Question everything.Follow the evidence. Discover the truth.
A case for God written for people who accept evolution, the Big Bang and an Earth 4.6 billion years old. It doesn’t ask you to believe first. It asks whether the science really ends where atheism says it ends.
The Atheism Delusion by Ahmed Al-Hasan runs to over 500 pages. Arabic edition 2013, English edition 2016. It takes on Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking by name, and it quotes Christopher Hitchens’s objections to the Flood story before agreeing with several of them.
The short version
Four steps
Four steps, and you can test each one
- Evolution is real.The book accepts it and spends a whole chapter on the evidence.
- Evolution produced minds, families and conscience.A process that reliably produces those is not obviously a process with no direction. The book argues it has one.
- Selfish genes explain loving your own.They struggle to explain a person who goes hungry so a stranger can eat.
- The universe began, and nothing cannot produce something.So the chain of causes has to end in something that never began. The book calls that God.
The rest of this page takes those steps one at a time, from the surface down to bedrock, with the best objection beside each one.
Common ground
Before we disagree
Where the book already agrees with you
If you’ve read Dawkins, Hitchens or Hawking, you won’t find a quarrel with the science here. The quarrel is about where the conclusion goes.
What the book accepts
- Evolution. Chapter 2 sets out the evidence: comparative anatomy, fossils, the fusion that formed human chromosome 2, the retroviruses we share with other primates. pp. 60–79
- The Big Bang. It treats a beginning of the universe as established and calls the eternal-universe alternatives obsolete. p. 389
- Deep time. Modern humans are about 200,000 years old, far older than any six-thousand-year reading of scripture allows. pp. 96–99
- No worldwide flood. There isn’t enough water on Earth to cover the mountains, and isolated species like Australia’s marsupials make no sense of it. The book puts the flood in southern Mesopotamia instead. pp. 351, 383
- That religious authorities get things badly wrong. It opens with Bruno and Galileo and argues that clerics have defended error against evidence again and again, including today’s writers who attack evolution. ch. 1, appendix 2
What the author doesn’t ask of you
- To take it on authority. He told readers to read, look into it and find out the truth for themselves, and not to let anyone else decide their afterlife. Barid al-Safha, vol. 213
- To switch off your science. In December 2012 he wrote that religious texts which contradict established science must be reinterpreted or set aside. In the same post he said that on the science, atheism was beating the people who claim to speak for religion, and that this was why he had written the book. vol. 213, 17 Dec 2012
- To fear a penalty for disbelief. Asked in April 2018 what should be done with people who leave Islam, he answered that he does not issue a fatwa to kill the apostate, the atheist or the non-religious, and pointed to his writing of The Atheism Delusion as proof of where he stands. vol. 216, April 2018
Today
Conscience
The book opens with an old story. A woman tells a lecturer the Earth rests on a turtle. He asks what the turtle stands on. “You’re a clever young man,” she says, “but it’s turtles all the way down.” The book’s question is for both sides: does your explanation stand on something, or is it turtles all the way down? We’ll start at the top, with you.
Why would anyone go hungry for a stranger?
Richard Dawkins urged readers to understand their selfish genes so they could upset the genes’ designs. The Atheism Delusion argues that people have been doing exactly that for thousands of years.
Genes can explain a parent feeding a child, a worker bee dying for the hive, a favor returned, a reputation earned. All of those pay the genes back. What they can’t easily explain is giving to someone who can never repay you, at the cost of your own children’s meal. The book’s example is the story told in Quran 76: Ali and Fatimah gave their family’s only food to a poor man, an orphan and a prisoner on three successive evenings, and went to bed on water.
The book’s argument is structural. If genes are truly selfish, they build bodies that resist genuine altruism, and natural selection removes anyone who practises it. Yet genuine altruism is on record since the earliest writing in Sumer. Something beyond the body has to be in the equation. The book calls it the soul, and adds that anyone who rejects that must still propose something else, a meme or a totem or anything at all, that isn’t biology.
Your objectionCulture can explain it. Ideas about kindness spread because they help groups survive.
The book’s replyDawkins’s own accounts of morality (reputation, showing strength, reciprocity) explain altruism that pays off. They don’t explain the stranger who can never repay you. The book also argues that ideas working against the genes would be filtered out by selection unless something else sustains them.
The Atheism Delusion, chapter 5, pp. 242–271.
About 5,000 years ago
Sumer
The oldest writing already asks for a rescuer
Sumer, in what is now southern Iraq, is the oldest civilization to record its own history, and what it recorded is striking: moral standards such as justice, organized social behavior, epic literature, science and engineering, a developed religious life. Its descendants spoke of their ancestors as more cultured and more moral than themselves.
