Atheism & Evidence For Existence Of God? | Mufti Abu Layth

sorry where are you joining us from uh brisbane australia i just wanted to say being a uh been a fan of your content for a while we don't agree on everything but i um i really enjoy the way that you put points across and uh the personality you bring i think that you're definitely something that brings a lot of positivity to the world in general so yeah thank you man i appreciate that yeah i i'm an atheist myself but um okay i was actually kind of wondering uh like for yourself what it is that you find convinces you

of the existence of god or i can say allah if you prefer sure no no no no god god is absolutely god it's not whatever name we call him by so right if i was to say the defining thing that really um that makes that gives me a sense of certainty that god exists it is truly consciousness right i feel that um you see the the profundity of

consciousness it transcends not only any understanding but any simple materialness of this world and if that exists to me it it definitely guides us back to to the transcendent to the divine yeah because it's just it's not you see because it's so profound just you know it's like we are it's like the lights are on yeah it's like we are online it's like animals are like all let's say

because i suppose consciousness can be a kind of spectrum so you know there's some this obviously there's awareness it's difficult to also it's like one of those things like love it's difficult to kind of absolutely pin down but we can we know what we're talking about but it's difficult to always put into words um now there's some kind of consciousness if we're saying an awareness a reflexivity you know at a plant level within nature and then animal kingdom and and it's kind of rising but then it comes to a point where it's all of a sudden it's like it's online and and i like that analogy that some

people use for it this online offline kind of uh metaphor and so and and it's just something so i mean i i i get it it's uh it doesn't have to um lead someone to god necessarily but i i feel it's difficult not to if one follows the path of consciousness yeah now i can kind of understand that view like it's um a consciousness is something which is uh

very different to everything else um sorry but it is something and yeah if if we did have like a fairly good understanding of how consciousness can arise like materialistically though do you think that would be something that would sway you in your views or is it maybe something that is uh maybe deeper or more important than consciousness or you see you see

you see this thing that if we did have something that is let's say this this this question if we did have a more detailed explanation explanation of consciousness yeah you see i it's not that if we did have i because i am you see to me it's a certainty like it's almost a certainty i could say that that this consciousness is not it's i understand what if we could explain how it happens you see but that's that would

be the whole thing in and of itself because that the the kind of offset to that question is coming from a perspective that to me it's it's kind of missing the grandeur of life it wouldn't be that way you would never be able to explain it in that way because to me and i feel that many physicists make be exploring this direction as well especially bernard bernard carr is and i mean he's an associate was an associate of stephen hawkins and that consciousness is actually within the cosmos and that it's perhaps what joins he

feels m theory with the multiverse theory that the missing m being mind that according to string theory you see even gravitation i mean gravity uh as posited by string theorists it's something that is possibly going through dimensions hence it's such a strong such a weak force because the weak force of gravity is still quite inexplicable like we can't understand exactly why gravity is a weak force um and and one explanation within this dimension or do you mean a weak force like do you mean that it goes because it is actually quite

mentioned because it's a weak force or because it's go through multiple dimensions it's a weak force within there so this that that's that is the response or the hypothesis of many string theorists that it's possibly a weak force uh because it's coming through diverse dimensions to us but even okay but even when you're looking at how we understand reality so you're just looking at reality yeah as as physics science as hard science understands it so it understands it in this sense that there are at least 10 if not 11 dimensions to existence

um which obviously we just can't understand already because it just you know it's already like what the hell does that even mean and then what we're saying is well at the essence of everything is most likely i mean it's just vibration yeah it's just vibration of just being we we don't know obviously we're calling it a string let's say but it's just this vibration which is then giving rise to something which is giving rise to some subatomic particle which is giving rise to mata and so on and obviously the whole you know higgs field and then so on all these different particles

but what we are saying in essence from physics is that you me everything for the most part is just empty space yeah now that you see even that it's something like we no none of us would really ever believe in that if it wasn't just a given statement in science because it sounds so absurd so i feel that yeah from an intuitive perspective even even not even from an yeah from an intuitive but even really like it's just because we know it to be true otherwise we would really struggle to accept that

really everything is for the most part just empty space it's nothingness and and i feel that you know in that is a humbling truth that this nothingness is something that this and this is that if a person can accept that as they can on this level it guides to well wow you know this profundity of it guides to the transcendent because even with life you see life now obviously one of the you know the elephant in the room is that life is

obviously with dna but dna is information and thereby its very essence requires the intelligibility of being which obviously the i mean yeah because kind of like because dna is like it's kind of information like it's not like the same information as yeah like it it is information but it's kind of like um like let's say uh water was flowing down a mountain right um and as it's flowing down it's coming across certain resistances as it flows down the mountain

