# Atheism vs. Islam: Mohammad Hijab DESTROYS Atheist Arguments!

- Language: en
- Published: 2026-08-26
- Canonical: https://blog.towardseternity.com/en/blog/atheism-vs-islam-mohammad-hijab-destroys-atheist-arguments
- Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2QjxVbPXQ
- Channel: Towards Eternity

This is the cleaned transcript of the source video. The speech is unaltered.

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Couldn't the Creator have established the laws of nature, set up the system and then left? I don't need God to tell me what is right, what is wrong. I have my conscience, I can be a moral person without any religion. What do you say to this? Couldn't this universe have formed by itself, on billions of possibilities? You're making a claim which cannot be justified by the scientific method. It's like a mother giving birth to herself. That science has no access to it. There has to be a foundation which holds all of existence. Otherwise, all of it would fall. There's no evidence to show that Islam inhibited science in that manner. In fact, all the evidence shows the opposite.

If your religion seemed to be contradicting science, what would you do? Assalamualaikum, brother Mohammad Hijab. Today we have what atheists consider to be their most difficult questions, and we wonder how you're going to answer them. Atheists scientists say there's a reason, a cause for everything. Like the rain is caused by clouds, clouds by vaporization and vaporization by condensation. The whole universe is operating by laws of nature. Then, where is the Creator in all this? If we find an explanation for the cause of the universe, or the beginning, or the origination, the preponderance of the universe, then we don't have a disagreement. We would agree with that fully.

But if you agree that there is such explanation, now, what kind of explanation must there be? For example, if you say that that explanation requires an explanation, and then that explanation requires another explanation and that requires another, then you go ad infinitum. Then there will be an infinite regress of explanations. So this is why we require something without an explanation, in order to explain everything else. It's like dominoes. One domino knocks down another domino. Another domino knocks down a third domino, and a fourth domino knocks down... If all the dominoes are knocking down the other domino, then the question is where is it all starting from?

Or it's like, for example, if you consider the sea. Now we don't see the sea floor, but I assume it exists. And the reason why I assume it exists is because I know the nature of water. The nature of water is that it cannot just stand by itself effectively. Like if I have a cup of water, right, and I put water into this, I know that, okay, water falls. So it requires something to hold it, a container. So when I look at the sea, I don't need to look and see the actual sea floor to know that the sea floor exists. I know there must be a sea floor because the water is being uplifted. It's being held.

And I'm saying, just like water is being held in that way, the whole of existence is being held in that way. And there has to be a foundation which holds all of existence. Otherwise, all of it would fall. That's effectively what I'm saying. All of it would actually just fall. This is beautiful because in the Qur'an, Allah is referred to as [ARABIC]. And this Qayyum, actually, the word means [ARABIC]. literally comes from the idea of letting something stand. So He's the one who's lifting everything into existence, and He Himself does not need to be lifted into existence. We fall out of existence without something else. Food, drink, sleep, all these kind of things, we wouldn't exist.

Even psychological things. We need all of that. We will fall out of existence if we don't have it. Likewise, everything in existence is dependent in that manner. And so when we look at existence, we realize the only way to make sense of this is that there's a foundation. There is a foundation which holds everything up. Atheists say nowadays science explains everything, and you only put God in some places that science could not explain yet. Soon science will fill those gaps, and there will be no need to believe in God of the gaps. What do you say to that claim? Well, it's definitely the case that science does not explain everything.

And this is what's referred to as "scientism." Greatest philosophers of science in the history of the world. For example, Karl Popper, who actually died recently in 1994, he accepted that there were so-called ultimate questions of life, which science couldn't respond to. Why? "Why?" That, science has no access to it. Science only answers "How?". you could say, "Well, actually, you put someone under an MRI scan, and see what kind of synapses, what kind of parts of the brain are moving," but then you'd have to ask the person, according to their emotions what they're feeling. So science, by its nature, is third person, okay, and it's about "how".

So also we know that there are scientists who are atheists. But even this concept, illogical, like atheism is really popular. And I want to ask, thousands of philosophers and scientists couldn't figure that out, but you did? Not everyone is interested in believing the truth. Because see, if the truth is, for instance, one's wife is cheating on them, some people would be in denial of that fact. There's reasons why someone would not want to believe in that truth.

For example, if someone is very attached to their children, and their children's misbehaving in school, and they have clear evidence that their child, a mother or a father, there's clear evidence that their child is a drug dealer is a bad person. Now, all the evidence in the world can be presented to the mother and the father, but they cannot believe that this is, "My son is a bad person." What I'm saying is that the assumption here that intelligent people always make intelligent decisions, or that intelligent people always desire to know and want to follow the truth is not actually true.

