format_quote Originally Posted by
Skavau
The key word there is if. If the Qu'ran can be 'proven' to be from God, then they are silly questions. Since the Qu'ran cannot, or has not been sufficiently demonstrated to be from God - they remain, at least for Atheists very valid questions.
Well, the Qu'ran CAN be proven with sufficient evidence to have come from God. But that is not the topic of this forum. But I intend,
inshallahta'ala, to post some information in that regard soon.
And yet, if Islam is to be proven, questions such as "Why does Allah do X?" or "Why did Allah commit Y"? have to be sufficiently answered. Otherwise, discrepancies with the definition of God still exist.
You are being inconsistent. You admitted in the quote just above that IF the Qu'ran can be proven true, such questions are silly. But now, just a few sentences later, you are saying that the question is no longer silly but MUST be answered in order for Islam to be proven.
Many things we have historically considered impossible to understand, now are possible to understand and comprehend. An individual human mind can only know so much and only understand so much - but collectively, the sum total of all human knowledge can arguably be considered infinite (if it persists). Our society is a testament to the collective work of human minds working to discover new things.
Right, I am not saying that the human mind is limited and that therefore logic is a weak thing in the grand scheme of things. The things we can accomplish with reason, intellect, wisdom, forethought, etc. are inspiring, indeed, to a believer such as myself, miraculous and of such a nature that such a complex concept cannot, to any stretch of my imagination, have developed on it's own without some superior force guiding it... So I am not belittling human thought... but even so, there are limits... for example, can you hold a thought in your head of what the entire universe looks like and see every small detail all at once? Every asteroid? Every planet? Every star? Every galaxy? Can you hold all of those images together in a single thought? No. At best you can imagine two or three of them at the same time, or maybe you can see all the galaxies floating out in black nothingness, but your mind, as miraculous as it is, cannot imagine too many things at once. It can't, for example, think ten coherent thoughts at the exact same time. It can't come up with a way to travel faster than the speed of light, and so on. So, it is limited.
And though logic will ultimately lead someone to the fact that Islam is the truth, it will also, undoubtedly lead one to believe, quite rationally, that this limited capacity [thought] cannot know every thing about the Creator who created the very reality that our minds operate in, and who created, not only our minds themselves, but the very concept of thought... and yet you expect thought to be able to grasp everything about the entity that created thought! It's the same logical fallacy as saying, as I originally pointed out, "
There is a machine that can record ALL SOUND!" There is no way such a statement can be true, because can the machine record the sound that would shatter it to pieces? Likewise, our minds, as amazing as they are, cannot understand ALL things about the One who created thought, reality, etc. and thus exists just outside of those things. -So while reason/logic/thought can be used to understand the evidence as to
who He is and
what He wants of us, we may not be able to understand everything about
how He operates... and thus, as I've said from the beginning, to have a conversation on that topic is a waste of everyone's time, and not really the issue anyways.