most people assume that I came to belief through Christianity and then converted

from Christianity to Islam but actually that's not true at all my parents were
Quaker so technically Protestant but they raised my brother and myself both to
think for ourselves and they never indoctrinated us into the religion so we basically
followed the path of atheism
we were raised in a scientific household my father was a very well respected
visual neurophysiologist and he himself although he called himself Quaker he
openly stated that he did not believe in God and he espoused the typical atheist
doctrine and an beliefs he used to tell us quite frankly that he just believed
after death it was just blackness nothing that was the end and that was ok with them he
used to explain our
existence the way all atheists explain it namely the Big Bang and evolution and
so that's what I was raised upon and so throughout my throughout my schooling up
through college medical school and so on you know we were raised to believe that
that was the only thing that made sense and yet at the same time I was raised with the
scientific mind and you know
one thing I've noticed is that when people come to faith regardless of what
faith they come to they start to question a lot of things that they never
questioned before and this is exactly what happened to me the whole process of
coming to faith for for atheists it is hard to understand and I think
there's a very good reason for that and that is that I have never in my entire
life ever met anybody who came to my
religion who came to Islam except that at some point in their life they prayed
for guidance even if it was the atheists prayer now the Atheist prayer is
also known as the prayer of the skeptic and the prayer is basically oh god if
there is a God save my soul if I have a soul so it's called the prayer of the
skeptic for obvious reasons but anybody who has heard my conversion story knows
that this was integral to my pathway to becoming a believer in the existence of
a creator I won't say a specific religion just the existence of a creator it was through my
path of discovery that
I studied Judaism Christianity Islam as well as a great deal of other religions
and ended up converting to Islam and that prayer was integral and anybody who
knows my conversion story knows that I was praying for my daughter who had been
diagnosed with a life-threatening
condition and I that's just exactly what I prayed I prayed oh God if you are
there just like the prayer of the skeptic you know I just I made a deal I
don't know if you're there or not but if you are I need hope and I promised if
you save my daughter's life that and guide me to the religion that is most
pleasing to you I will follow now the point is that I don't know and I have
never met any convert to Islam except that in some shape or form they have
prayed that prayer or something very similar to it where they reached out to their creed
or whether they already
believed in him or not and asked for guidance and asked o God guide me and
this of course is the one thing that atheists never do until they are taking
that first step on the pathway of discovery so one thing I like to point out is that if you're
having a
discussion with an atheist it's going to go nowhere if you have a believer on one
side and an atheist who has never prayed for guidance on the other it's just like
I mean a person being lost in a city trying to find their destination just
imagine that you're lost in a city and you don't have any you don't have your cell phone
you don't have GPS you you
know you don't have a map if you don't ask for directions how do you expect to
get guidance you know if you're in a classroom and you don't ask the questions how do
you expect your
professor to answer them etc etc and if you don't ask for guidance from our
Creator to the religion that is most pleasing to him how can you expect that
that door in your heart and mind that he will open them for you because we cannot
open that door ourselves the the only thing that we can do the only opening to
the door that we could make is to pray that prayer to recognize our Creator and ask him
for guidance so if you find if
you're if you're the believer talking with the atheist and the atheist has not even you
know made that minimal you know
effort to say oh God if you are there how can it hurt to ask that okay if
there is no God nothing changes but if there is a God and he answers your
prayer everything changes it's just my observation that when people come to
belief they start to question things and so here I was the atheist who found
myself challenged by a life circumstance that just knee buckling gut-wrenching
heart tearing moment where I turned to my Creator prayed for guidance prayed
for salvation of my daughter and for guidance and found my prayer answered
both in my daughter's life being saved and her becoming healthy and in me
feeling for the first time in my life the presence of my Creator and so that
was a real difficulty for a person who had previously explained to everything
by the Big Bang and evolution so as I said it forces you to rethink things I
did start to rethink and I started to sort of ponder over some of the issues
and I realized you know there's more that does not make sense about these things than
does at the simplest level
looking at the Big Bang I remember how
the theory of the Big Bang had changed even over my own lifetime I remember
when I was in college the the view point at that point was basically that there
had been a primordial dust cloud which had all come together formed a hyper
dense core and exploded outwards and that became the big thing now over years
they started to reassess this and where did the primordial dust cloud come from
that was one problem secondly they started to think about it
from an intellectual point of view and said well so whenever you have an
explosion things start traveling away from one another but they slow down and
looking at things from a cosmological level we know the force of gravity so
the supposition was that as things were flying outwards away from one another
the initial force of the explosion that's finished that's done so what
forces are left the force of gravity which as things are moving away from one