The book treats Sumer as the earliest written record of a leap, not the moment it happened. It says the leap reaches back to earlier millennia whose traces were probably lost, because those people built with reeds in a valley that later flooded with salt water. Where the leap began is the next layer down.
One popular explanation is rejected outright: the ancient-astronaut theory of Zecharia Sitchin, which the book says has no reliable evidence behind it.
The Sumerians also left a hero, Gilgamesh, and the book reads him as the figure of an awaited savior: someone who rescues humanity from its animal side and ties it to God, not to himself. That reading is the book’s own, and specialists in Sumerian literature will have theirs. It’s where this site’s name comes from.
Your objectionWriting is only as old as writing. Ordinary cultural evolution can account for early law codes and epics.
The book’s replyIt grants that the record is incomplete and that its reading is an inference. It argues that nothing on record explains why moral ideals like altruism and justice appear so early, and that brain size alone can’t explain them.
The Atheism Delusion, chapter 5, pp. 249–251, 289–291 and 330–331.
About 70,000 years ago
The group that left Africa
Two kinds of human, one of which wrote laws
The book is blunt that the popular religious story, a clay figure brought to life on Earth, “completely conflicts with science.” Homo sapiens is about 200,000 years old and every human body has a lineage going back millions of years. For tens of thousands of years our ancestors lived in Africa without burying their dead. The book ties Adam to a later moment: a small group that crossed out of Africa through Bab-el-Mandeb about 70,000 years ago, and from whom everyone outside Africa descends.
Here it makes its comparison. In Europe lived the Neanderthals, whose average brain was as large as ours and at times about ten percent larger. They lasted hundreds of thousands of years and, the book says, developed no recognizable culture, art or civilization. The migrant Homo sapiens were making statues and artwork in Europe by about 35,000 years ago, and within perhaps 60,000 years were recording moral laws on clay. The book’s point is that brain size can’t be the explanation, and that something new entered the equation.
What it adds is a claim about the soul, and it’s a religious claim, so it’s labelled as one here. The first human soul was formed in a realm the book calls the first heaven, which it likens to a universe parallel to ours, and was then joined to a body evolving on Earth. Adam, in this account, was born into the migrant group like anyone else, and the joining of souls to bodies is what shows up as the leap. This is where the book moves from argument to scripture-based belief. A skeptic can fairly separate the two.
Your objectionNeanderthals and Homo sapiens differed in many ways. Language, population density and climate could account for the gap, with no soul needed.
The book’s replyIt says it knows of no sufficient scientific explanation for the change in the migrating group, and offers the soul as the best fit alongside the altruism argument. Anyone who rejects it, the book says, still owes a different explanation.
The Atheism Delusion, chapter 3 pp. 96–101; chapter 5 pp. 249–251 and 285–287.
Billions of years ago
Life
A process that keeps producing minds
Genes are a language. Four letters (A, T, C and G) along a chromosome carry instructions that cells read and carry out. The book’s inference: a language and a plan tell you something about their source, in the same way the attributes of any effect tell you something about its cause. It calls this the first of two rational proofs for God that it finds in the Quran.
The usual reply is that natural selection is blind. The book answers that blindness is a property of the parts, not the whole. Mutation, environment and reproduction work as one productive system, and that system has reliably produced intelligence, family bonds and conscience. Splitting it into pieces, the book says, hides what the whole has done. It adds that intelligence is the winning long-run survival strategy, so any genetic process was always going to arrive there.
It also challenges the claim that all mutation is random. Some of it plainly is, the book grants. But “every mutation is random” has never been shown, and the pattern of evolution (bursts of fast change, long pauses, unrelated lineages reaching the same result) is what you would expect from a system following laws.
Your objectionSelection has no goal. Mutation and selection are blind processes. A “purpose” is something we read into the result.
The book’s replyEvery organ in a running body serves a short-term purpose, yet the body as a whole is purposeful. The book says the same holds for evolution viewed whole, and asks why a blind process would reliably output minds and morals.
Your objectionThe origin of life is still an open research problem. A gap in knowledge isn’t evidence of God.
The book’s replyIt agrees that no abiogenesis hypothesis is proven. But its Chapter 4 argument grants abiogenesis and evolution in full, and says the result still looks directed. The case rests on what evolution produced, not on what science hasn’t yet explained.
The Atheism Delusion, chapter 4, pp. 163–226; the mutation argument is at p. 175.
13.8 billion years ago
The universe
Something began. Nothing cannot begin it.
The book accepts the standard cosmology: the universe is expanding, it carries the afterglow of a hot beginning, and the old idea of an eternal universe is dead. Then it asks the next question. Whatever began needs something to begin it, because absolute nothingness has nothing in it to produce anything. It takes this as the second rational proof, and notes that the Quran poses it as a question: “Or were they created from nothing?”