um and so eventually that flow of water will create a path or you know a stream as it goes down and it's kind of similar to dna in the way that it is no because you see no because the dna is advising on how the proteins should be constructed so it's actually telling it's actually dictating it's informing uh you know the rna and it's informing the the my it's actual information on what to do and what proteins to synthesize which will then result in what kind of blocks so it's not just a it's not about an obstacle it's

an actual dictation it's saying do this so this is it's it's coding it's in essence it's coding so it's it's coding of any nature whether it's you know coding on a computer it's software in essence now they could be very simple software very basic coding at a very primordial sense of life or they could be very complex coding um life as we know it today but yeah it you see that's i'm not saying that this then but i'm not saying a person has to see that and think okay there must be a god you know what i'm saying is yes uh

it definitely brings that question like the elephant in the room that wait a minute if there is information if the bit precedes the it right as it's been put forward as it's been posited in the theory that the bit does seem to precede the it because it then dictates how the it is to be formed so in that case being with a capital b has intelligibility to and this is obvious the whole thing of tillak speaking of the fact that being has intelligibility of it is indicative that there is you know that this is

coming in with intelligence now i understand it's not you know it's not like uh it's not to say well you know there will still be faith there will always be faith it's not to say well this is you know once a person hears this they can only say you know anybody who says you can only go one way or the other it's no it's it's always be a question of faith yeah but i do feel that that coming back to that also that voice you know building of consciousness that voice within these things are ultimately what guide people to this way

are to the path of you know leads in search of the divine it's usually from one being away that consciousness and then from that this voice within us because there is this kind of voice that we find within us and and it's just too real to be just random and meaningless so from within and i'm not sure if this would be maybe your view but like from the islamic perspective like obviously we can all see that there's a lot of different religions around the world yeah and

um people from within those different faiths are going to have the same sort of inner voice that leads them in the guidance for their own religion um so is that more so maybe um like like because i know from the islamic perspective they believe that uh that god sent messages messengers across the world so do you think maybe that would be um like again from the islamic perspective with the crime being the completely unaltered version like of the

wordings from god would that then maybe make the other religions essentially um the older um messages or the messages yeah yeah so i mean islam generally i mean there's this obviously there's as many interpretations as people but many scholars always write as the quran states itself that look that there's been there's there's always been these prophets that have come to people and they always come to a people that they are native to and then god mentions some examples in

the quran says we've only mentioned a few examples there's so many we you know we don't we have not mentioned them but there's been people in all times that have come now so yes so i mean that's so many people have said many people have said that look for example uh buddha uh you know would have been a prophet um according to islamic teachings that he would have been a prophet as uh uh zarathustra would have been a prophet or um let's say socrates was a prophet these kind of discussions have happened uh on many occasions in the islamic literature in the past obviously these people have long

been i mean they're you know historical figures so people are saying well when we look at their messages this is what we see we feel that that would have been a divine how people followed it and how it turned out obviously is something that is up for debate but they would feel that these people were divinely some people would i'm sure some people would say that no we don't think so maybe not and but there's always been that room to say well look god has that there's always been prophets of god that have been inspired in different places and have um and then spoken to their people the

the issue of religion that you know there's so many different religions that you ask of course now this is really the human journey you see it's not god's it's see this is they will always be you see it's not human beings it's not just human beings it's nature it's there will always be conflict there will always be some kind of um antagonism some kind of competition um for the for for life in and of itself to thrive even with ideas they must compete for

them to thrive you know this is it's it's at every scale it's at a the human level it's at life you know just life in nature and it's at an ideological level with ideas as well with concept that there's always this kind of that's just seems to be the law of of of things so yes people have you know people will say well oh but religions disagree in themselves i would feel that in essence many religions ultimately in essence essence that the kind of core of them the nectar of them would be saying very similar things obviously that the kind of layers around them become different

um and that may be in part with culture maybe in part with where they are in the world and what they so for example some religions one of the key divergents that you study in philosophy of religion is it's either what they call i mean some have termed it eastern the eastern religions versus western religions some call it you could simply call it the abrahamic faiths or you know the but then it doesn't contrast it with something so the east-west that is often given is those religions that uh relied upon reason to like they definitely embodied reason whether they always

followed it through is a question for debate but they at least asserted that they were built on on reason now versus those that were built entirely on the absurd or and by absurd i don't mean something being silly but the concept of the philosophical absurd that it was never about making sense it was about just the experiential and it was never to make sense so you know things like the the like that would be buddhism hinduism that kind of uh that group of um beliefs where it will say things like things are not

