Ramadhan, the Muslim Holy month most commonly associated with the practice of fasting, is actually holy primarily because it was the month during which the Qur’an was revealed to Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. In the Qur’an, Muslims are instructed to observe the fast in this month. Loosely translated, the verse means:
“The month of Ramadan is the month in which the Quran was revealed; a guide for the people, the most authoritative of all guidance and a criteria to discern right from wrong. Anyone of you who knows that the month of Ramadan has begun, he must start to fast. Those who are sick or on a journey have to fast the same number of days at another time. God does not impose any hardship upon you. He wants you to have comfort so that you may complete the fast, glorify God for His having given you guidance, and that, perhaps, you would give Him thanks.” – Qur’an 2:185
During this month, not only are Muslims instructed to fast, but also to resist our worst instincts, to praise God, to thank Him, and to reflect. It’s a month in which every Muslim should apply extra energy into the manner he or she lives his or her faith. It’s a boot camp, of sorts, on how to be a better person and a better Muslim in the year to come.
The obvious, most in-your-face aspect of this boot camp is the deprivation. No eating, drinking, smoking or sex from dawn until sunset. Clearly this is an exercise in self-discipline, in resisting urges and temptations, but it also exercises our ability to feel compassion for those who need to go without. Despite that we have relief from the fast every night at sunset, the fact that the fast is repeated daily for 30 days really tests a person and certainly awakens a sense of compassion for those who enjoy neither the nightly reprieve nor the one that comes at the end of the month. To reinforce this feeling, the end of Ramadhan is capped off by a requirement to donate to the poor. The fast itself is invalidated by the failure to contribute this donation.
More powerful to me, however, is the fact that the fast in Ramadhan is a completely pure act of worship. It is like a prayer that is spoken in silence. A prayer of praise and submission, not a supplication or an apology. It’s easy for a Muslim to pretend to fast, to fake it. And truth be told, many do just that. They want to be seen to be fasting more than they want to fast. Only the person and God know whether anyone is truly fasting. And the fact that this knowledge is intimate is what makes this a very personal, committed and deliberate act of worship. Why does a Muslim fast? He/she fasts for God; out of love for Him, out of submission to His expressed Will. There is no other reason to do it.
Which is not to say that I do not derive some benefits from it. No, weight loss is unfortunately not one of them. The primary benefit that I derive from observing the Holy month is that I find myself spending less of my mental energy on the urges of my body, which frees my mind up to wander and ponder. I’m not running marathons, especially not when I can’t take a drink. So I do tend to spend more time sitting or lying down, and thinking. Thinking, as it turns out, is also an act of submission to God’s expressed Will. He instructs Muslims to be people who think:
“It is these who commemorate God while standing, sitting, or resting on their sides and who think about the creation of the heavens and the earth and say, "Lord, you have not created all this without reason. Glory be to you. Lord, save us from the torment of the fire".“ – Qur’an 3:191
There are several examples in the Qur’an of God urging us to use our intellect to develop knowledge, and to consult with those who are knowledgeable, and that doing so would lead us closer to Him. And there are also many verses that point to the universe and the systems operating within it as Signs, for people who reflect. And reflect I do. Not only on things religious but on all manner of things.
I’d like to think that I’m a fairly analytical thinker. I’ve always gravitated toward the sciences and in fact have enjoyed a long and (thank God) successful career in data networking and software development. I believe myself to be someone who understands the value of the scientific process, of reason, logic, rationality, evidence. And because of this I find myself paying very close attention when people that I intellectually respect express their lack of belief in God. I spend a lot of time thinking about this. And I’m going to attempt to scratch at the surface of my thoughts in this post.
The existence of God is something that I have not unquestioningly accepted since I outgrew the age of unquestioning acceptance. I’ve gone through periods of great doubt and less doubt, but there is always doubt. And I keep coming back to that doubt and picking at it. But here I am, still a believer. Why?
Well, let’s start with perhaps an easier question. All of us in the world operate on a daily basis armed with knowledge, experience and assumptions. I distinguish knowledge and experience because experience is basically the bridge between knowledge and assumption – more specifically, experience lets you judge whether at any given time you need knowledge or whether an assumption will do. Lack of experience frequently leads to the wrong choice.
I think that generally speaking, we tend to over-estimate how much knowledge we have and underestimate how much we rely on assumptions. The flat-earthers, for example, (and I mean the flat-earth trolls, not the morons who actually buy into their satire) are having a field day exploiting this misconception. They play with the fact that most people do not have direct knowledge of the Earth as a ball – that most people actually lack the knowledge to argue for the ball-earth using anything other than appeals to authority. When people are confronted in this way they tend to react emotionally – they shut down and start insulting the demagogues, which instantly causes them to lose the moral high ground as well as the intellectual one, and just frustrates the hell out of everyone.
I find it quite humorous because the flat-earthers are managing to ridicule two groups of people at the same time: the ignorant, and those whose only defense is appeal to authority. And let’s face it, religious people often fall squarely into both camps. And that makes the people who actually believe in the ball-shaped Earth look like religious nut-jobs who worship at the altar of NASA. But these “religious nut-jobs” are actually right! Oh the irony delights me.
