The Proof from Knowledge and Will

M. Fethullah Gülen · Sermon · February 28, 1975 · Third sermon of the "Proofs of Tawhid" series

In the previous lesson it was said that matter is not eternal, and so the One who is eternal and everlasting is Allah. In this lesson Hocaefendi goes a step further: every work in the universe requires knowledge and will. The mosque, the car accident, the printing house, the army of forty thousand men, the forty thousand atoms in a single protein, the blind man sitting in his hut, and the distance between us and the sun... All of them make us ask the same question: Can this happen by chance?

This post follows the video above section by section. The account keeps to the sermon itself; tables, Risale-i Nur parallels, and source notes are in the expandable boxes. In the video, the gold bands at the bottom of the screen mark the corresponding passages in the Risale-i Nur, and the blue bands show the present-day values of the figures given in 1975.

I — The verse of the sermon

"Worship your Lord"

The sermon opens with the basmala and verses 21-22 of Surah Al-Baqarah. In Suat Yıldırım's translation: "O people! Worship your Lord, who created you and those who came before you. By doing so you may hope to be protected from every harm. That Lord of yours who made the earth a bed and the sky a dome for you, who sends rain from the sky and with it brings forth produce of every kind as your provision. Knowing the truth as you do, set up no rivals to your Lord!" (Al-Baqarah 2:21-22)

Hocaefendi makes the verse's description of the earth as a "bed" and a "table" the key to the lesson: Allah has spread the universe before us like a book so that we may reflect on it; even tasting His bounties, once it is done for Allah's sake, is worship.

II — The universe is a book

Whoever does not read falls behind

"Allah has presented the universe to us as a book so that we may reflect on it." Since Allah would not write a book that is not pondered and studied, those who do not read that book, who cannot grasp the wisdom in its creation, are backward, reactionary.

Hocaefendi's measure is clear: even strolling the streets, smelling a flower, or tasting a fruit passes into the rank of worship in the hands of one who tastes and thanks his Creator. One who takes the lesson passes the grade and gains worth in Allah's sight.

III — Eternity, existence, everlastingness

Matter is not eternal

Hocaefendi recalls the previous lesson: Allah exists (existence), He has no beginning (eternity), and what has no beginning has no end (everlastingness). The unbeliever ascribes eternity to matter and energy; the believer gives eternity and everlastingness to Allah. "Whether we grant it or not, Allah is eternal." The proofs are there to wipe away the dust that has settled on the capacity for knowledge of Allah in our hearts.

He shows in three ways that matter is not eternal. The law of thermodynamics says that the suns are losing heat; one day they will go out. What will go out also has a beginning. "Mâ sebete kıdemuhû imtenea ademuhû": what is proven eternal cannot cease to be. So the Eternal is not matter but Allah; matter stands by Allah's sustaining. Eternity is not the beginning of some long stretch of time; it is endless time.

IV — Today's lesson: will and knowledge

Everything glorifies Him

Today's lesson is on Allah's attribute of will; the attribute of knowledge accompanies it at a secondary level. Hocaefendi recalls verse 35 of Surah An-Nur, recited in the previous weeks (in Suat Yıldırım's translation: "Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth..."), and asks: In the light of the attribute of will, how shall we look upon the divine existence?

Surah Al-Isra gives the answer (in Suat Yıldırım's translation): "There is nothing that does not glorify Him with praise. But you cannot understand their glorification and sanctification" (Al-Isra 17:44). What does it mean to glorify? Everything, in its own particular tongue, says there is no creator in the universe but Allah. The words "you cannot understand" are for those who flee from thinking, who flee from reasoning; the one who enters into the matter and penetrates it through knowledge understands it.

V — Reflection, like reciting blessings

An analogy

Hocaefendi builds an analogy for his listeners: "Suppose I told you the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) says in a noble hadith: 'If you recite blessings and peace ten times on Friday, the angels will recite a thousand blessings and peace upon you.' This is a way of opening a door of reward for you, of turning your gaze toward the Noble Messenger, of spurring you on in the way of Allah's pleasure. But if I told you the same thing in a different form, you would have to approach it with the same conviction. If I said: were you to reflect on one of Allah's signs in the universe, to draw a beam of meaning from that sign and, like a bee, store it in your heart, Allah would write a thousand good deeds for you for that reflection..."