what they seem nor are they otherwise now that in and of itself even though it's you've understood the words but what am i even saying it's but it's about levels exactly and it's about embracing that philosophical absurd and it's not about reason so even from this split it's about maybe what civilizations needed at a certain time you see i would feel that the ancient civilizations in the far east that they at a certain time it was about the mystique it was about purely about that the philosophical absurd

but what happens is humanity is at a certain point in in human history to be where religion is to be rooted in reason and this obviously begins with the whole judeo-christian and then islamic traditions that then set humanity onto a trajectory for unification because i definitely feel that the the three greatest things that have set humanity on to this unification uh trajectory have been as yuval harari highlights that they've been it has been religion it has been empire and it has been a currency i mean these things have

ultimately kind of unified uh humanity and and maybe we're we're heading towards a greater unity yet yeah and time to come do you think we see that in a voice you were speaking of before and with the other religions potentially all having levels of inspiration like um i guess even even when it comes to considering like from people who are similar to myself who don't hold an active belief in any um you know gods or spirituality like um i guess that probably i i don't know your view but um

maybe that wouldn't be exclusionary to having the inner voice but um then that would likely preclude um the inner voice being from having the messenger and would just be like i'm just trying to guess from your view would be that's just the same i'm saying that these are you see there are many things um along this journey that you know this journey of life there are many things that will be that are symbols of the transcendent of the divine um now

they they may be there as an aide they may be there to to guide they may be there and maybe ignored so this so for example an inner voice for example creation in and of itself as as immanuel kant would say you know this the starry heavens above or the moral code within um whether it's going to be consciousness whether it's going to be other intricacies so for example the question that mathematicians have raised that it's interesting that you see is this world a simulation that you know in the simulation theory that

what they've said that okay is it if so let's work it backwards that if it were to be a simulation what would you expect to find like what could you catch out now according to that hypothesis the things that they would expect they seem to be finding and hence it's so they seem to be finding the because you'd expect certain coding in the cosmos and certain forces to behave in a certain way in certain mathematical patterns to be in certain things and they seem to be finding i mean you could just watch several i mean neil degrasse tyson has a a lot of uh panel conferences on it they're on youtube with mathematicians giving lengthy kind of presentations on it so

you would if you just you can watch that i in fact everybody should watch it's very interesting so you see there are many signs or symbols i i would say symbols i prefer that word or science or whatever and they're all there and maybe some help others more than others maybe some don't help at all maybe it's but one thing for sure is a very personal journey um people to some people through things like mindfulness through exploration they have experienced certain planes

and of consciousness that are undeniable to them um you know some people through uh through other measures have experienced that whether it's in fact there's a documentary i'll i'll speak about it on maybe next week um through some of these the sacred medicines for example uh things there's a documentary called five meow the movie and even though the documentary isn't necessarily um it's not hyping uh the it's just a documentary about three friends who set off to to explore this and and it's just following their journey but it's not necessarily

speaking in favor of sacred medicine such as the psychedelics like five meow but it's uh at the same time it's not negating it it's just kind of leaving it for the viewer now it's very interesting that these ancient traditions as well that go back thousands of years um as with other traditions that have done this through meditation or mindfulness or within the muslim tradition as well certain people with thicker and this kind of you see it's interesting because thicker can mean uttering remembering but it can also mean mindful this mindfulness and that people they actually experience

um and and what they experience is obviously it's subjective but it's you see it's more real than real and for that person it becomes impossible to deny what they have experienced and i know to the other that they haven't experienced it so they see that you know well this is just your experience you could be hallucinating you could be this you could be that and true that's to the other until they taste it and then all of a sudden yeah do you think though if so if people are having these different experiences like um is that

like i understand how convincing it is to the person who has the experience but um a lot of the experiences people have are very different to one another um like there's not that level of consistency of you know what they went through which why would we seek out you see we shouldn't be it is all about the individual person and their journey it is not to mirror or to replicate or to clone another i mean obviously you have pathways you will have structures you will have societies you will have you know you will have faith guidelines you will have religions that are guiding you

but your experience is is your very own and it's for yours to cherish yeah yeah i i definitely agree that like um i mean if everyone was just having the same experience it would be less of a special thing to do but um the reason i asked that there was like four um like generally in at least you know um well most of the world that these days generally follows uh the scientific method for coming to terms with you know what is uh you know an accurate description of how reality works um

