Quran Blogger

Before we begin with the text of the actual Quran, we should probably talk about faith and logic a bit, and about the interaction of both in the context of reading and understanding the Quran.  Some people believe that all religion is naïve and that every religion essentially asks human beings to suspend their capacity for critical thinking and logic and accept fantastical stories in order to feel some comfort against the knowledge of their own mortality. 

Freud, for example, argued that religion is a neurotic reaction to childish insecurities about the harshness of man’s condition.  Man is mortal, so he creates in religion the notion of an everlasting life where death cannot touch him and he can be reunited with deceased loved ones.  Life is unfair, so man creates in religion the idea of a just god who will put right the evils of the world, vindicate the oppressed and punish evil men for their treachery.  I don’t disagree that faith serves those function.  Religion does comfort people against the harshness of mortal life.  It does give hope to people who may otherwise be hopeless.  Its utility, however, does not undermine its legitimacy.

Part of the reason some may view faith and religion as silly is because some biblical stories read like fairly tales, and because it would be silly for anyone to take comfort in stories that would not intellectually pass muster in modern times.  In response, I would say first that the Quranic narrations of some of those stories differ materially from their biblical counterparts, and it would be unfair for anyone to impose their impressions of the biblical stories on the Quranic ones without first reading the Quranic narrations in the context of the Quranic message.  Second, I would explain my own faith as follows:  I believe in some things because they make sense to me; I believe in other things because of my belief in the things that make sense to me. 

In Islam, the tenets of faith are six:  the belief in God, His angels, His books (i.e., divine revelation to his messengers), His messengers, the Last Day (the Day of Judgment) and destiny (or predestination), both the good and the bad (i.e., that all things that happen to you—whether you perceive them as positive or negative developments—were predestined to occur).  I have never seen evidence that the Prophet Noah existed and built a large ark to survive a massive flood, or that Prophet Jonah was swallowed by and lived inside a whale for a time.  If narrations about them did not appear within the text of the Quran, the strong likelihood is that I would not have believed that they ever existed, or that their stories played out as described.  It is my belief in God and the Quran that anchors my belief in the stories of the prophets that appear in the Quran.  I believe in angels not because I have intellectually concluded that there must be angels but because I independently believe in God and that the Quran could not have been produced by anyone but God, and because the Quran says that angels exist.  (For the record, Islam’s concept of angels is very different from the concept and description of angels in other traditions). 

I believe in God for intellectual reasons.  I find it a bigger leap of faith to believe that the entire universe began out of nothing, and I find it impossible to think that, in the beginning, some lesser matter (whether gas, atomic particles or otherwise) just existed without having been created by a creator who Himself was not created, a power higher than humanity that we cannot manipulate, control or fully understand.  I find it impossible to believe that the incredible order in which the universe operates resulted by chance.   

In Islam, faith and logic intertwine.  The Quran makes logical arguments in favor of monotheistic faith.  In matters of faith, however, logic, by definition, can take you only so far.  There is no logical argument that will absolutely prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that God exists and His message is true, just as there is no logical argument or scientific evidence to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that God does not exist and this world came into being on its own.  Faith is the bridge between logic and truth.  In my view, the bridge between the Quran’s logic and the truth of its message is short and sturdy.  I can’t say the same for other religions or for atheism, and I’m looking forward to exploring these concepts further as this blog progresses.