da’wah & muslim apologetics
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Is Din ‘Private’ Religion & Is Iman ‘Blind’ Faith?
This article revolves around three questions: (1) Does translating din as ‘religion’ imply that it is only a private matter, having nothing at all to do with the public sphere – which is what people usually associate with the term religion? (2) If iman is translated as ‘faith’, does that not suggest it is ‘blind… Continue reading
consider Islam, contemporary concerns, correctives & clarifications, da’wah & muslim apologetics, knowledge & learning, theologyis faith in Islam blind faith?, Is iman the same as faith?, Islam insists on reason-based faith, islam is not just va religion but a way of life, Islam the way of life, Islam’s theology insists we should believe by way of reflection, justification for God’s existence, meaning of din in Islam, meaning of iman in Islam, proofs for the existence of God -
Principle v. Practice: Questions on Modern Muslimness
In principle, there’s good cause to counter the allegation that, historically, Islam impeded the development of modern science in the medieval Muslim world. In practice, this must not translate into the belief that scientific progress is an absolute value upon which the credibility of Islam must actually rest. ≡ In principle, a Muslim scholar possessed… Continue reading
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Stephen Hawking and the Fate of Non-Muslims in the Afterlife
In 1985, I started my degree in Astrophysics up in the north of England, at one of the only two places in the country which offered this course. It was more or less what I had set my heart on studying ever since reading Isaac Asimov’s, The Collapsing Universe: The Story of the Black Holes… Continue reading
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Does Science Point towards God or Atheism?
‘Atheism,’ writes John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, ‘is on the march in the Western world. Noisily. A concerted attempt is being made to marshal the atheist faithful, to encourage them not to be ashamed of their atheism but to stand up and fight as a united army. The enemy is… Continue reading
core atheist arguments, critiquing New Atheism, God of the gaps, good reasons to believe in God, has science dispensed with God? Carl Sagan, has science disproved God?, Hawking and the Theory of Everything, materialism, Muslim apologetics, naturalism, nature of religion, nature of science, purpose of life, refuting New Atheism, Richard Dawkins, scientism, what is the evidence for atheism? -
Pilgrimage of Reason: Proofs for God’s Existence [2/2]
In the first part of the blog (here), I discussed a ‘proof’ for the existence of God vis-a-via the kalam cosmological argument. We saw how, as a rational argument, it is well reasoned, cogent and logical; hence giving a lie to New Atheism’s allegation that belief in God is irrational. But since the proof is highly abstract and theoretical, I suggested… Continue reading
aQuranic argument for design, C.S. Lewis and the moral argument, God’s signs as proof for existence and His attributes, God’s signs lead to awe and love of Him, Ibn al-Qayyim’s watermill, knowing God’s existence via fitrah, moral proof, ontological proof, Paley’s watch anallogy, proofs for the existence of God, teleological proof, the signs of Allah -
Pilgrimage of Reason: Proofs for God’s Existence [1/2]
As anyone familiar with anti-religious polemics knows, the core criticism by today’s New Atheists is that, allegedly, belief in God is both infantile and irrational. It is, they say, a childish delusion that ought to have died out as humanity reached its maturity. In the New Atheism’s canon, belief in God is likened to believing in the Tooth Fairy or… Continue reading
‘ilm al-kalam, al-shafi’i against kalam, discursive theology, do hanbalis reject kalam, does the universe have a cause, Hanbali school and kalam, Hawking of the origins of the universe, Ibn Hamdan al-Hanbali, Imam Ahmad on kalam, Islamic dialectics, islamic theology, kalam, proofs for God, speculative theology, status of kalam in Islam, the first cause -
Was the Universe Expecting Us?
Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists, wrote: ‘The more I exam the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense knew we were coming,’1 Today scientists don’t hesitate to acknowledge this wondrous fact of how tailor-made to life our universe is.… Continue reading
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How the Qur’an Justifies Itself
In a previous posting about Islam’s rational monotheism (which can be read here), we saw how the Qur’an utilises a rationalist discourse to substantiate some of its main theological doctrines. As for how the Qur’an vindicates itself and rationalises its claim of truly being the Word of God, it deploys the following line of argument: ♦ Firstly,… Continue reading
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Islam’s Rational Monotheism in a Nutshell
Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad explains: ‘In the Western milieu, converts to Islam claim that they are attracted to what they regard as its clear, rationally-accessible teachings, unobscured by elaborate mysteries. It is not only insiders who wish to take this view. Non-Muslim academic accounts … now frequently draw attention to the central role of reason… Continue reading