You can have someone who's less intelligent, less IQ, so to speak, but then they actually want to follow the truth and they can find it easy. So Allah says in the Qur'an, إِنَّ عَلَيْنَا لَلْهُدَى "To Us belongs the guidance." Which means that if someone goes to Allah, وَإِذَا سَأَلَكَ عِبَادِي عَنِّي فَإِنِّي قَرِيبٌۭ أُجِيبُ دَعْوَةَ ٱلدَّاعِ إِذَا دَعَانِ "If someone calls out to Me, I will answer them. If My slave calls out to Me..." He doesn't say the Muslims. He says "the slave", it's open invitation. So if somebody is interested in knowing the truth, Allah according to the Qur'an will guide them. And on the flip side, the opposite is true as well.

فَلَمَّا زَاغُوا أَزَاغَ اللَّهُ قُلُوبَهُمْ "When they went astray, Allah then made them go astray." Meaning it's you that decided to go this way or that way. It's the interest in knowing the truth and following it, which is the point. And for psychological reasons, someone might not want to do that. Couldn't the Creator have established the laws of nature, set up the system, and then left from the equation? When we look at the sea, going back to the example, if we look at the sea and we look at the water continually staying in its shape and not falling, we continually assume that there's a sea floor.

If I'm continually using my mobile phone and it's continually charging, I'm continually thinking that there's something being... there's a continuous charging process. Likewise, the continued existence of all dependent things is evidence of the continued existence of the independent thing. It's possible, like Al-Hazara gives example and others, to create a house and die, the house continues and then I am dead. So the house is still there, but I'm dead. So in order for the house to continue being in existence, it requires materials. It requires bricks. It requires, you know, gravity. It requires all these environmental factors.

And so the continued cause, which you can call the dependency of the house, is on all of these materials working together. If you get rid of the clay and the thing that puts the clay together, the bricks and this and that, and then the house ceases to exist. And so we would say the continued existence of the house indicates as proof of the continued existence of that which the house is dependent on, which is the materials of the house. And likewise, the continued existence of humankind, existence-dependent things is evidence that there is something which is independent, which everything depends upon, and it depends upon nothing.

Couldn't this universe have formed by itself on billions of possibilities? This multiverse theory, and maybe an infinite amount of universes. So the universe could not possibly have been formed by itself. Because that would mean that it has to exist and not exist at the same time. For the universe to be the explanation of itself, as Hamza Tzortzis vividly mentions in his book, it's like a mother giving birth to herself. You cannot explain the mother through herself. You need something outside of herself to explain it. Otherwise it would be a contradiction, a logical contradiction. We are living in a universe, okay? We are alive. Okay, so there's life on the universe, and the universe exists.

So, let's go further. If I say that the universe is proportioned in a way to allow life to exist in the universe. This is something which is uncontroversial, no one can deny. Now, what is the best explanation for this? So let's do a thought experiment or an exhaustive, what you call, a disjuncture. Looking at all the possibilities and see if it's possible. So possibility A is that it was like this, randomly. That everything just came about out of random, out of chance. Okay. Now, the way I respond to that is, is there an agent responsible for this process of chance, or is there no agent?

Which means is there someone, for example, rolling the dice, or there's no one rolling the dice, or something or someone? You say there's no one rolling the dice. It just happened from chance. Okay, so what is this chance you're talking about? Is chance an actor or non-actor? They say it's a non-actor. Because you cannot say it's an actor, because then you go into God now. So it's a non-actor. How do you prove scientifically that randomness exists, or there's such a thing as chance? Can you put chance under a microscope? Chance is not something which is possible. The second thing is to say, the universe is like that by necessity, which means it has to be like that.

But why does it have to be like that? What about the universe is necessary, when it is composed of different contingent things? Because we know the universe is made up of dependent things. So how could a collection of dependent things be necessary? There's nothing to explain why the universe is in a way that allows for different life forms to exist inside of it, that you can provide. Either it's through knowledge or no knowledge. And we're saying the knowledge thesis is that which we use every day. When we see something organized in a manner to facilitate a function, we assume knowledge. The universe is organized in a manner to facilitate a function of life.

There's no one that can say it's not. That's what it is. We hear atheists say things like, "My life is very good, things are going well. Why should I need God? I don't need to believe in a Creator." How would you respond to someone like that? According to Pew Research, which, in 2019 they've actually done a study on the difference between religious and irreligious people and happiness. And they actually concluded, and this is the gold standard, you know, of statistical kind of information in the West, that religious people, practicing religious people have a better life in terms of satisfaction, fulfillment and quality of life than irreligious people, the atheists.

There's no evidence that having an atheistic life makes you more content, makes you more satisfied, makes you more fulfilled. The second thing is that when you have no purpose of life and you become, you have existential crisis and stuff, there's no world in which, you know, that can lead to or mean, okay, that you're going to be happier. When I had the conversation with Jordan Peterson, even, famous psychologist of the 21st century.

