

But, what I want to share with you is that events of such improbable nature have occurred in human history.  Fact of the matter is that atheists choose to ignore what they do not like, what does not suit their ideology or mix it up with some fraudulent claims to obfuscate the issues.

I will review, here, how earnest prayers of the Founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, the Messiah, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiani, cured a  patient of rabies (hydrophobia) within 24 hours, an equally incurable disease.  Iain Adamson, a biographer of the Messiah wrote:

One of Ahmad’s intercedings with God on behalf of a person on the  brink of death, took place in 1907.  It concerned Abdul Karim, who was  later to become one of his followers.  At that time Abdul Karim was 12  years old and had been sent to Qadian (where Ahmad lived) from Hyderabad,  South India, roughly a thousand miles away, to pursue his religious studies.

At Qadian he was bitten by a mad dog and was  rushed immediately to the Pasteur Institute at Kasauli for  treatment.  He returned to Qadian, but a few days later showed unmistakable  signs of hydrophobia or rabies.  A telegram was sent to the director  of the Pasteur Institute asking for advice as to what should be done.

The telegram that came back said, ‘Regret!! nothing can be done for Abdul  Karim’.

When Ahmad was told of the reply (in the telegram) he was deeply moved and in  earnest prayer beseeched God for the return to health of the young man.   Within 24 hours Abdul Karim’s condition began to improve.  In due course he  recovered completely.

The events described are from 1907.  Cure of hydrophobia was unheard of  at that time.  Even today, with immediate hospital care and the use of the  latest drugs and intensive care management people bitten by a rabies‑infected  dog stand only a small chance of recovery.

The telegram from the Pasteur Institute is still retained in the archives of  the Ahmadiyya Movement, as a sign of gratitude to Allah for the acceptance  of prayer.[1][2]

Baron John Rees, President of the Royal Society of UK writes in his book, Just Six Numbers: the Deep Forces That Shape the Universe:

I have highlighted these six because each plays a crucial and distinctive role in our universe, and together they determine how the universe evolves and what its internal potentialities are; moreover, three of them (those that pertain to the large-scale universe) are only now being measured with any precision.

These six numbers constitute a ‘recipe’ for a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitive to their values: if anyone of them were to be ‘untuned’, there would be no stars and no life. Is this tuning just a brute fact, a coincidence? Or is it the providence of a benign Creator?[3]

To drive home the full force of the fine tuning of these six numbers from physics, Martin Rees further quotes a very useful metaphor:

There are various ways of reacting to the apparent fine tuning of our six numbers. One hard-headed response is that we couldn’t exist if these numbers weren’t adjusted in the appropriate ‘special’ way: we manifestly are here, so there’s nothing to be surprise about. Many scientists take this line, but it certainly leaves me unsatisfied. I‘m impressed by a metaphor given by the Canadian philosopher John Leslie. Suppose you are facing a firing squad. Fifty marksmen take aim, but they all miss. If they hadn’t all missed, you wouldn’t have survived to ponder the matter. But you wouldn’t just leave it at that – you’d still be baffled, and would seek some further reason for your good fortune.[4][5]

If a Governor’s wife starts winning New York state lottery month after month, at some point every one will be convinced that the Governor had something to do with it and the argument that someone got to win the lottery every time, will not be good enough.

But, strangely enough improbabilities of our universe being biophilic can build to one in a trillion or worse, the atheist scientists do not stop weaving stories to confuse those less informed about mathematics, statistics and physics.

For a more rigorous presentation of ‘argument from design,’ let me refer the readers to a book, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology by William A. Dembski.

Hawking closed his presentation yesterday, by outlining “M-theory,” which is based partly on ideas put forward years ago by another famed physicist, Caltech’s Richard Feynman. Hawking sees that theory as the only big idea that really explains what he has observed.