and so when we're having but but i've given that and we we don't really truly believe in it in our real world but we believe in it in a textbook version see like i told you we you and i are for the most part not even here and yeah you see now really speaking completely and that's consciousness well which once again we have no idea where to begin yeah i i think though if we were to like if we were to construct um say um

an actual replica of a human right um with you know fully functioning cells and all of that i imagine that more than likely that person would be conscious if we were to you know ensure it was like a living uh creation right well i could i like to tell you look scientifically speaking that wouldn't be true you know how because homo sapiens have long existed before the cognitive revolution it's the exact same homo sapiens as us i don't mean uh neanderthals or heidelbergensis or these other variants i'm speaking about homo sapiens have gone back so the

ancient so now we have at least homo sapien findings from at least 300 000 years in certain parts of the world whereas we know that the cognitive revolution of consciousness must have taken place anything between 70 to 100 000 years so if you were to find a dead body of a homo sapien from let's say 150 000 years ago he would look identical to a let's say given whatever the regional features of a human being today you would not like let's say we closed him you would think that is an absolute you wouldn't think he's a neanderthal you wouldn't have like a protruding brow or anything he'd look exactly like this so

and he would have a brain just like ours the same capacity the same ca cc you know whether it's 1800 or whatever he would be exactly like us except he would not have consciousness so what what is it that you mean by consciousness then like isn't that the million dollar question yeah well i i don't really know what differentiates us from like a dolphin or an octopus for example or um you know any of the other apes we seem to have

varying degrees of you know see matt that is weird that is where your journey begins not just yours each and all and this is why i've said that in this day and age it will be the path of consciousness that guides to the transcendent in just trying to understand it just try to spend the coming whatever time you have in the future ponder reflect that what is consciousness why why is it special why what is you know hominins have existed for so long they're not just and in fact consciousness to a great extent is counter evolution i mean it's counter productive evolutionarily speaking

you see because we are much better at survival based on instincts than we are on consciousness because consciousness causes you to pause whereas instinct an animal will hunt on instinct this is why it does what it does it will hunt on how it's been built to hunt if it had to think you see thinking weakens you because it can make you also think compassionately it can make you slow you down it can make you you're not impulsively acting on instinct always so it's not productive to evolution obviously human beings have thrived because of

consciousness but it's not productive as far as evolution is concerned now it just happens to be that yes we have taken it this way but that's like a fluke you know it's not going by yeah i'd definitely like challenge you on that because instinct uh alone doesn't seem to be what we okay well yeah like all you'd have to do to prove that you'd just have to put a human being that is conscious in the wilderness on his own and you'd have to put an animal and you can place your bets and i'll bet so much more money whatever you bet i'll double it

and that the animal will outlive and out survive the human being if he's on an island brutal nature you place a human being and you place on a similar virtual thing let's say a chimpanzee or you place an animal now the animal will out survive the human because it doesn't you see the consciousness will freak the hell out of you it will it will give you so much panic you see it's not you know when you're built to just move and survive that is all you're built for you do not pause and reflect and you you see as mark twain said that i've been

through many terrible things in my life some of which actually happened most of our fears are in the our fears are kind of our country like we we imagine them people live in depression why you know in studies done on primates primates that for example chimpanzees who are paralyzed don't undergo depression they don't become depressed they live just as happy why would a human being in that scenario become depressed because of consciousness because he becomes conscious and he thinks of the future and he thinks that well you know i'm going to live a miserable life i won't be able to do

what that whereas the chimpanzee in the studies with bonobos they showed that they there was no varying degree to their subjective well-being they remain just as happy and they remain just as playful and joyous regardless of becoming crippled you see human beings when you say does consciousness in brutal nature the fact that we so you see the way it's happened is it's one consciousness has won the war and humans have thrived now you and i are living in that society where humans have thrived so therefore it's true we would now think consciousness

but given just if you're just playing a game of chance you see nature is brutal do you know the marshmallow experiment that um they perform on children to see um like to basically demonstrate their ability for foresight and um suppressing their desire for something now so that they can get something oh yes yes yeah um it's good that you mentioned that because do you know the studies showed that bonobo chimps when given the same study with withheld for the same amount of time as children which was the maximum 18 minutes

now they showed that so bonobo had the same ex could exercise the same amount of self-restraint as a child could to refrain for a greater reward but not longer than 18 minutes however the bonobo outsmarted the child when it came to mirroring on certain things with so for example when they gave them there were certain experiments where the child had to do something and they would get certain rewards and sometimes it was randomized and you couldn't see how it was happening but some had transparent kind of backing so you could see the hand of the experimenter doing something so you could tell oh he's doing this so this is not going to happen this time because you could see the hand

