What can you recommend when dealing with Atheists? Youtube recently recommended me a video about debunking 5 quranic miracles and I got really upset about the recommendation itself, but also about the video, as such things always upset me. (and anger really messes with my mental health which is why I avoid it at all costs) I didnt watch it but that makes me feel like I'm hiding from them, without wanting to seek knowledge. Is it our duty to learn from other groups and what they say about us? 1/2
2/2 I am actually really curious about what 5 quranic miracles this video is talking about. If it talks about the miracles described, than whats the point of “debunking” them? That’s the point of a miracle afterall, that you can’t explain them with science. Or are they talking about miracles we attribute with thw Quran itself? Either way, I know I’ll get angry should I watch it and I don’t like getting near doubtful thoughts in the first place, again, it makes me feel like I run away from them.
What you should do with respect to atheists and critics of Islam is ignore them unless they are respected scholars who have something intelligent to say. There is no point in listening to someone who attacks what you hold valuable unless they really have an important (and new) point to make. As it happens, almost anything you see against Islam on YouTube has been answered over and over again by hundreds of scholars over the past centuries, so nothing they say is new or shocking as they might claim.
Since you are unable to study the matter for yourself, it should be sufficient for you to know that many well-educated and widely-read Westerners have embraced Islam and remained Muslims, such as the University of Kansas math professor Jeffrey Lang, the German diplomat Murad Wilfred Hoffman, Hamza Yusuf, the Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown, Umar Wymann-Landgraf, the Shakespeare scholar Martin Lings, and Timothy Winter. It would be highly irrational to assume that all of these people failed to learn about the arguments against Islam by atheists and others. Quite the opposite is true, many of these people studied Islam and all the arguments against it very deeply before they embraced it.
One common attack against religion by atheists is that science “has shown” that the world is mechanical and that there is no place for free will or responsibility, we are all controlled by selfish genes and laws of nature, therefore religion is false. They are merely repeating theories that were fashionable in Greece in 350 BC and that were debunked by al-Ghazali in the 11th century (see my essay on this). If we think of the universe as a simulation as Imam al-Ghazali did, then the views of religion make scientific sense and cannot be proven false (even if they cannot be proven true).