So Mehdi Hasan is a Muslim who interviewed Richard 
Dawkins for al-Jazeera. He apparently got his ass handed to 
him because he’s written a rather typical article calling 
Dawkins ‘strident’ and being generally butthurt when people 
point out his delusions for what they are. 
This sort of writing is a good example of British, wishy-washy, 
semi-relativistic twaddle, as opposed to American pseudo-
philosophical genocide affirming claptrap. 
Mehdi Hasan: "You believe that Muhammad went to heaven 
on a winged horse?" That was the question posed to me by 
none other than Richard Dawkins a few weeks ago, in front of 
a 400-strong audience at the Oxford Union.  
I was supposed to be interviewing him for al-Jazeera but the 
world's best-known atheist decided to turn the tables on me. 
So what did I do? I confessed. Yes, I believe in prophets and 
miracles.
Oh, and I believe in god, too. Shame on me, eh?
My response: Yes! Although I noticed you were rather 
ambivalent. Do you actually believe in the specific miracle 
mentioned? Because that’s stupid even by ordinary miracle 
standards – why would god want some random paedophile in 
heaven anyway? That’s not only in violation of the laws of 
nature but logically absurd.  
even if we did allow some miracles on theism is it simply a 
case of anything goes?
Mehdi Hasan: Faith, in the disdainful eyes of the atheist, is 
irredeemably irrational; to have faith, as Dawkins put it to me, 
is to have "belief in something without evidence".  
This, however, is sheer nonsense. Are we seriously expected 
to believe that the likes of Descartes, Kierkegaard, Hegel, 
Rousseau, Leibniz and Locke were all unthinking or irrational 
0:01:48.066,0:01:48.000
idiots? 
My response: Nice name-dropping there. It’s not about the 
intelligence of these people. It’s a common religious sophism 
to shift the focus onto individuals. This is a matter of
argument. But as it happens, Kierkegaard was irrational and 
proud of it. His whole philosophy is built on the notion that 
faith trumps reason. 
None of those thinkers were idiots by any means but their 
arguments for religious faith were poor and that’s the crux of 
the matter.  
You could also perform the same namedrop for many wacky 
beliefs. Aquinas believed in astrology. Augustine believed in 
geocentrism. 
Brilliant historical thinkers have believed erroneous claims, 
because they were still figuring stuff out. 
And of course, many of them didn’t have anything like 
freedom of inquiry.    
Mehdi Hasan: In trying to disparage 'faith', Dawkins and his 
allies constantly confuse 'evidence' with 'proof'; those of us 
who believe in God do so without proof but not without   
evidence. As the Oxford theologian (and biophysicist) Alister 
McGrath has observed:
"Our beliefs may be shown to be justifiable, without thereby 
demonstrating that they are proven."
They are not justifiable. They are unfalsifiable. They have 
immunity from disproof built into them, like a fairy which turns 
invisible when you look away. 
God is as indistinguishable from nothing as it is possible to 
be. 
Mehdi Hasan:  
The Science Bit
Those atheists who harangue us theists for our supposed 
lack of evidence should consider three things. First, it may be 
a tired cliché but it is nonetheless correct: 
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I can't prove 
God but you can't disprove him. The only non-faith-based 
position is that of the agnostic.’
My response: Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. 
What other evidence of absence could there be?
A thing being completely undetectable and unknowable is the 
most fundamental form of evidence against its existence. 
I could go further with the problem of evil, but that’s beside  
the point here. You ought to have said ‘absence of evidence is 
not proof of absence.’ 
That would be correct but completely unpersuasive, since 
fairies and spaghetti-monsters are equally immune to being 
proved absent.
So it’s actually you who is confusing proof and evidence. So 
your tired old cliché isn’t even correct.  
Agnosticism gives unfalsifiable ideas more than they’re due. 
Are you agnostic about fairies? If you think that’s an unfair 
comparison, that’s probably because you’re giving theism 
 more credit as an idea than it deserves. Until you offer good 
arguments, it doesn’t have any.  
Mehdi: Second, there are plenty of things that cannot be 
scientifically tested or proven but that we believe to be true, 
reasonable, obvious even. 
Which of these four pretty uncontroversial statements is 
scientifically testable?
1) Your spouse loves you. 2) The Taj Mahal is beautiful. 