And when I was speaking to him about this, and I explained to him that the Qur'an says that وَمَنْ أَعْرَضَ عَن ذِكْرِى فَإِنَّ لَهُۥ مَعِيشَةًۭ ضَنكًۭا وَنَحْشُرُهُۥ يَوْمَ ٱلْقِيَـٰمَةِ أَعْمَىٰ "Whoever goes away from the remembrance of God, that he will have a depressed life." And I explained to him that on the flip side, Islam says أَلَا بِذِكْرِ اللَّهِ تَطْمَئِنُّ ٱلْقُلُوبُ "Certainly with the remembrance of God, do hearts find rest." He looked at me and this is online. 6 million people have watched it on his channel. Said that the reason why that is the case is... He agreed with it.

And he said that the reason why that is the case, because the focus is not multiplicitous, meaning one person does not focus on many different things at the same time. When you focus on one thing, it reduces anxiety and creates peace. And what better thing to think about and to focus on, and this is my embellishment here, than the Creator of the universe and the purpose of life. Once that's established and it's rock solid, there's nothing better to create a sense of meaning in the human being, which will then give him the strength to live life in all its difficulties. Which is why the Prophet (saw) said beautifully in a hadith.

عَجَبًا لِأَمْرِ ٱلْمُؤْمِنِ "Wondrous is the affair of the believer." إِنَّ أَمْرَهُ كُلَّهُ خَيْرٌ "All of his affair is good." إِنْ أَصَابَتْهُ سَرَّاءُ شَكَرَ "If good things happen to him, he is thankful." وَإِنْ أَصَابَتْهُ ضَرَّاءُ صَبَرَ وَشَكَرَ "When bad things happen to him, he is patient and thankful." And in fact, this sentiment became so powerful in psychology, that Viktor Frankl, he explained that the thing which creates that kind of level of satisfaction, fulfillment, quality, and removes anxiety is meaning itself. So all in all, having a deep meaning and purpose.

And if that purpose is one and is central to your life, there is no way in which you can have that purpose and be depressed. Whereas being an atheist, which means to put it in Jordan Peterson's terms, your focus is multiplicitous, and you are thinking in different ways and different things. You're more likely to have anxiety and depression, and not have meaning in your life. And when bad things happen, it didn't mean anything. When your parents die or even if your children die, if you have disease, if you get cancer, if you're on the sick bed, if you're about to die. All of this stuff is purposeless and meaningless. So if they're saying that, I don't need it, actually, that's not true.

Psychologically, they do need purpose, just like every human being has ever needed it for all of the existence of human beings. Atheists also say, "I don't need God to tell me what is right, what is wrong. I have my conscience. I can be a moral person without any religion." What do you say to this? John Mackey who wrote this book, "Ethics," which is like the magnum opus now used in Western academic institutions to teach ethics and moral philosophy. He actually says the exact opposite of that. He's a staunch atheist and one of the top of his field and, you know, one of the top philosophers and ethicists in the 20th century.

And he actually mentions in the book and the end of his book, telling us there's no way of knowing what's right and wrong except through a list from God telling us what's right and wrong. So he says the exact opposite of what this atheist is saying. So these are just ramblings of an atheist. And if an atheist says that, I say, listen, I'm not your psychologist. I mean, I'm not here to be your counselor and to help you. I don't need this, and I need that, and you don't know what you need. How do you know what you need and what you don't need? Because their assumption is that they know what's best for them. But there's no evidence to show that they know what's best for them.

There's not even evidence to show that they know what they want. From a meta perspective, they may know what causes them pain and what causes them pleasure. But effectively, what they want and what they need, and what's best for them. These are three completely separate propositions. The revelation tells you what you want, what you need, and what's best for all three of them. If your religion seems to be contradicting science, what would you do? Look, I mean, if you look at history, there's been paradigm shifts where everyone believed something about science, and then there was something which really changed about it. A very, very important one is the Heliocentric Model, for example.

For a long, long time, people couldn't conceive that there was the Earth that goes around the Sun. In fact, they believed that the Sun goes around the Earth. Likewise, you can even say, with Newton and Einstein, that's another example of a paradigm shift. And once again, maybe with evolution. The point is that there are paradigm shifts in science because of the principles of falsification and verification. That there may be a scientific theory that we hold today that is falsified. Even if that theory is referred to by scientists as fact. Just as, for example, you know, the revolution of the Sun around the Earth. That was seen as fact by those scientists at the time.

