Page 46 - Timelessness and the Reality of Fate

44 TIMELESSNESS AND THE REALITY OF FATE

do not really deny the existence of Allah but have a wrong perception of
Him. These people, who make up the majority of the society in some coun-
tries, do not openly deny creation, but have superstitious beliefs about
"where" Allah is. Most of them think that Allah is "up in the sky." They false-
ly imagine that Allah is behind a very distant planet and interferes with
"worldly affairs" once in a while. Or perhaps that He does not intervene at
all: He created the universe and then left it to itself and people are left to
determine their fates for themselves. (Surely Allah is beyond that.)
Still others know the fact that Allah is "everywhere" as revealed in the
Qur'an, but they cannot perceive exactly what this means. They think that
Allah surrounds everything like radio waves or like an invisible, intangible
gas. (Surely Allah is beyond that.)
However, this notion and other beliefs that are unable to make clear
"where" Allah is (and maybe unwisely deny His evident existence because
of that) are all based on a common mistake. They hold a prejudice without
any grounds and then are moved to wrong opinions of Allah. What is this
prejudice?
This prejudice is about the nature and characteristics of matter. Some
people are so conditioned to suppositions about the real essence of matter
that they may have never thought about it thoroughly. Modern science
demolishes the prejudice about the nature of matter and discloses a very
important and imposing reality. In the following pages, we will try to
explain this great reality to which the Qur'an points.

The World of Electrical Signals
All the information that we have about the world we live in is con-
veyed to us by our five senses. The world we know of consists of what our
eye sees, our hand feels, our nose smells, our tongue tastes, and our ear
hears. We never think that the "external" world can be other than what our
senses present to us, as we have been dependent only on those senses since
the day of our birth.
Modern research in many different fields of science, however, points to
a very different understanding and creates serious doubt about our senses
and the world that we perceive with them.
The starting-point of this approach is that the notion of an "external
world" shaped in our brain is only a response created in our brain by electri-