3) There are conscious minds other than your own. 4) The 
Nazis were evil.
My response: They are all testable. The third is a 
philosophical problem but at least we can see people walking 
around, acting human. 
We can’t disprove the notion that they are automatons, but 
you’re not going to justify belief in a paedophile prophet this 
way. We can all see that these things are completely dis-
analogous. The attempt to conflate scientific knowledge with 
religious belief is typical, tiresome and dishonest.
Mehdi: This isn't just about metaphysics, aesthetics or 
ethics: science itself is permeated with unproven (and 
unprovable) theories. Take the so-called multiverse 
hypothesis. "It says there are billions and billions of 
universes, all of which have different settings of their 
fundamental constants," Dawkins explained to a member of 
the audience in Oxford. "A tiny minority of those billions and 
billions of universes have their constants set in such a way as 
to give rise to a universe that lasts long enough to give rise to 
galaxies, stars, planets, chemistry and hence the process of 
evolution... "
Hmm. A nice idea, but where's your evidence, Richard? How 
do we 'prove' that these 'billions and billions' of universes 
exist? "The multiverse theory may be dressed up in scientific 
language," the cosmologist Paul Davies has admitted, "but in 
essence it requires the same leap of faith [as God]."’
My response: Well Paul Davies is wrong. We have one 
universe. There could be more of them. We have no gods. 
Therefore universes are leading gods in the evidence 
department one to nothing. It makes more sense to 
conjecture the existence of other universes, which we already 
have, than to switch from doing science to theology. 
Mehdi: ‘Third, there are plenty of good, rational and evidence-
based arguments for God. You don't have to agree with them, 
but it is intellectually dishonest to claim that they, too, like 
God, don't exist. Take the Kalam cosmological argument - 
first outlined by the medieval Muslim theologian al-Ghazali, 
and nowadays formulated by the Christian philosopher 
William Lane Craig as follows:
1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.
3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.’ 
My response: It’s been debunked more times than 
Mohammad had wives. But even if valid, the argument as 
presented wouldn’t prove god, and if it did prove god, it 
wouldn’t prove any particular one. If I accepted deism, I would 
still laugh derisively at the idea that his favourite human is a 
child-raping, illiterate warlord. However speaking of 
arguments, on the one hand Mr Hasan, you’ve attempted to 
conflate our current scientific knowledge, and religious faith, 
and on the other, you’re saying there are good science-based 
arguments for god. That’s cheating. Mehdi: Whether you 
agree with it or not, it is a valid deductive argument, a genuine 
appeal to reason and logic.
My response: Here’s a logically valid argument. 
1) If I eat a Koran, I will become god. 
2) I have eaten a Koran.
3) Therefore I am god. 
Logical validity is a long way from soundness and cogency. 
Mehdi: ‘Or how about the argument that says the universe, in 
Davies's words, 'is "in several respects 'fine-tuned' for life"?’
My response: The fine-tuning argument is very slippery. It’s 
been refuted more times than there have been jihads. Rather 
than take all of the evidence at once, it wants to look at a 
favoured portion of evidence, the fact that we’re here, and then 
explain away all unwelcome observations once the favoured 
conclusion has been embraced. What about all of the evil and 
chaos in the universe? Well, god works in mysterious ways. 
That’s not evidence. That’s an unsupported conjecture, 
followed by a series of ad hoc qualifications. You can always 
imagine a god to fit the data. If you look at the universe 
honestly, in its entirety, there is no valid inference to a 
designer. Advocates of both the Kalam and fine-tuning 
arguments are extremely thrilled at the simple fact that there 
is stuff. It’s not up to me to rule out invisible beings based on 
the mere fact that there are things flying around. 
Mehdi: ‘Remember, the late Antony Flew, the atheist 
philosopher who embraced God in 2004, did so after coming 
to the conclusion that 'there had to be "an intelligence behind 
the integrated complexity of the physical universe".' To 
pretend that Flew, of all people, arrived at such a belief 
blindly, without thinking it through, 'without evidence', is plain 
silly.
My response: What was his argument? The fact of DNA! 
That’s no argument, that’s a purely subjective and biased 
interpretation of the data. 
And you didn’t mention that he was not only old and senile, 
but he didn’t even accept theism. He was a deist. A senile old 
bastard is still too smart to accept your dogshit theories. 