another should exert its pull to try to slow things down and the theory became that as
things
moved outwards the force of gravity would be pulling upon them until a point
would come at which force of gravity would equal the outward force so you
would you would establish an equal and then the force of gravity would start to pull
things back together again
and so everything would come back come back come back until it became once
again a hyper dense core everything would be crushed together into this tiny little
singularity and then the whole
process would repeat itself so that became known as the Big Crunch and then
the second step of that became the theory that this was a repeating you
know episode that that basically you know you had this short sort of an endless series
of everything getting
crushed together by gravity exploding outwards crushed together by gravity exploding
outwards of course
over huge periods of time but I'm still looking at this trying to make sense of
it and wondering but what is the origin
where does where does all of this come from I mean what how did it start and I
had the same thought about evolution you can explain a lot with the theory of
natural selection but if you believe in the presence of the soul you cannot explain the
presence of a soul and
obviously we all believe in the presence of life but that's another thing that we
cannot explain you can you can Frankenstein together an animal out of
working organs but you cannot make it live you can take a human being who has
just died with everything still basically functional and cannot bring it
back to life life is this indefinable essence which once it escapes we cannot
put it back into an organism how did that evolve you know it's it's an
argument that has stumped atheists basically as far back as atheism was and
one thing I find kind of amusing is that a lot of atheists have said oh well it came from
outer space either it was seeded upon this planet by
an asteroid or meteorite or something like this but basically life somehow
came from outer space it reminds me of something that you know a joke that was
told when I was in college when I was in college they told this joke about how a
professor goes and gives this lecture about the universe and at the end of the
lecture this old lady stands up and says Oh young man you really don't know what
you're talking about everybody knows that the earth is just balanced on the
back of a turtle a giant turtle and the scientists just sort of nods and sort of
winks at the students you know we're gonna make fun of this old lady and says and
what if the turtle standing on her
and she looks at him and says oh you're so stupid it's Turtles all the way down
and everybody laughs at her ignorant and at the superior knowledge of the
professor of course but what I find interesting is that you have these professors now
saying that life came
from outer space and where did they get
it from it doesn't answer where did life come from ultimately okay if you're
gonna say that came from an asteroid or it came from aliens where did they get it from
other aliens or other asteroids
where did that come from other aliens or other asteroids and from there other aliens
other astronauts so
basically you have these scientists who are laughing at the old lady who says that it's
Turtles all the way down and
the scientists are the ones who are saying that it's aliens all the way up it's a pretty
ridiculous argument we
have this quality of life we can give a working definition of what a living
organism is but we cannot define where that life came from whenever anybody talks to
me
about the theory of evolution and says this explains the diversity of life that we have I
point out that you know a
theory is only as good as the foundation it stands upon so when you talk to me about
evolution what evolution are you
talking about biological evolution or chemical
evolution the vast majority of atheists in my experience when I ask them that
question they'll say huh I'll say yeah are you talking about biological
evolution or chemical evolution and they'll act like they know what I'm
talking about because of course they don't want to look stupid but in the end
I have to remind them that biological
organisms could not have come just sprung up from nothing there was a time
when in the primordial earth all we had were basic elements and those base
elements had to come together to make complex molecules from the complex
molecules even you know more complex molecules eventually amino acids
supposedly the theory goes from amino acids to simple proteins complex proteins and
these were the building
blocks of life that's chemical evolution nobody has ever explained how chemical
evolution could have taken place the original experiments by Stanley Miller
now known as the miller-urey experiment have basically been disproven at this
point the gas is that he mixed together to build amino acids were not the gases
present in the primordial earth when you take the gases that were present in the
primordial earth and repeat the experiment it doesn't work by the way I'm not speaking
without
experience in these things this foundational experiment the miller-urey
experiment which supposedly showed how base elements could be converted into
amino acids as the building blocks of protein these were performed in the laboratory
of Harold Urey who is a Nobel laureate and a friend of our family I'm familiar
at a base level not not only with the experiments but with the men I I know my
parents were friends of his family and it's interesting to me that Harold Urey
himself was a deeply religious man and he used to say that he never met a
scientist of any true worth who was not religious make of that what you will but
the point is talk about evolution you have to take it to the foundation if
you're a billionaire or a multi-millionaire and you're going to buy a building what's
basically the
first thing that you want to know about the structural integrity of this building the
foundation well we don't
want to talk about the 20th floor we don't want to look at the penthouse until we know
that that building is on a
sound foundation that is not built on landfill that it's not built in a flood
