Page 98 - Timelessness and the Reality of Fate
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96 TIMELESSNESS AND THE REALITY OF FATE
occurrence, great and small, happens within the knowledge of Allah and is
inscribed in a book.
You do not engage in any matter or recite any of the Qur'an or do any
action without Our witnessing you while you are occupied with it. Not
even the smallest speck eludes your Lord, either on earth or in heaven. Nor
is there anything smaller than that, or larger, which is not in a Clear Book.
(Surah Yunus: 61)
The Worry of the Materialists
The issues discussed in this chapter, namely the truth underlying mat-
ter, timelessness, and spacelessness, are, of course quite clear. As stated
before, these issues are in no way any sort of a philosophy or a way of
thought, but crystal-clear, indisputable scientific truths. In addition to their
being a technical reality, the rational and logical evidence also admits of no
other alternatives on this point: we can know only the version of the uni-
verse, with all the matter composing it and all the people living in it, in
our brain.
Materialists have a hard time in understanding this issue. For instance,
let us return to Politzer's bus example: although Politzer knew that techni-
cally he could not step out of his perceptions, he could only admit it for cer-
tain cases. That is, for Politzer, events take place in the brain until the bus
crash, but as soon as the bus crash takes place, things go out of the brain and
gain a physical reality. The logical defect at this point is very clear: Politzer
has made the same mistake as the materialist philosopher Johnson who
said, "I hit the stone, my foot hurts, therefore it exists" and could not under-
stand that the shock felt after bus impact was in fact a mere perception as
well.
The subliminal reason why materialists cannot comprehend this sub-
ject is their fear of the fact they will face when they comprehend it. Lincoln
Barnett writes that this subject has been "discerned" by certain scientists:
Along with philosophers' reduction of all objective reality to a shadow-world
of perceptions, scientists have become aware of the alarming limitations of
man's senses. 62
Any reference made to the facts that we do not have direct experience
of the original of matter and that time is a perception arouses great fear in a
materialist, because these are the only notions he relies on as absolute enti-
ties. In a sense, he takes these as idols to worship; because he thinks that he