Reason on Faith

commenting on faith and religion through the eyes of reason

The Multiverse and Ahmadiyyat

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I often come across Ahmadi Muslims in social media scoffing at the idea of a multiverse.

For example:

Here’s another example from the July 2009 issue of the Ahmadiyya Jama’at’s publication, the Review of Religions. The article is entitled, Existence of God. Scroll down to the section entitled, “Multiple Universes”. You’ll see this statement from the author, Rafi Ahmad, PhD:

Consequently, many atheists, in desperation, have fled to the second explanation, multiple universes(9,15) – in fact, an infinity of universes. The uniqueness and fine-tuning of our universe is dismissed by claiming that it is but one among countless universes.

In one version of this phantasmagorical theory, uni-verses are springing up everywhere. But please do not ask where and how, as these universes are inaccessible from our own universe! So what is the empirical evidence for oscillating and parallel and multiple universes? There is none.

As an aside, reflect on the arrogant bravado of this Ahmadi Muslim writer, eager to paint atheists as ‘desperate’ and subscribing to ‘phantasmagorical’ theories. Replace the concept of “universe” with “God” in his last paragraph and the ambience of absurdity still holds. But what is more likely? Universes in our Cosmos being created and destroyed, or a deity way more complex than such a multiplicity of universes? Who’s being ‘phantasmagorical’ now? And yet this isn’t even the best point in this blog post. Are you ready?

What’s interesting is that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad — the Promised Messiah to Ahmadi Muslims — himself wrote in support of a multitude of universes in his book, The Criterion for Religions. See page 17 (or raw page 25 in the PDF document on alislam.org with a ’17’ in the top right corner).

Notice how the above tweet from an Ahmadi Muslim—convert Joseph Seager—can no longer be found on Twitter?

Update: As at June 7, 2018, the tweet has returned to visibility. This can happen if a user takes their Twitter account private for a time.

Ask yourself why Ahmadi Muslims seem to delete tweets once I link to them—often months after the fact. The tweets I capture demonstrate how inconsistent Ahmadiyya Islam’s apologetics are. In fact, Qasim Rashid once deleted tweets that I responded to on Twitter, and which I used in a blog post. I have since learned to take screen shots when Ahmadi Muslims tweet, just in case.

So here it is, the original tweet and my original comments to it on Twitter:

Joeseph Seager Ahmadi Muslim on Multiverse in PM writings

The context is that MGA is doing quite an excellent job at critiquing Christianity. MGA suggests that we aren’t the only universe, and that if God sacrificed a son in this universe, how many other times and universes has this gone on in? Here’s a wider excerpt from that short book:

He has been the Creator and Lord of the worlds since eternity- they at least do not believe that He has eternally been crucifying His darling sons for the sake of mankind. Rather, they say that it was only recently that He hit upon this stratagem, and that the ageing father has only now thought of saving others from punishment by having His son crucified.

It is clear that once one accepts that God is eternal and timeless, one must also accept that God’s creation has always existed in one form or the other, and that because of the eternal manifestation of the God’s eternal attributes a whole universe has at times been disappearing into the realm of non-existence and, at times, one universe has been appearing in place of another.

Furthermore, no one can count how many universes God has withdrawn from the world and replaced them with others. God Almighty, in fact, points to this ever-existing generic universe when He says in the Holy Quran that He created the Jinn before He had created Adam.

Despite self-evident proof that the universe must be timeless in nature, the Christians have yet to produce a list showing the number of times that the ‘Son of God’ was drawn upon the cross in the countless universes, each isolated from the other.

So, would Ahmadi Muslims like to keep poo-pooing the hypothesis of a multiverse? Remember, no one is saying “we know”. Non-theists are postulating ideas. It is the classical theists that take the position they they “know” and that the multi-verse is too far fetched.