The second point: the knowledge we would gain, beam by beam, from the universe Allah created has, as if it were foreign to the spirit of religion, been kept away from the mosque and the congregation for long centuries. "This must be put down to our lack of insight." According to Hocaefendi, "you will bring the sciences, the positive sciences, into the mosque." And he continues: "You will marry heart and head. Since the day the heart divorced the head with a triple divorce, since the day the heart parted from the head, believers have been crawling face down. The believer's standing upright again depends on this marriage of heart and head. When heart and head marry, the knowledge of Allah will be born of it, and believers' faces will smile."

VI — Three possibilities for the universe

Chance works here, and not there

We see the existence of the universe with our eyes, through telescopes, through microscopes. Either Allah created it, or the atoms put their heads together and agreed, or it came about by coincidence. Hocaefendi sets the second option aside as a "fallacy" and analyzes the third: we sometimes see chance as possible; but there are situations where to see chance as possible means suddenly loading it with ten kinds of attributes. Order and harmony show both existence and will.

"Let me list some examples where chance is possible and where it is impossible." The backbone of the sermon is the examples that follow.

VII — The mosque and the stacked lecterns

As the numbers rise, chance diminishes

Suppose we entered the mosque and saw three lecterns placed one on top of another: number one at the bottom, number two above it, number three above that. Beside them, a helpless child, bound hand and foot, whose eyes cannot see. Suppose the two of us fell into a dispute: did this child arrange these lecterns in order, or was it coincidence? For three lecterns one could allow a possibility. But as the lecterns increase, chance diminishes in the same proportion: six lecterns, ten lecterns, a hundred lecterns... "In mathematics, they say, chance is inversely proportional to the rising of the numbers. The ancients called this makûsen mütenasip, inversely proportionate."

And what of the mosque itself? Suppose one wind brought the marble, another set it one on top of another, another brought the stones head to head in the dome, and yet another poured the horasan mortar and bound it with iron ties... Does a mosque come about through coincidences one after another? Hocaefendi adds a note in parentheses: "I do not call any of these chance. The single lectern placed here, even the existence of that single lectern I do not call chance. For it too was placed by someone with a will."

VIII — The car and the turban

As the links increase, chance loses its claim

Hocaefendi makes an example of what happened to him that day: "I took my own robe in my hand and carried it along with my turban. And in the evening I decided; I put them inside a plastic bag. I set it beside me so I would bring it. Since the matter was left to chance, when we were halfway along the road I realized that I had forgotten them there. So the meaning and nature of my preaching today without a turban is just this." If a car hit you from behind as you walked down the street, this too might, as one possibility, be called chance. But before the car hits, another car tries to stop, the two cars collide, at that very moment a meteor falls from above in front of the car, a passenger who could not catch that car is left behind, the driver curses someone that day and then boards the car... As the links increase, chance loses its claim; "even the most obstinate will claim" that these cannot be put down to chance.

"If even a single event, in a conscious human being, is left to chance, such gaps, such breaches arise. And if these events are several, linked to one another, then allowing for chance becomes madness and crime."

IX — The printing house and the calculation of probabilities

Half a million letters, one ode

Let us imagine a printing house: half a million iron letters. The typesetters take the letters and set them; books are printed. Now let a wind enter this printing house and topple the letters. From letters toppled by the wind a word may come out, as one possibility. Ten words, ten sentences? "It still could be. This is not a plain impossibility." But: "If a third man came and told you: 'These half million letters toppled. Without a single letter going to waste, all of them formed a metered ode out of words. Such an ode that the odes of Labid and Imru' al-Qays hung on the wall of the Kaaba would pale beside it...' when he says this, you will say: 'Even if, as an expression of my fairness, I allowed for the earlier ones, this I will not accept'; since it would mean accepting every sophistry there is, you will reject it."

Hocaefendi also explains the calculation of probabilities: building with ten numbers, lining the numbers up in order, is by chance a probability of one in ten billion. With twenty-two stones it is one in a thousand billion times a thousand billion. Pulpit, cushion, turban, human being: each requires a separate will. "To put all of these down to chance is to come face to face with the positive sciences."

