Page 246 - For Men of Understanding

Qur'an, but cannot understand exactly what this means. Superstitiously, they
think that Allah surrounds all matter like radio waves or like an invisible, intan-
gible gas. (Allah is certainly beyond that.)
However, this and other notions that cannot clarify "where" Allah is (and
perhaps deny Him accordingly) are all based on a common mistake: They hold
a groundless prejudice that moves them to wrong opinions about Allah.
What is this prejudice? It concerns the existence and nature of matter. Most
people have been conditioned to assume that the material universe we see is
itself the true reality. Modern science, however, demolishes this position and
discloses a very important and imposing truth. In the following pages, we will
explain this great reality to which the Qur'an points.

The World of Electrical Signals
All the information we have about the world is conveyed to us by our five
senses. Thus, the world we know consists of what our eyes see, our hands feel,
our nose smells, our tongue tastes, and our ears hear. We never believe that the
external world can be other than what our senses present to us, since we've
depended on those senses since the day we were born.
Yet modern research in many different fields of science points to a very dif-
ferent understanding, creating serious doubt about the "outside" world that we
perceive with our senses.
For this new understanding, the starting point is that everything we perceive
as external is only a response formed by electrical signals in our brain. The red
of an apple, the hardness of wood-moreover, one's mother, father, family, and
everything that one owns, one's house, job, and even the pages of this book-
all are comprised of electrical signals only.
On this subject, the late German biochemist Frederic Vester explained the
viewpoint that science has reached:
Statements of some scientists, positing that man is an image, that everything
experienced is temporary and deceptive, and that this universe is only a
shadow, all seem to be proven by current science. 1
To clarify, let's consider the five senses which provide us with all our infor-
mation about the external world.

How Do We See, Hear, and Taste?

The act of seeing occurs in a progressive fashion. Light (photons) traveling
from the object passes through the lens in front of the eye, where the image is
refracted and falls, upside down, onto the retina at the back of the eye. Here,
visual stimuli are turned into electrical signals, in turn transmitted by neurons

244 For Men of Understanding