And there are many, many examples of this. If you understand that science has the propensity to change based on new findings and can be falsified, but how to answer this question? If something purports to be scientific fact, and it also is shown to be in conflict with the verse of the Qur'an, then we have to look at the strength of the claim that this is something which is unlikely to change due to scientific method. Number one. And number two, we have to look at the fact that, what is the verse? Is it [ARABIC] or not [ARABIC]? Is it something which can be interpreted in more than one way, or can it only be interpreted in one way? And once we understand how both of those...

how strict the interpretations of both of those things are, then a hermeneutic can be done and exegesis can be done, and interpretation can be done on the verse accordingly. In the Middle Ages there was this conflict between science and Christianity. And that's why science couldn't develop in those years, in those ages. How did Islam look at science and what does it promise different than the other religions? Islam is even more lenient with these things, I would say. It's easy to show that it was more lenient. Because all over the Muslim world, from Persia to Spain, you had a level of exploration. You had a level of investigation.

And if you look at some of even the hadith literature, if you look, for example, at the hadith of black seeds, and the hadith of dates, there was a level of investigation and criticality that was involved there. There's no evidence to show that Islam inhibited science in that manner. In fact, all the evidence shows the opposite. It shows that Islam encouraged. Al-Biruni, for example, one of the great scholars of the Golden ages, who estimated the circumference of the Earth, the rotundity of the Earth, and the circumference of it, did so because it was on the back of trying to investigate how to calculate the qibla in certain directions and stuff like that.

For example, one verse which comes to mind on this regard. I think is one of the most severe verses, if you think about it. إِنَّ شَرَّ الدَّوَابِّ عِندَ اللَّهِ الصُّمُّ الْبُكْمُ الَّذِينَ لَا يَعْقِلُونَ "That the worst beasts, according to Allah, are the ones who are someone and they are blind and deaf." Obviously metaphorically, right? Not actually blind and deaf. They are the ones who don't use their intellect, So this shows you how important using your intellect is when it comes to critical investigation.

سَنُرِيهِمْ آيَاتِنَا فِي الْآفَاقِ وَفِي أَنفُسِهِمْ حَتَّى يَتَبَيَّنَ لَهُمْ أَنَّهُ الْحَقُّ "We will show them Our signs in themselves and in the horizons until it is so clear to them it is the truth. You have to look out to the horizon in order to see the evidences of Allah's creation. According to you, what is the most difficult issue, the biggest dilemma of atheists? The thing is, atheism doesn't actually have any explanatory scope or power. It's not really a dilemma, but so much the impotence of the atheists, which is that his worldview doesn't actually give him any power to say anything because he's not making a claim, he's got a lack of belief.

So if he's got a lack of belief, then what can you offer me? What explanations does your belief system give us? What prescriptions? How can your belief system help my life? Effectively, there is no answer for this question for the atheist. So the atheist is effectively deconstructing everything. But he has nothing reconstructed, no claim that he's happy to make in confidence that would allow him to live a fulfilling life. And that's why Allah says, إِنْ نَظُنُّ إِلَّا ظَنًّا وَمَا نَحْنُ بِمُسْتَيْقِنِينَ "They are just speculating and they are not certain." So I think that atheism doesn't give any answer to any questions. And that's the problem. There is an atheist that has doubts.

He's hesitant, you know, which one is true, which one is not. And looking at the camera, what would you like to say to them? I would like to say to them, listen, I know that you have gone through difficulty. I know that life is difficult. I know that you may be going through some anxiety and depression, and I'm not here to judge you. You know, anyone can go through that. It doesn't mean that if you're a religious believer, you're not going to go through that. But it does mean this. I mean, you've got to think about what the root causes of this all are. Why are you living such an unfulfilled life right now?

I would say to you, look, the reason why you're living an unfulfilled life, and this is not something you're going to hear from a psychologist or a counselor. It's not something you're going to hear from a doctor. I think the reason why you're living this unfulfilled life as it stands, and why you've got this chronic anxiety and this depression and this feeling of meaningless and hopelessness, is because the basic human function is not being met. Because you don't have a purpose of life which is solid, because you don't have something to anchor on. And I know this for a fact, because I've done these experiments.

When I went to Scandinavian countries and spoke to lots of people about completely unrelated topics, and they were all telling me, look, I mean, meaning has some kind of connection with how they feel in terms of depression, anxiety. And even there's a phenomenon of suicide that's happening in those areas. So I'm saying to you is that, to kind of remove yourself or to get better from that, you need to think about what the purpose of life is. And the purpose of life is the following. It's to do what everything else in nature is doing, and everything else in nature is submitting to that which brought its existence about.

That's what everything else in nature, this cup here, this one, that one, even the inanimate objects, they are submitting to that which brought about its existence. So the first question is you have to admit what brought about your existence. Then think about that purpose of life, which is to do what everything else in nature is doing. Submit to that which brought about your existence. And then, and only then could you be living a fulfilled, satisfied good life, which will rid you from this chronic anxiety and this feeling of depression that you have.