X — Cell, protein, atom

Forty thousand atoms in a protein

The cell, hücre, means room in Arabic; it is the smallest part of a human being. The basic structure of the cell is protein; six or seven elements build our little rooms and form protein chains. "Allah (may His glory be exalted) brought these cells into being from protein chains strung together like prayer beads." The figure Hocaefendi gave in 1975: a single piece of protein contains forty thousand atoms; atoms are so small that ten million of them side by side would make a millimeter.

These forty thousand atoms will come together, agree, and take up such a position that they become a small part of your body, a piece of protein. The answer to the question "What does this mean?" lies in the next example.

XI — An army of forty thousand men

If a conscious army fares so, what of unconscious atoms?

Imagine an army of forty thousand men; it has a commander who gives the order: everyone will put on the uniform that pleases me, bear arms likewise, and take his place in his squad, in his battalion. But the orders are a bit confused. When forty thousand men come together, you will see: one has something green tied on his head, another something red, all scarlet and frills; one has stuck the bread knife from home in his belt, another has come with a Mauser. A jumbled, motley army. Why? No one knows anything of anyone else.

If conscious human beings forming an army of forty thousand men is such a puzzle, how can forty thousand unconscious atoms coming together to become a piece of protein be accepted? "...so far from reason that a person who does not allow for the army assembling perfectly should not allow for forty thousand atoms coming together to form such a protein."

XII — The probability of a protein

One in ten to the power of one hundred sixty

"Now from this point of view, the famous Swiss mathematician, that is, the mathematician Charles says: for a single protein, mark this, for this single protein, not the chain, to come about in the form we want, that is, for these forty thousand atoms to become a soup, to become a dish in the cell, could, by probability calculations, happen by one chance out of ten to the power of one hundred sixty, multiplied out... probabilities. Ten to the power one hundred sixty: this number is unreadable. Turn the sands of the earth into zeros, put a digit in front, and it stays small beside this number." Lecomte du Noüy goes on: "A human being does not consist of a single protein. Heaps upon heaps of proteins come together like prayer beads" and form the cell. For a single protein chain to form, the probability is one in ten to the power of two hundred forty-three.

According to Hocaefendi, this is how the matter must be grasped when we say chance, coincidence. Nor is a human being a single protein chain; when the other elements of the cell, its RNA, its DNA, its cytoplasm, are taken up, the matter grows thoroughly complicated.

XIII — The particle points in two respects

One particle, a thousand jobs

"The ancients said zerre; zerre means atom in Arabic." The particle points to the Necessarily Existent in two respects. First: the unconscious atom easily performs the heavy duties laid upon it; for forty thousand to agree and build a piece of protein is not to be attributed to the particle's might, strength, knowledge, or power. Second: each particle is related to all the events in the universe. If a particle in the air is to transmit a television picture, it will agree with other particles; it will carry the voice on the radio; it will go off charged with the duty of entering a flower; it will be a component conveying your voice. A particle "will do a hundred jobs at once."

Yet in the particle we imagine no might, no strength, no knowledge. "To give these jobs to the particle is to give it Allah's attributes. Lâ yeşğaluhû şe'nün an şe'nin" (no concern of His keeps Him from another). Thus the particle points to Allah in two respects, and everything glorifies Him; "but since you do not know these matters I have presented, you cannot know how the particle glorifies Allah."

XIV — The blind man: factory and hut

"There is someone employing this blind man here"

In the example presented earlier, a blind man's piling lecterns one on top of another might perhaps be allowed a possibility. But the matter in the universe is thoroughly tangled: "When we come to the universe's general matters, there is no possibility or chance of explaining even a single event without attributing it to Allah." Hocaefendi shows a blind, crippled man working in Ford's factories; then he says that the atom is blinder and more crippled than he: a heap of stone, of soil, of iron. Yet the atom is doing these conscious works; so "there is someone who whispers in the particle's ear, who whispers with His law, with His order. He is Allah, may His glory be exalted. So the particle, with its movement like a whirling dervish, recites what Allah has whispered to it."

Then the example of the hut: "A clumsy, crippled man whose eyes cannot see is sitting in his little hut. Into that hut a bit of stone is thrown, a bit of bone is thrown, a bit of cotton is thrown. Then you look, and from the other side of the hut, sugar comes out, jewels come out, calico comes out, fabrics come out. Would you have any doubt left that this man is not doing these things? ... Perhaps you would say there is someone employing this blind man here." Here Hocaefendi relays from Bediüzzaman, in paraphrase: "The many conscious events that take place upon you, those events that occur consciously, since they themselves are not conscious, show that behind them is a conscious one, and these are the art of that conscious one."