Anyway, I digress from my main point which is that we generally rely on assumptions and these assumptions routinely masquerade as knowledge in our lives, which is not a bad thing because actual knowledge is very hard to come by and if knowledge was required in order for us to make choices, we would be severely limited in our ability to live. Pragmatic people will, upon identifying a faulty assumption (defined as being either un-useful or leading to bad outcomes), simply replace those assumptions either with knowledge gained through investigation, or with another assumption that is judged to be more useful.
It’s not quite as trivial as that, of course. Because certainly for the key assumptions we use to govern the choices we make in life, there is a certain standard of evidence that needs to be met. A reasonable person has to have a reasonable basis on which to make an assumption, and observations, facts and experience are where it comes from.
As a believer in God, I feel that there several central assumptions that separate me from people who don’t believe. I’ve tried to think about what those are, and I’ve tried to separate them into assumptions that separate me from non-believers and assumptions that separate me from other believers. I’m going to focus on the first of these categories (we will see how far I get before this post gets so long no one will read it – it may already be too late).
The assumptions are:
- The universe has a Creator
- The created universe includes a spiritual dimension we cannot physically observe
- The Creator has attempted to communicate with us
When I turn these assumptions around in my head, I find the first two assumptions pretty easily meet the “sufficient evidence” threshold. The third one is more challenging. Let me try to explain.
The universe has a Creator.
What leads me to believe this? What supports me in retaining that assumption in my set of basic/central assumptions? It’s not because of mysteries, miracles, uncanny perfections or imperfections in nature, visions, or emotional experiences. It’s because the universe has laws, and I’ve never seen a law that wasn’t authored, and I’ve never seen a law do anything at all unless it was enforced.
People mistakenly see God in so-called miracles or some sort of super-natural event or thing. This makes no sense to me. We have brains, we have intellect, and we’ve used that intellect to discover many things about our world and our universe. Everyone agrees that the universe has an origin and that it operates as a system that is governed by laws, and that those laws, to our knowledge, cannot be broken. And if we do find that the laws are sometimes broken, we will set our best minds at the discovery of the principle that governs when the law will or will not be broken (another law). That means the universe was instantiated, and it is being sustained and guided through change by forces and laws.
So, to be clear, I believe God to be the Creator, the Sustainer, the driver of change. I believe that his Will is manifest in the laws of the universe. The fundamental forces of the universe: Gravity, Electro-magnetism, the Strong Force and the Weak Force are measurable, reliable and seemingly unbreakable laws. Our understanding of these laws will no doubt evolve, but laws they are.
Terrible analogy time: Imagine an alien lands in a city in the middle of the night. He happens upon an intersection controlled by a set of traffic lights. Knowing nothing about our planet or our species, he investigates. After careful observation he notices that there is a pattern to the lights that are emitted by these strange objects. Green for 60 seconds, yellow for 3 seconds, red for 60 seconds, then green again. He can now accurately predict the behavior of the traffic lights. He sends word of his discovery back to his home world telling them of this natural phenomenon. Of course, that’s absurd. Having discovered the principle behind the traffic lights’ cadence and seeing, for example, that the movement of cars seems to be regulated by this cadence, the alien should deduce instead that the operation of the traffic lights was designed and engineered to support a system. If he is interested in traffic lights his likely next step would be to seek out the makers of traffic lights.
That’s in fact pretty much exactly what scientists do when they discover something new. They study it and test their understanding by its ability to make predictions. Once they feel they have understood well enough to predict, they try to find out where this new thing came from.
So that’s a definition of God that maybe even some atheists might get behind. “Oh, so by God you just mean the origin of matter, energy and the laws describing how forces interact with them? Sure whatever! Praise the Lord!”
But, of course, there is more…
The Spiritual Dimension
Here are a couple of other things I think I know.
- Our intellectual ability to understand ourselves and the universe is limited
- Our existence consists of more than the space we occupy in 3-D space and time
Easy one first. We already know that we don’t know everything because we learn continuously. But I am referring to more than the amount of knowledge we possess. When I say our intellect is limited, I mean that there are some things that are objectively true, but we are not capable of knowing them or understanding them. I can’t really site examples of these things because, well, if I could then I’d be contradicting myself, right? The closest thing I can think of is Infinity – the infinitely large and the infinitely small. But that’s a weak example because despite the fact that trying to think about infinity hurts most people’s heads, we’ve actually got a pretty good handle on how to work with infinity in math, at least. But just for giggles, try to think about what lies beyond the edge of the universe. Or how it is that an arrow ever strikes a target when in order to reach it, it first has to cross half the distance to the target, and then half the distance of that, and so on.
The reason it’s easy to accept that our intellect is incapable of fathoming, knowing or understanding all things that are objectively true is that we have direct experience with intellects that are less capable than our own. For example, there is nothing you could say to a turtle that would trigger even a hint of comprehension about prime numbers, yet prime numbers are a real thing. They are real despite not only the lack of awareness of their existence on the part of the turtles, but despite the lack of their ability to become aware.