zone or etc etc etc okay and so it is with scientific theories returning to
the Big Bang one thing I want to say is I mean there's a lot that I want to say and that
will come out in future
episodes but one thing I want to say is that the
confounding question of where it all came from is the again the foundation
that's the foundational issue now I follow a religion which is compatible
with the Big Bang it's compatible with the belief that the universe came from a central
point and expanded
and is expanding that's actually in our scripture so I have no problem rectifying the big
bang with with my
religion but what I have problem with is saying that it was a spontaneous event
first of all science teaches us that matter and energy are not created from
nothing they don't arise spontaneously one can convert to the other and vice versa but
you do not get something from
nothing you know the first law of thermodynamics is basically conservation of mass and
energy that mass and energy
you cannot create mass from nothing energy from nothing one can transfer to
the other and vice versa but mass and energy are basically conserved okay so the
concept of everything that we have
coming from nothing violates the first law of thermodynamics the second law of
thermodynamics is basically the law of entropy entropy basically teaching that
any process tends towards randomness unless a greater power controls it
unless energy is exerted to keep it - in order to establish order so for example
whether you're talking about a chemical reaction or a physical process or whether
you're talking about that the
dishes in your kitchen sink or your teenage son or daughter's bedroom these
are things that degenerate into chaos unless effort is is put into place to
contain them a chemical reaction has to be contained the dishes have to be done
or they pile up energy has to be put into the bedroom - to establish order to
clean it up so it is with any process you you have gas and you release it it
will expand out and just basically tend to greater and greater randomness as it
spreads but the effort to contain it is an effort it requires energy so it is
with any physical process it requires energy and it requires basically a greater power to
contain the process to prevent it from degenerating into randomness and so the
theory is that that applies to every single element in the universe with the
exception of course of the Big Bang which is the one most cataclysmic event
of all history and in that case this
explosion has not tended towards randomness but rather has tended towards
a universe which is defined by a myriad of fine-tuned constants which basically
dictate our existence and we can talk about this more later but I think
everybody has heard the simple examples the simple examples being things like if
the earth was just a little bit closer to the Sun then life would not be
sustainable because of the heat if the earth was just a little bit farther away again life
would not be sustainable
because it would become too cold or if the moon was just a little bit closer or a little bit
further away or rotating at
a different speed but there are other constants which are much more finely tuned even
than these and the point is
that here you have this most cataclysmic event the Big Bang
where first of all everything comes from nothing I mean the first law of
thermodynamics tells us that you cannot even have a single atom not a single atom can
come into existence from
nothing but science is telling us that this entire universe came into existence
from nothing and then secondly with this cataclysmic explosion instead of tending
towards randomness which is what the second law of thermodynamics dictates we
have tended to this universe that is in a state of balance that is almost
unimaginable when you at the fine-tuned constants that that define our universe they
boggle the mind
so as a scientist understanding these principles and also understanding the
backtracking that scientists make okay as soon as this was pointed out the
Atheist scientist said oh yeah yeah yeah those laws of thermodynamics yes yes they
apply they apply but they only
apply after the Big Bang happened what is this I mean it's a rule or it's not a
rule as soon as they're challenged by it as soon as they find they cannot explain it their
answer is okay okay those are
rules and and we are going to stand on that foundation of our belief but we're
gonna see it say that those rules only applied after the explosion that's from
my viewpoint that's just not science that's that's just ridiculous
looking at the theory of entropy admitting that everything tends to
randomness unless a greater power controls it what is controlling the
universe and keeping it from degenerating into that random State has
to be a greater power what greater power than a creator going back to the origin
Stephen Hawking and Penrose basically to
two of the greatest astrophysicists of this age have now developed what is
regarded as basically the acceptable theory the Hawking penrose theory or a
model I should say of the Big Bang and what they teach is that before the Big
Bang there was no mass there was no energy and get this there was no time
and there was no space a singularity arose from where they do
not know how they cannot say from what okay and exploded outwards why again
they do not know but despite all of these unanswered questions the
interesting thing to me is that they are they are now saying that before the
singularity there was no mass energy time or space now think about that for a
minute think about that for just a minute think about that for just a minute close your
eyes and think about
it imagine imagine something with no mass or energy okay that's a vacuum
that's a vacuum without any energy now imagine it without time and now imagine
it without space what do you have absolute total and complete nothingness
except you know what you have no space for that nothingness even to exist in you have
nothing by this theory
scientists have painted themselves into a corner because they do not leave room
for anything to exist before the Big Bang other than a transcendent creator they
have not left a space for things to develop in they have not left a
timeframe for it to happen over and they have not left the mass or energy that
