Dawkins vs Mehdi Hassan: Empiricism vs Knowledge

So someone asked me to respond to this clip. I'm sure we've all seen it. It's the clip of Richard Dawkins and Mehdi Hassan, where Dawkins is mocking Mehdi Hassan for his belief in the Israel Mirage. So before I start, let me just sort of preface this by saying that an empiricist, which is what Dawkins claims to be, is almost by definition someone who is entirely concerned with what we can call surface knowledge. That is knowledge that is accessible, only to the five senses.

Anything beyond that or deeper than that, they distrust. Or it's not so much that they distrust whatever is beyond or deeper than the surface. It's that they distrust their own ability. They distrust themselves in their ability to understand or process anything that's beyond or deeper than the surface. It's like someone who's on the shore, who distrusts whether or not they'll be able to swim, so they stay on the shore.

That's empiricists. They're unable to, accept that realities can and do exist beyond the reach of their five senses, even though everyone everywhere mostly lives, according to their ability to understand reality beyond what they can see, touch, taste, hear, and smell, and that includes empiricists. But, of course, empiricists have made being empiricists a central component of their personality, so they feel they need to deny it. But most people have no problem accepting that, realities can exist and things can happen that defy empirical explanation because we have all experienced that, and we in fact experience it on a regular basis. And we're able to accept that because most of us have advanced beyond the entry level, approach to knowledge, the entry level stage of understanding, of empiricism.

So we know that things can exist and things can happen which we cannot explain. And we know that that doesn't mean that they don't have an explanation. It just means that we are aware, we are cognizant of the fact that our own limitations prevent us from being able to explain them. Even though we may try to explain, this type of phenomena, within our limits of understanding, within our limits of expression, these explanations are always going to be inadequate. So for the example of the story of the Isra wal Mi'raj, the experience of Rasulullah this was an experience that challenged normal explanation.

And Rasulullah himself, by the way, was fully aware of this at the time. He was fully aware that relating this experience to anyone would make him look crazy. And if it was in his character, to conceal it, he would have. And in fact, the first person to approach him, to ask him what was new with him was one of the worst enemies of Islam at that time, Abu Jahil. The last possible person that Rasulullah would want to confide this experience to, but it was not in his character to conceal anything or to lie or to obfuscate.

So he related the story, this very strange, very easily rejected story to his worst enemy because it is a thing that happened. He could only explain it in the best way that he could, And only Allah knows how it occurred and he's capable of doing all things. The point is that at the time, even the prophet knew that it was strange. He knew that it was incredible, and he knew that it strained belief. So Richard Dawkins, is not special in his rejection.

We see in him, the exact same mockery and superiority complex of Abu Jahal. Richard Dawkins literally has the same, way of thinking as a simple minded Arab disbeliever in the seventh century. And he imagines just as Abu Jahal did that this story of the Israel Mirage should be enough to turn people away from Islam. And just as Abu Jahal was wrong, Richard Dawkins is wrong. Because people like that don't understand that grown people, adult people, mature people, are able to understand and believe things through ways that are more sophisticated, that are more advanced than the way a baby learns and understands things.

I mean, a baby thinks that his mother has disappeared when she leaves the room. That's basically empiricism. He can't conceive of her being anywhere that he can't see. But adults know that there can be realities we don't see. There can be realities that are beyond the grasp of our five senses.

Now, one of the reasons why people do hesitate regarding, knowledge and experiences that relate to empirically hard to explain or impossible to explain, phenomenon is because it takes you into the realm of occultism. And you can encounter charlatans and fakes, know, phony psychics, mind readers, and all sorts of tricksters and frauds. But let's be honest, science has just as many frauds and liars and weird, fantastic claims as occultists. We just lived through one of the greatest scientific frauds in history. And according to some of these, scientific empiricists, the world was supposed to have already ended in a climate catastrophe by now.

Some of these same, you know, I don't believe anything that I can't touch, see, hear, taste, or smell, some of these same types will have you believe that there are an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of yous living infinite number of parallel lives. And they'll tell you, that you are the way you are and that society is the way it is because lobsters are this way or that way. That's because they are limited in their understanding. They're limited in, what they are willing to consider, and because they think that their limits dictate what can actually exist. So it is as useless trying to talk to someone like Richard Dawkins as it was to talk to someone like Abu Jahal.

It's as useless, as trying to explain to a baby that his mother didn't disappear because she walked out of the room. It's as useless as trying to explain to someone what it's like to swim in the ocean when they refuse to get off the shore. And these kind of people are dangerous. They're dangerous, because they try to make you think that it's smart. They try to make you think that it's intelligent, to distrust what your soul feels.

They're dangerous because they try to make you distrust or to belittle what you are able to know inexplicably in the marrow of your bones. They wanna alienate you from your deeper human senses. That means that they wanna disarm you. They wanna disable you, and they wanna separate you from your god given ability to understand reality on a deeper level than the surface level. Because think about it, that's where lies happen.

That's where deception happens. Most of us who've ever been lied to knew that we were being lied to long before we ever had the empirical evidence to prove it, and they want to kill that unempirical sense that's in you. I mean, aren't these the same people after all who were frequent flyers on Jeffrey Epstein's private jet? Dawkins, Pinker, Krausz, the lot of them. They want to keep you, looking up here on the surface so that you never see what's going on and what they're doing down here.

Oh, yes. I believe there is an agenda behind this type of movement, this type of, insistence on empiricism. The insistence that empiricism is the only way to approach the world. The point is to sabotage your understanding, not to improve it. No.

Science has its place. Empiricism has its place, but it is by no means, a sufficient way to interact or to understand the world or reality. And it's a losing game to think that you should have to try to explain to this kind of people in their language and in their framework, things that are beyond their understanding. They've already rejected that anything can exist that's beyond their fingertips. So when you try to explain it empirically, you've already lost.

The point is there is understanding, there is reality beyond what can be perceived by your five senses. So if you try to explain it to them in a way that will satisfy their empirical obsession, you'll never be able to do it. You have to accept that this kind of person is taking a very superficial approach to knowledge. They're taking a very superficial approach to reality, a very superficial approach to understanding. So when you're trying to explain this to them in a way that they can understand, it's like trying to fit the entire ocean into a puddle, and it's not gonna work.