Perhaps a better example is that good presidents do in fact exist but Donald Trump will never understand what a good president is. Q.E.D.
All kidding aside, this is an important point because it means that we not only have to accept that there are some things we don’t know and yet are still true and real, there are also most likely some things we CAN’T know and yet are still true and real. It would be the height of arrogance to assume that the human mind is the most developed mind there could ever be. At the very least we know that our evolutionary history over millions of years our cognitive abilities have improved as well, not only our understanding. Assuming that this process is on-going, we will evolve further, and our cognitive ability will improve, which implies that there is a cognitive ability beyond our own.
The second thing I think I know is that our existence consists of more than the space we occupy in 3-D space and time. I think I know this because theoretical physicists firmly believe that the universe is composed of at least 10 spatial dimensions (plus time, making it 11). Many of the equations for how the universe works simply don’t add up unless the universe has 11 dimensions. Our experience is of 3 physical dimensions and time. Yet we actually live in 11. File that under things our mind can’t quite fathom, right?
That means that as you go about your day, you are not only moving through 3D space. You are potentially also moving through some of the other dimensions. This isn’t hocus-pocus. We’re talking real science here. So, either we are 3 dimensional beings moving through 10 dimensional space, or we are actually 4, 5 or perhaps 10 dimensional creatures and are simply unaware of the full extent of our own existence. There are implications here that are hard to think about so I’ve thought about a simplification that can serve as an illustrative example:
10 dimensions are hard to grasp, but we have a full grasp of the 3 spatial dimensions: height, width and depth. Now in our daily existence we don’t run up against 1-dimensional things very much but we can talk about 2-dimensional things.. things that have height and width but no depth.
For example, say I shine a light against a wall and put my hand between the light and the wall. The shadow that is cast on the wall is pure 2-D. It has no thickness. Imagine the shadow is conscious. The shadow is aware of itself, of its movements up, down, left right on the wall. It is aware of its own size. Now imagine that someone places a box against the wall and the shadow partially hits the box. The part of the shadow that is on the box would suddenly become wider than the part that is still cast against the wall. The shadow would be at a loss as to why its own dimensions have suddenly changed. If the box was on a conveyor belt and was merely moving past the shadow, and other boxes quickly followed, the shadow might attempt to study the phenomenon of its changing shape and may even detect patterns.. and it would do this without ever truly being aware of why its shape was changing.
Another thing the shadow may never truly realize is that its existence depends on the existence and movements of another object in 3-dimentional space (my hand) of which it is completely unaware. The shadow is actually a mere projection of my hand. If it was a very very clever shadow, it might theorize this, but that would be almost impossible for it to prove. So you could say that the shadow itself doesn’t exist, only my hand does.
What this example means for us is that we are not fully aware of our movement through 10-dimensional space and that our existence could be a mere projection of something that exists in a higher dimension or our existence is in a higher dimension than we are used to thinking about.
This is not religion – this is science with a side of imagination. We most likely DO exist in a 10+ dimensional universe and that’s something we need to contend with.
So you take these two things I think I know, and you then consider spirituality. The soul. Our non-corporeal existence. An existence that transcends our physical bodies. In fact our true selves may only briefly take the shape of our bodies as we move through the time dimension and intersect briefly with the 3 spatial dimensions.
Heaven, Hell, Sin, Righteousness – could they be ways our limited intellects fathom the consequences of our movements through nth dimensional space? I will dig into this a little more in the next section.
But the take-away here is that I feel that there is sufficient evidence for me to assume that my nature and the nature of the universe is not fully transparent to me, nor to humanity as a whole, and that science seems to indicate that I exist and move through dimensions of the universe of which I am not aware (or at least not fully aware). I intuit that I exist as more than electrical impulses in a lump of flesh and posit that perhaps that aspect of my existence that is so centrally me and yet so hard to attribute to something physical is the part of myself that transcends my existence in space-time. I call it my soul.
I therefore think it is entirely possible that just as I face real dangers in the physical world and should work to avoid them, I face dangers in the higher dimensions and some of those dangers I define as spiritual dangers, or dangers to my soul.
This is getting long and I’m not even sure if it will be interesting to anyone, so rather than launch into the 3rdand probably most contentious assumption, that the Creator has attempted to communicate with us, I will pause and solicit feedback. What I’ve tried to show so far is how it is that I come to the ideas that the universe has a creator and that there is a spiritual dimension to existence. I doubt I’ve converted anyone but I hope that I’ve done at least a passable job of showing that I’m trying to *think* and not just feel my way around life. And most importantly, I hope that I have triggered some thoughts of your own that you will be willing to share with me.
Tomorrow is Eid-ul-Fitr, the celebration of the end of Ramadhan. It’s the biggest celebration in Muslim tradition and I’ll be spending time with my family, and then I will pack for a trip to visit my parents in my native Canada. But I’ll try to come around in the evening, God Willing.
Peace to all of you, my sincere and humble thanks to contribute to your community, and Eid Mubarak!
Hark
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