By Charles Moore
The Telegraph:
You often meet them for the first time at secondary school. The typical teenage atheist is more likely a boy than a girl, stronger on science than the arts, and at the high-ish end of the academic spectrum. He tells you that he has studied the nature of matter, the universe etc, and can prove that God does not exist.
Already, you are plunged into the thick of the problem, which is one of category. The teenage thinker treats the existence of God as a scientific matter, but it isn’t. Science can certainly disprove some claims that believers make about their God – or, to be more exact, it can prove that these claims are incompatible with science – but it can have nothing to say about something that lies outside its realm.
A few atheists realise this, and so, while trying to devise concepts of a good society without God, they give the subject of God’s existence a wide berth. Charles Darwin followed this cautious approach. For the most part, however, they devote themselves to the wearisome and surprisingly difficult business of trying to prove a negative.
Categories: Americas, Atheism, Religion, Religion & Science
I had a friend in UK, Junior to me, named Brown, at Fisgard and he was a good friend. He used to discuss existence of God with me and mostly based on “Seeing is reality. Since we cannot see anything, we do not believe in it.”
I was young Muslim and did not know much of religion and Science. I argued with him not to rely on sight only. Use your heart too i.e. seek things by feelings.
I asked him about love and pain and sympathy and hatred. He believed in them all. But he had never seen any of them, how come he believed in them!
I do not remember what was the end result of our discussions.
Now I feel that there are many abstract (and imaginary) things. WE cannot see them or present them on the table. But we feel their effect and cannot deny them at all.
Do we see electricity/ or the software running in computer hardware? or gravity? or Time? Who has seen the time which is considered as the forth dimension.
The prophet Moses, Jesus and Muhammad taught belief in God (in One God). The basic theory of Islam is to believe in the things which can be seen and also some things which cannot be seen. Islam is the true medium course religion, not inclined to any extreme. (Khair ul Umoor e ausatuha).
Basic principle of Islam or any true faith is to believe in the seen as well as unseen things. Islam teaches Muslims not to lay a condition to believe only in the seen things. It teaches believers to believe in the UNSEEN too. That could be belief in God or Spirit or angels.