Page 157 - Allah is Known through Reason

The basic mistake of those who deny Allah is shared by many people

who do not really deny the existence of Allah but have a wrong percep-
tion of Him. They do not deny creation but have superstitious beliefs about
"where" Allah is. Most of them think that Allah is up in the "sky". They
tacitly imagine that Allah is behind a very distant planet and interferes with
"worldly affairs" once in a while, or perhaps does not intervene at all. They
imagine that He created the universe and then left it to itself, leaving peo-
ple to determine their fates for themselves.
Still others have heard that it is written in the Qur'an that Allah is "every-
where" but they cannot conceive what exactly this means. They think that
Allah surrounds everything like radio waves or like an invisible, intangible
gas.
However, this and other beliefs that are unable to make clear "where"
Allah is (and maybe because of that deny Him) are all based on a com-
mon mistake. They are prejudiced without any grounds for it and so are
then moved to wrong opinions of Allah. What is this prejudice?
This prejudice is about the nature and characteristics of matter. We are
so conditioned in our suppositions about the existence of matter that we
never think whether it does exist or not or whether it is only a shadow.
Modern science demolishes this prejudice and discloses a very important

and revealing reality. In the following pages, we will try to clarify this great
reality to which the Qur'an points.

THE WORLD OF ELECTRICAL SIGNALS

All the information that we have about the world in which we live is
conveyed to us by our five senses. The world we know of consists of what
our eyes see, our hands feel, our noses smell, our tongues taste, and our
ears hear. We never think that the "external" world could be anything other
than that which our senses present to us, as we have been dependent on
only those senses since birth.
Modern research in many different fields of science points to a very dif-
ferent understanding and creates serious doubt about our senses and the
world that we perceive with them.

A Very Different Approach to Matter 157