Challenge #1: Reality is Personal.
Yes, AL-LAH is Suprapersonal, which means that He transcends personality as we understand it. But transcending it is not the same as denying, excluding, or ignoring it. Before we can transcend something, we have to be able to reach it. People have difficulty grasping how Personal GOD is, let alone Suprapersonal. Modern thinking, if it thinks of GOD at all, tries to rationalize the concept of GOD as some kind of intellectual object, under the guise of being objective. But at the same time as asserting Himself to be the Truly Real, AL-LAH goes out of His way, so to speak, to affirm His Personality with pronouns such as I (ana) and We (nahnu), to describe Himself in human terms, such as His Shin, Hands, Face, Eyes, Throne, and Footstool, and to invite us to interact with Him personally. And when My servants question you concerning Me, then truly I am Near. I answer to the call of the suppliant when he calls on Me, so their response should be to Me, their faith should be in Me, and thus they will be guided well. (Q2:186) Our personality is what makes us ‘real’ and ‘present’ to ourselves, so it is only natural that the Divine Personality would be expressed in the Qur’an with a similar end in mind – that we take Him to be our Ever-Present Reality.
Challenge #2: Reality is reciprocal.
Modern scientism assumes the reality of the observing mind, the subject, and then goes on to interrogate the object of inquiry, be that a geological formation, a viral mutation, or a dysfunctional family. This is not a reciprocal connection, but a one-way street, an intellectual master-slave relationship within the supposedly impartial confines of the study.
For the limited purposes of an inquiry, that initial assumption is allowed to stand. But to extrapolate from that practice to the whole of reality is a gross example of the inductive fallacy, whereby particular instances are believed, falsely, to justify unlimited generalization. Absolute Reality is not amenable to subjugation and interrogation – He is not queried over what He does, but they are questioned (Q21:23) – and we, on the other hand, are not as real as we like to think we are.
Rather it is AL-LAH, the Truly Real, Who invites us to participate in a mutual relationship with Him – the strongest dose of Reality that we can take, and our only means of ‘getting’ it.
Other than AL-LAH, then, who can guide him? Will you not take heed? (Q45:23)
فَمَنْ يَهْدِيهِ مِنْ بَعْدِ اللَّهِ أَفَلاَ تَذَكَّرُونَ
AL-LAH is not only the Master, the Scientist, but also the Creator, and we are the creatures in His cosmic laboratory and the objects of His Attention. As Absolute Reality, He remains totally Free of and Independent from us. Despite all that, however, He does what that no scientist will ever do with his lab rats; He expects – nay, commands – us to communicate with Him, to come to Him, and to remember Him.
So remember Me – I will remember you – give Me your gratitude, and do not disavow Me. (Q2:252)
فَاذْكُرُونِي أَذْكُرْكُمْ وَاشْكُرُوا لِي وَلاَ تَكْفُرُونِي
Dependent, contingent, and verging on unreality though we are, He holds out to us a bond with His Independence, Absoluteness, and Reality. It is not something to be seized or even studied, but rather to be conversant with. And in that conversation, we find the joy of mutuality.
AL-LAH is pleased with them, and they are pleased with Him. (Q98:8)
رَضِيَ اللَّهُ عَنْهُمْ وَرَضُوا عَنْهُ
Challenge #3: Reality is elusive.
There is a constant tendency in scientism to ignore, dismiss, or deny whatever aspects of reality are not precise, measurable, and contained. The irony of this was not lost on Einstein, who remarked, “The eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.” In other words, there is a mysterious pre-existing congruence in things, as if the primeval settings of reality somehow had the human mind in mind. We consign this odd coincidence to the margins of our thinking, where also lurks much of what is unknown – dark matter and dark energy, for example – obscure, such as the origin of life, and counter-intuitive, including the baffling reciprocity implied in quantum entanglement.
There are other terms we could use instead of ‘elusive’. ‘Allusive’ is one; Reality does not just hide from us, but keeps returning to lob hints at us – more like ‘hide-and-seek’, an invitation to play. We might also mention ‘fuzzy’, as in fuzzy logic, and ‘cloudy’, referencing Ibnal-‘Arabi’s term al-‘ama, the amorphous, primordial cloud from which all created being was formed. Other useful concepts are ‘non-rational’, as illustrated by the assertion of Heisenberg (formulator of his famous uncertainty principle) that direct knowledge of reality is beyond the scope of science,1 and ‘paradoxical’, from Bohr, the physicist who declared, “If you’re not astonished by it, then you haven’t understood it.”2 To all of that and more – and there will always be more – AL-LAH succinctly says:
GOD knows, and you know not. (Q2:216)
وَاللَّهُ يَعْلَمُ وَأَنْتُمْ لاَ تَعْلَمُونَ
Challenge #4: Reality is effusive.
The supreme irony in this matter of our knowledge is that, although we know practically nothing compared to GOD’s Infinite Knowledge, we nonetheless know far more than we are ready to re-cognize. A simple diagram may illustrate what I mean by “You know the Absolute”:
Whatever information or sensory input comes to us has GOD’s watermark on it, but we remain largely oblivious:
And in the heavens and the earth how many are the signs that they pass by, and pay no heed to them! (Q12:105)
وَكَأَيِّنْ مِنْ آيَةٍ فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالأَرْضِ يَمُرُّونَ عَلَيْهَا وَهُمْ عَنْهَا مُعْرِضُونَ
What we consider to be elusive may appear so simply because we have not yet learned how and where to look, as I explained in Chapters 23 and 36. If we do so, we will find that Reality is abounding in detail, astounding in its clarity, and overwhelming in its sheer volume(s).* I say “volumes” because many of GOD’s books are written in languages that we are only now beginning to decipher. This flood of data is so enormous that we are obliged to select what will constitute our severely constrained sense of self and the framework of our faith, as discussed in Chapter 11. That constraint applies to us, not to GOD.
* Newton is reported to have said: “I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.”
It was originally conjectured, for example, that the 98.5 percent of our DNA identified as non-coding was ‘junk DNA’ – useless gibberish from humans’ evolutionary past. That was the first guess by a generation of slow readers who were quick to dismiss what they could not understand. More recent science now disputes that, as the greater intelligence in our creation has increasingly come to light.3
I am confident that as long as we are honest with ourselves, as lovers of truth must be, we will be continually “astonished” by not only what we did not know before but also by what we actually did know but consciously or unconsciously were hiding from our own selves – including memories of an Expressive, Caring Creator. We shall manifest to them Our signs on the horizons and within themselves until it is apparent to them that it is the Truth. (Q41:53)
1 Lee Smolin. Einstein’s unfinished revolution: the search for what lies beyond the quantum. (9 April 2019) London. pp. 92–93, quoted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg
3 https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/Functions-of-Junk-DNA
The GOD You Already Know 