became all this massive energy they've left a total and complete nothingness
within a nothingness which means that there could basically be nothing to have
preceded the Big Bang other than a transcendent creator of the Big Bang one
thing I find really amusing listening to the talks by so many of the
atheists and I don't want to name names I'm just gonna say it's become a
catchphrase to say atheists we go one God further and you know the first time
I heard it I just kind of said oh what'd I say yeah yeah yeah we go one God
further I had to look it up to see what what on earth these people were talking about
they said okay well you know the
Hindus have these gods and they say all those other gods are false gods the
Buddhists have this view of God and they say okay though those gods over there of the
other religions those are false gods
and the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims and the this and of that and so
on everybody disavowing everybody else's gods okay and the atheists say we go one
God further basically disavowing the one true God there's a problem with this reasoning
there are lots of problems with this reasoning but number one is that every religion in
the world whether they're
monotheistic or polytheistic every religion in the world has one feature in
common and that is that they believe in a creator of the world now that one creator of
the world might be in a
polytheistic religion the big God so to speak or it might be one God that is in
a mix of gods but they do believe everybody believes every religion
believes in one creator of the world that is the one true God so Jews believe
and monotheistic God sort of soda Christians although they have this Trinitarian formula
soda Muslims of
course and actually every religion in the world believes in a God a creator of
the world but you know the bigger problem to me is that you find atheists
criticizing the religious community as if they are
unthinking thinking or foolish there say Oh hahahaha yeah you believe in this one thing
that
nobody can explain so tell me this who made such and such and the religious
person says God who made such and such and the religious person says God and
then they said and who made God ha ha ha
ha I got you you know this is their attitude and the religious person
religious person says God is transcendent always uh was and always
will be we have a certain view of God that he was all-powerful all-knowing and
that he was there before us we'll be there after us and that he's eternal one absolute
and eternal so we
have a view of his qualities and his existence although we do not understand
it completely we have the concept that is one eternal absolute that he does not
beget is not begotten and there is none like unto him we can recite the views of
our religion but that one question who made this God who made that God who made
God we cannot answer better than what I've just said but I have a question in
Reverse and that is that atheists have a
God of sorts their God is basically science or maybe you could say their own
intellect if you're defining a God as the thing that they worship they worship
their minds they worship their icons of their atheism the main speakers the main
proponents these are held as in a religion they would be regarded as Saints and they
this hold them in high
esteem in the same way a religion might hold those parallel figures as Saints
but at the end what they ultimately worship is they ultimately worship their own intellect
or science so let me just
point something out I believe in a God who's a greater at the universe can I
explain where that God came from I won't say more than what I've already said but
what I can say is this believing in an all-knowing all-powerful God explains
every other question you can ask me believing in that one thing can explain
where all creation came from then it can answer every question within creation
because God is all-powerful let's look at the things that atheists cannot
answer where did everything come from Big Bang and evolution where did the Big
Bang come from they don't know the singularity arose without time without
space without mass without energy how did that happen don't know what were the
formative elements that brought the singularity into existence don't know
what were the forces that made it draw into a hyper dense core Cassie what were
the forces that after drawing it into a hyper dense core reversed and instead of
compacting it made it explode and expand can't say where did all the mass and
energy where the first law of thermodynamics tells us by the conservation of mass and
energy where
where did that come from breaking your own rule of the first law of
thermodynamics don't know how did it the one most cataclysmic explosion of all
existence how was that kept in check in other words how is that kept from just
degenerating in total randomness but instead developed into a universe of exquisite
balance
can't say who begins to look like more
of a fool with one somewhat spiritual
and mysterious entity to some extent our Creator the religious can explain
everything and in addition we can explain the Big Bang because in our scripture our
creator
himself speaks of a universe that is expanding so we can actually answer
using Scripture we can actually answer the questions the scientists cannot from
that one belief we can explain everything from the atheists basically
one belief that there is no God they can almost explain nothing like I said who
starts to look more foolish if you are going to look at things from an
intellectual point of view the satisfaction of intellect is being able
to explain things and that is what at this point the scientific atheists are
failing at doing I mean this is what they're feeling at so you know people
ask me many times you know how I became religious and this is part of the answer
and hopefully over time and with a series of these talks I will expand upon
this and and this is just the beginning I hope all of you have found something
of worth in this talk and will stay tuned for future talks so don't forget
to click on subscribe and we'll send you further vignettes in this series
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