yeah the the bonobos when they could see the hand didn't they they recognized it and they could tell that oh this isn't going to happen whereas the child still couldn't so the bonobo chimpanzees uh could outperform the intelligence of a young human child but it's only as we develop that we become obviously much more intricate and sophisticated yeah but do you think that that would be based on instinct then because if it's performed outside of the you know like normally i would say instinct would generally be something for you you know

like it would be described as um something which creates an impulse to act right yes so okay so just so just that's a good question just to kind of as a notation to clarify that so although i'm using the word instinct because i don't you know for lack of a better term that's just me i don't mean by just purely impulsive instincts what i mean is you see the animals have a brain as well so they they have all the these kind of systems they have flight fight they have obviously the sensory multi-sensory cortex they have all these visual cortex they have all the auditory cortex they have these things as well and obviously chimpanzees

similar to some extent to humans obviously not as developed in the prefrontal cortex but still similar now it's not i don't mean by that they're just surviving based on a whim that it's just like an instinct to react obviously there are some deep mechanisms so even primates and animals and even certain mammals have some concept of justice for example and morals and this you know um franz de wong speaks about this in his book the bonobo and the atheist he highlights after decades of studies that look they have certain structures and they have a community concern and they they recognize structures they recognize hierarchies

they also recognize some form of right and wrong they recognize punishments and they recognize these things there's obviously a sophisticated kind of um mechanism at play but they're not and and so obviously they are conscious if it depends how if we're speaking about consciousness as a spectrum then they are conscious but they're not you see we are at a point where we are online yeah and they are still called consciousness rather than you see it's just that conscious no it's just that consciousness when we're using it in binary terms to say we have consciousness and animals don't we're not using it in that sense

in the spectrum sense because it's like obviously life so when we speak of life obviously bacteria has life but we're not speaking you know when people say for example life is precious they're not in that particular context referring to bacterial viruses or things like this that are also alive but they're referring to let's say human life or maybe a mammal life or they're not even referring to reptilians or uh or pests or you know so yes in one sense life is you know it's a continuum starting right down from single cells all the way up but when we're speaking in a certain

setting we're speaking so when i'm saying consciousness i'm speaking about consciousness as we recognize it the precious the question mark consciousness but you're right if we're speaking as a spectrum of awareness and some form of consciousness then a lower level consciousness is there amongst animals and more so amongst some than others like obviously dolphins and elephants and um obviously primates and even crows you know to some extent so it is there but it's still a very qualitatively different format it's not like how we have it so we have obviously something there's some kind of if i can say magic

there's some kind of magical level dual makeover to human consciousness which is very different now that's what i meant i wasn't just speaking about sheer instincts that the animals are just kind of reactionary and but what i was saying is you see if the purpose of evolution is to survive simply survive then nature which is brutal can survive much better without consciousness being like our sense of consciousness the magical consciousness being gifted because nature is very brutal to to be wired to survive is just the

better way to do it with humans consciousness obviously we thrived in a totally different way but i'm just saying given the equation it seems counterproductive to survival in brutal nature obviously the way history worked out is humans did thrive but yeah i mean these obviously to be fair we can never settle these in just a discussion but these are definitely fabulous points to ponder over and it's obviously look it's a question which nobody can you know i could say you know i've experienced something that

somebody else could say you know they've experienced the presence of god they've experienced these things now i get it to that person it's well you know they've experienced this thing and so it's very it's more real than real somebody else could say well i haven't you know and in my mind you know that's just it's subjective to you which which okay each person's journey for all we know for example one could argue that none of you really exist this is all just a dream in which you are just a figment of my imagination and and you could say well that's not true because i exist but you could just exist

within that imagination i mean you wouldn't be able to tell exactly no it's been epic match i i love the philosophical is it what is it you do by the way if you don't mind uh at the moment i'm a student um i used to run a couple businesses but um uh some not so great things happened and i decided for a career change so well maybe maybe maybe for much greater things to happen yet quite possibly a lot yeah absolutely so i really appreciate it i appreciate i appreciate you coming on i appreciate the dialogue take care and i'm sure

we'll speak soon stay in touch much love yeah i'll forget thanks for uh the positivity you um you bring across um yeah i see when you post the shorts thank you i appreciate it i always click them to have a look so thank you and um sorry to hear it i know it was a while ago now but sorry to hear about the um when the people came and yeah you know even even even crises have within them hidden blessings and many a blessing emerged following that so thank you once again i appreciate it take very good care of yourself and we'll speak soon people ladies and gentlemen

that was matt from down under our