Also, isn’t it a bit of an own goal to gloat when frightened old 
people who have lost their intellectual power turn to your 
beliefs? What you’re effectively saying is that religion is for 
pussies. As Flew’s intelligence decreased, his religiosity 
increased. You’re really not helping yourself.
Mehdi: For Muslims such as me, faith (iman) and reason (aql) 
go hand in hand. The Quran stresses the importance of using 
science, logic and reason as tools for discovering God. "Will 
you not then use your reason?" it asks, again and again.
My response: Fuck off. It preaches submission, fear and 
barbarism. 
Mehdi: ‘But hasn't the theory of evolution undermined Islam? 
asks the atheist. A few years ago, Dawkins accused British 
Muslims of "importing creationism into this country". He has 
a point.’
My response: You mean, ‘he’s correct.’
Mehdi: ‘These days, the vast majority of my coreligionists 
see Darwin as the devil.’ 
My response: Evolution does undermine religion. Apart from 
removing god’s role as celestial biological tinkerer, it indicates 
that populations adapt over time, rather than create less 
adaptable offspring. An omniperfect being would create more 
beings like himself; not shitty peons who screw everything up 
after five seconds in the freewill zone.  
Mehdi: Yet this is a new phenomenon. Many of Islamic 
history's greatest scholars and thinkers were evolutionists; 
the 19th Century scientist John William Draper, a 
contemporary of Darwin, referred to the latter's views as "the 
Muhammadan theory of evolution". My response: This is 
rather like claiming the universe is evidence for the
existence of god. If everything is proof of a thing, then it’s 
probably going to be bogus. A hypothesis which is consistent 
with any set of observations is a meaningless one. 
Mehdi: As I pointed out on these pages back in January, "one 
of the earliest theories of natural selection was developed by 
the 9th Century Iraqi zoologist (and Islamic theologian)  al-
Jahiz, 1,000 years before Charles Darwin". And almost 500 
years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, the 
acclaimed Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun wrote his 
Muqaddimah, in which he documented how "the animal world 
then widens, its species become numerous... the higher 
stage of man is reached from the world of the monkeys..."’
My response: And Augustine proposed some sort of 
rudimentary form of evolution too. But no-one gave a shit 
about his scientific findings, clearly. It would be nice if religion 
stopped plagiarizing scientific findings it only just stopped 
opposing, and not even entirely. 
And we didn’t come from monkeys. We have a common 
ancestor with them. If you’re going to write articles taking 
Richard Dawkins to task, have at least a semi-rudimentary 
grasp of evolution. 
Mehdi: Yet the theory of evolution, whether Muslims accept it 
or not, doesn't explain the origins of the universe, the laws of 
science or our objective moral values. In short, most of us 
who believe in God do so not because we are irrational, 
incurious or immature but because He is the best answer to 
the question posed by Leibniz more than 300 years ago: 
"Why is there something rather than nothing?"
My response: The best answer is ‘I have no idea’, because 
you don’t. But I have the advantage in that I know I don’t 
know. And I know positing an agent is foolish. Agents arise 
from matter. Matter does not arise from agents who wish it 
into existence. 
To summarize, this article is a complete waste of time. It’s a 
shame, because this writer has done good work in the past, 
in the area of defending whistleblowing. It’s a shame he’s 
chosen to defend dogma and ignorance. 
The article makes all of the same moves articles on religion in 
newspapers always make. 
1) Conflates reason and faith. (I’ve never seen an article where 
this doesn’t occur. The slicker apologists avoid this.) And also 
gets epistemology completely wrong, i.e. justification, 
unfalsifiability. They have to do this. Philosophy of science is 
the death of religion. 
2) Namedrops like there’s no tomorrow. Tries to 
shift the focus onto individuals and their intelligence, and not 
about arguments. Calling Richard Dawkins intolerant and 
offensive is also an absolute must.
3) Plagiarizes fantastic scientific findings and glosses over 
the fact that these remarkable discoveries were and probably 
still are opposed by religion. 
The one good thing Hasan did was to gesture towards some 
theistic arguments, but even this is only spreading ignorance. 
Good philosophers reject these arguments, and it’s dishonest 
to represent the Kalam and the fine-tuning arguments as even 
remotely worth taking seriously.Thanks for listening.
 