Hawking and others have argued the universe could arise from nothing, since its total energy may add up to zero and the laws of physics do the rest. The book replies that zero is a mathematical nothing, not absolute nothing. A hole and the pile of earth dug out of it sum to nothing, but someone still dug the hole. And the laws of gravity and quantum mechanics are something. They need explaining in their own right.
The familiar objection that time began with the Big Bang, so a creator had no “before” to exist in, gets a one-line answer: if God made time, God isn’t inside it.
Your objection“Why is there something rather than nothing?” might have no answer, or the question might be malformed. That’s not an argument for God.
The book’s replyThat’s a coherent position, and the book doesn’t claim to have run an experiment. It says the question can’t be dismissed: any explanation must either end in something uncaused or run back forever, and it argues that a world with a beginning can’t run back forever.
The Atheism Delusion, chapter 6, pp. 387–489; “Selected Warning Notes” at p. 493.
Before the beginning
Bedrock
Where the chain stops
Read the whole descent as a single chain, each link resting on the one below it.
- You, and a conscience that argues with your genes
- Evolution, which produced a mind able to ask the question
- A planet 4.6 billion years old
- A universe 13.7 billion years old
- The laws that let a universe happen
- Whatever those laws depend on
- Something that did not begin and depends on nothing
A chain of causes can’t run back forever in every respect, the book argues, because the world it describes had a beginning. So it has to end in something that never began. In the book’s terms, that is what the word “God” is for.
If you accept the bedrock, one question is left: has it ever spoken?
Back at the surface
The savior
If there is a source, has it spoken?
People in every age have said yes, and across traditions they have expected someone to come and put humanity right. In Islam he is the Mahdi.
The call presented on this site is that this expected figure has begun to summon people, through Ahmed Al-Hasan, whom his followers present as the successor and messenger of Imam Mahdi and as the promised Yamani. That is a very large claim, and this page does not ask you to accept it. It asks you to examine it the way the movement itself says it should be examined.
Three ways his followers say such a person is recognized
- Designation
- That God appoints His representative by name, through the testament of the one before.
- Knowledge where a skeptic should start
- That the representative shows it through knowledge and wisdom that nobody else can match. His followers call this his scientific weapon, and point out that he has answered questions from Muslims, Jews, Christians and atheists.
- Allegiance
- That the call is to pledge to God alone, not to a person or a sect.
For a skeptic, the second is the fair place to begin. Read the arguments. Read the answers. Check whether they hold. He has said that an atheist who rests disbelief on science owes a scientific reply to his case, or should concede it.
The book also gives its own test for any savior. A true one will occupy people with God and not with himself; otherwise, it says, he is no different from a tyrant who wants fame. Apply that test to everything you read.
Sources: The Atheism Delusion, pp. 330–331; Al-Jawab al-Munir, part 7, introduction; Barid al-Safha, vol. 213.
Hard questions
Asked plainly
The questions you’re probably already asking
Isn’t this creationism with better vocabulary?
No. Creationism rejects evolution. This book defends it, including against religious writers who attack it. Chapter 2 answers the “what use is half an eye” and probability objections, and the second appendix takes three religious critics of evolution apart point by point. Its position is that evolution is how God works, not a rival to God.
What about Noah’s flood and 950-year lifespans?
The book rejects a worldwide flood: not enough water, no geological trace, and no way for isolated species to reach an ark. It places the flood in southern Mesopotamia, where the Persian Gulf basin filled as ice-age ice melted. On lifespans, the author replies that genetics shows people did not live for centuries, and that such questions don’t touch the case for God.
Do I have to accept the Quran to follow the argument?
No. The two rational proofs, that an effect tells you about its cause and that nothing cannot produce something, are presented as arguments from reason and science. The book says it found them in the Quran, but you can judge them on their merits. Scripture enters at the points marked on this page, such as the soul and Adam.
Isn’t “savior” language a red flag?
It’s a reason to be careful, and the book agrees. Its own test is that a genuine savior points people at God, not at himself, and the author tells readers to examine the evidence and not let anyone else decide for them. Apply the test, and hold the movement to it.
What happens to people who don’t believe?
He has said he does not issue a fatwa to kill the apostate, the atheist or the non-religious. In 2018 he also protested the arrest of his own followers in Iran for their belief, saying there is no compulsion in religion.
What does he say about women’s rights?
His position, collected in the Arabic volume Women in Islam, is that women are equal to men in belief, work and education, and may lead in public life when qualified. He forbids insults and violence against wives, with one narrowly defined exception he describes as limited and never severe.
Some of his rulings, on marriage age, polygamy and that exception, will strike many readers as hard to accept. He gives his reasoning in his own words. Read it and judge it yourself.
Read it. Argue with it. Then decide.
You don’t need to sign up or agree to anything. The full English edition of The Atheism Delusion is there to read online as a PDF.