M-theory posits that multiple universes are created out of nothing, Hawking explained, with many possible histories and many possible states of existence. In only a few of these states would life be possible, and in fewer still could something like humanity exist. Hawking mentioned that he felt fortunate to be living in this state of existence.  I have examined some of the issues pertaining to multiple universes, in a different article, Stephen Hawking has a change of heart: God did not create Universe?

Often the atheist scientists mix natural with supernatural when they talk about God and religion.  Transcendent God of Judaism, Unitarian Christianity and Islam is beyond, time space and matter and cannot be seen by the scientists, no matter how sophisticated their equipment.  More specifically the God of Islam is the Hidden (Al Batin) and the Subtle (Al Lateef), whom humans cannot directly observe in the operations of nature.  Allah says:

Eyes cannot reach Him but He reaches the eyes. And He is the Incomprehensible, the All-Aware.  (Al Quran 6:104)

The Transcendent God of Islam operates in a dimension, which is not accessible to human eyes or any sophisticated human equipment, yet He is able to influence our dimensions, without breaking any laws of nature.  Indeed, Quantum mechanics provides for what I have just claimed.

A Muslim sees the Personal God of Islam, as the Supreme Law Giver, who given His Omnipotence and Omniscience has brought into existence, such elegant Laws of Nature that His Divinity and Providence is not suspended, even for a nano-second, in any minutest corner of His ever expanding universe.

Atheists often use an argument against theists, which is labeled as ‘God of the gaps.’  But, this can be easily turned on its head.  Atheists assume that if they find out the mechanisms of something, it cannot be attributed to God.  But, allow me to say this is only an over simplification, a sheer stupidity.

If Hawking’s physical impairment were to be cured and if we were to examine his journey to cure, in biological terms, or if we were to examine the journey of cure of a person suffering from hydrophobia, we may discover some intermediary steps, in biochemistry and molecular biology.  But, who is to deny that what we observe in our three dimensions is not being influenced by additional dimensions, outside our observation, by a Transcendent, supernatural being?  So, the crux of the matter in such issues is not whether we know the mechanisms or not but the improbability of events.

The cure of  Lou Gehrig’s disease or hydrophobia are so unlikely that if achieved through earnest prayers, no sane mind should deny religious implications and natural inference of a Merciful God.

Atheists are apt to pick up the worst creation stories and myths from different cultures and religions and at this occasion Hawking had some stories to tell from Africa.  They never systematically address books like the Bible, the Quran and Science  by Dr. Maurice Bucaille, which show the profundity of many of the verses of the Holy Quran, on subject at hand.

Hawking closed the event with a familiar plea for continued exploration of the cosmos: “We must continue to go into space for the future of humanity,” he said, adding, “I don’t think we will survive another thousand years without escaping our fragile planet.”

I have no reason to disagree with this.

I will conclude this post with a verse of the Holy Quran, which not only talks about the Big Bang, but, also tells that all life forms on our planet evolved from water, a concept, which would have been very foreign in the 7th century Arabia:

Do not the disbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were a closed-up mass, then We (Allah) opened them out? And We made from water every living thing. Will they not then believe? (Al Quran 21:31)

Additional Reading

Atheism exposed in one paragraph

Debate: Does the Universe have a purpose?

The anesthesia of familiarity: There should be a Creator for this universe

Photosynthesis: deserving of our awe or ridicule?

Al Aleem: The Bestower of true Dreams

Aztec beliefs in the afterlife: Stephen Hawking and me

February 2011 Alislam-eGazette: Metaphysics, Religion and Science

Religion and Science: The Indispensable God-hypothesis 

References

1.  Iain Adamson.  Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian.  Elite  International Publications Ltd, 1989.  Pages: 95-96.

2. http://www.alislam.org/library/books/guidedone/index.htm

3.  John Rees. Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe. Basic  Books, 2000. Page 4.

4. John Rees. Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe. Basic  Books, 2000. Page 4.

5. John Rees. Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe. Basic  Books, 2000. Page 165-166.