As for the claim that a thing does not exist because we can not perceive it, then that is something which the intellect completely refuses to accept. Why wouldn’t it, when we know, of a certainty, from thousands of daily experiences, that our senses are limited in magnitude and property!!

As far as magnitude is concerned, whenever a vast distance within the bounds of our perception is crossed the incapability of our senses grasping things becomes apparent.

The sense of sight, for instance, is the sense with the greatest range; every time a visible object becomes distant from us, its size decreases in our vision, until it disappears completely because of the distance.

Similar is the sense of hearing.

As for the sense of touch, its preconditions are even more limiting since it needs physical contact.

With respect to property, it is essential that the specific conditions of each sense within us be fulfilled so that we are able, by means of it, to grasp things presented to our senses.

Thus, the sense of sight, for instance, needs light to see things; whenever there is no light and intense darkness descends sight is totally lost. Likewise whenever visible things decrease to the lowest levels of smallness, we are unable to see them except by means of microscopes magnifying them tens, thousands, or millions of times.

And there are a great many things, in reality, which we strongly accept as truth without physically acquiring it by means of our senses, rather we accept them as truth due to a deduction.

Example: While you are inside your room, you hear a knock at the door, so you deduce, without any hesitation, that someone knocked on the door without you seeing them or hearing their voice. This is because you know with certainty that the door does not knock on itself, so you say, ”There must be someone who is knocking.”

Here, we should turn our attention to a superstition which some of the small-minded amongst the atheist who behave like fools say, “We don’t accept the existence of things which we can not perceive.” It is like they assume that their senses are able to discover everything around them! But every day, science is discovering new things around us, and even inside of our bodies, which people for generations and centuries did not perceive at all during by gone times. How much do they share, because of their non-acceptance of these things (if they even rejected them), in this declaration of their misguided understanding, and extreme ignorance. [These people] certainly give proof against themselves that they are narrow minded ignoramuses, recklessly rejecting the realities of the cosmos whose evidences are established!!

The following is a curious story concerning this matter:

Through the brilliance of his natural disposition, a young child gave a stinging refutation, both mocking and convincing, to one of those fools amongst the atheists. The fool said, “We don’t accept as truth the existence of anything until we see it, nor do we admit to anything until we observe it,” and he began giving spurious examples of that, until it reached to the subject of the existence of Allāh, whereupon he said, “We didn’t see the Creator with our own eyes, so He doesn’t exist.” The young child who was silently sitting in a corner of this foolish atheist’s gathering stood up and said, “Teacher, none of us have seen your intellect which you contemplate with, so you must not have any intellect.” And the denier of the truth was dumbfounded; indeed, Allāh does not guide the wrongdoing folk.

 (Continue to Part 3) (Back to Part 1)