XV — The same atoms, different molds

The balance

Atoms enter through our mouths: crumbs of bread, stone, iron, copper, lime. When they reach the cells, they take up positions of their own and become useful things. "In the universe the Almighty makes all from the same atoms": however many atoms there are from hydrogen to uranium, the universe is being made with them; "and yet, pay attention. The form of each thing is different, its nature is different, its formation is different. That is, everything requires a separate mold."

Hocaefendi recites Surah Ar-Rahman; in Suat Yıldırım's translation: "He raised the sky with this harmony and set this balance, so that you too may take the lesson and not overstep the measure. So weigh with justice, and do not upset the scale, the balance!" (Ar-Rahman 55:7-9). In the preacher's words: "Allah has set a balance in the sky and the earth. Within this balance, in the universe He built, He has you walk about and roam." The fine calculation in the protein depends on this too: what is beneficial in one measure is harmful in another; sodium and chlorine make salt, while another combination may be poison. "In the face of Allah's making everything with balance, in this balanced way, never act like a rabble, never act without order."

XVI — The balance on earth

Earth's crust, the sun, oxygen, the axis, the moon

Hocaefendi lists them in order: had the earth's crust been a few feet thicker, it would have swallowed the oxygen, and there would be no life. The sun is sometimes 149.5-150 million, sometimes 135 million kilometers away; if the distance decreased or grew a little, there would be no life on earth; were it twenty thousand miles nearer we would burn, and that much farther we would freeze. Twenty-one percent of the air is oxygen; had it been fifty percent, every spark would become a fire. The earth's axis is tilted twenty-three and a half degrees; had it been upright, the clouds would pile up at the poles and rain would fall only in the north and the south.

Had the atmosphere been a little shallower, meteors would strike the earth as they strike the moon; had it been a little denser, the sun's beneficial rays would not reach us. Allah, who moves the sun in a course, moves the earth too; a slight deviation from the orbit would fling everything into space. It is Allah who has the moon keep the calendar there. It is He who prepared the earth as a table; had the earth turned like Mercury, with one face always toward the sun, the far side would blaze and burn and this side would perhaps freeze. "The One who turns the globe of the earth in its present form and makes it a table of bounties, who adorns it every spring with bounties of every kind, and offers it for the use of human beings, is Allah; this too cannot be put down to chance."

XVII — Two lessons, one conclusion

Without Allah's will, none of these would exist

"Just as in the last lesson, by the measure and criterion of matter's being created later, we presented and explained Allah's eternity and everlastingness, His existence, in this lesson we have explained Allah's knowledge, His will, and, in one respect, once again the existence of the Almighty. Yes, without Allah's will none of these would exist. Science says this." Everything that runs counter to these things science says must be rejected.

People who have specialized in these matters will come before us; let us have no hesitation: "These are words they said but from which they could not reach the conclusion. We reach the conclusion from the things they said, the things they explained to us. We say: 'You relay these well, but they cannot be put down to coincidences, to chance. They are by Allah's grace, by His will.'" The sermon closes with a prayer: may Allah reform, guide, and lead to the right path the deceived, mistaken generations; may He grant us understanding, and grant fairness and sense to those who lead them astray. "The truth is very great, very tremendous. Allah explains Himself plainly, openly. Nothing is hidden. Everything is hidden by the intensity of its manifestation; but the blind do not see this."

XVIII — How the video was made

Original audio, visuals in code

The audio is the original recording of the sermon of February 28, 1975 (Çınar Media); it has not been altered. The Arabic opening prayers at the start of the recording are not included in the video; the sermon begins with the basmala and Al-Baqarah 2:21-22. The Arabic recitations are shown on screen in Arabic script and given in the subtitles from Suat Yıldırım's translation.

The visuals are animated slides drawn in code with artificial intelligence (Anthropic Claude): the spinning atom, the sun and the earth on an elliptical orbit, the stone going into the hut and the jewels coming out, the army of forty thousand men... The gold bands at the bottom of the screen show the corresponding passage in the Risale-i Nur at the moment the preacher speaks the sentence; the blue bands give the present-day values of the 1975 figures. These are not the preacher's words; they are source notes. The subtitles are in seven languages.

Concepts

Sources