Praise be to God! There is no other god except God. People use so many times their lack of knowledge as an argument for the existence of God. For example, many religious people argue that no one knows how rain really happens. God just sends it from the sky, and since we don’t have another explanation for it, then God sent it. So, these types of people think of God as dealing with only unexplainable things. In philosophy, this is known as the “god of the gaps”, meaning that wherever there are knowledge gaps, religious people will fill them with their god. Unfortunately, this has been true so often, across time, and it has given the non-religious people an excuse not to believe in God, because once the explanations for those things are found, then they say, “See, God didn’t do it.” But their argument is wrong also. So, let us take an example and explain how we should not use gaps in knowledge as arguments for God, and also why once we can explain those gaps, they should not reduce our faith in God, but only increase our appreciation for God.
Now, let’s say that you order toys on internet for your child, let’s say from Amazon, which is a distribution company, and let’s say that the child doesn’t know where the toys are coming from. Now, he or she asks? Where do toys come from? You tell them, “from Amazon”. Now, you believe that Amazon exists because you know, but the child believes that Amazon exists because he does not know where else they could come from. So, it’s not his knowledge which is causing him to believe in Amazon, but his gaps in knowledge which are causing him to believe. Now let’s say that one day, while that child is watching outside of the window, sees a man, let’s say he is also a distant neighbor, and sees him dropping a package at the door. The child goes out, takes the package, opens it, and sees a toy. Now, he comes to you, and says. You have been lying to me. There is no such thing as Amazon. Our neighbors bring my toys. He totally disregards the fact that the neighbor can also be an Amazon employee. Had that neighbor not existed, that toy would still get there, but had Amazon not sent it, the toy would not get there. So, once the child sees part of how the toy got there, if he is not appreciative and trustworthy of you, he will conclude that you are a liar, but if he trusts that you might know even more, he will conclude that the neighbor is part of how Amazon works.
And the same thing with rain. After the scientists know how rain works, at least a few of them, instead of concluding that God has nothing to do with it, they should conclude that the raining system is just part of how God does things. After all, the Quran does not deny that God sends rain within a system. For example, verse 30:48 says, “GOD is the One who sends the winds, to stir up clouds, to be spread throughout the sky in accordance with His will. He then piles the clouds up, then you see the rain coming down therefrom…”
And actually there is a logical way to reach a conclusion the same as this verse. Let’s say if you found a very smart man in the past, even if he was not a weather scientist, he would be able to conclude how rain works just by observing and thinking. Here is how: Let’s simplify the logic so we can express it with a few words, but this is the basic logic to understand how rain works. First, we would have to observe the sky, and see when it rains. We will notice that whenever it rains there are dark clouds. So, we conclude that rain only comes after dark clouds. Now we watch the sky for many years and try to find dark clouds. What we will notice is that we can see a single white cloud alone in the sky, but we will never see only one small dark cloud in the sky. So, the conclusion is that dark clouds always come in bunches, many clouds on top of one another, but never alone. However, we can see that clouds are not attached to one another and they move quite sporadically. Since that is the case, chances are that if dark cloud existed, we would quite often see a single dark cloud alone in the sky, but we never do. This means that dark clouds are a function of the number of clouds or the density of clouds, and not a true color in itself. This is true. There are no dark clouds. All clouds are always white. If you travel with a long distance airplane, which travels above the clouds, and you look directly down from the plane window, during midday, you can travel the whole world and you will never see a dark cloud. All of them are white. They took pictures of the whole earth from space, and all the clouds are white. No dark clouds. But then, why sometimes some of the clouds look dark from below. Well, we already concluded that dark clouds only come in bunches but never alone, so maybe one cloud is making the other cloud look dark. And the explanation is simple. One cloud is shielding the other cloud from the sun, and the lower cloud looks dark. So, whenever we see dark clouds, all of them are white, but there are simply two piles of clouds, and the top clouds are shielding the bottom clouds from the sun, and the bottom ones now look dark, and in most cases we don’t see the upper clouds, because the bottom cloud is preventing us to see it. And the difference is exaggerated even more in our mind, because we have no other objects in the sky to compare the colors, and see that the dark clouds are actually not that dark. For example, if there was a completely white airplane flying in the sky during that time, you would notice that it looks darker than the dark clouds. But anyway, what we have concluded is that piled clouds create the illusion of dark clouds. Now, we already know that rain only comes after “dark clouds”, but now we know that there are no such things as dark clouds, then we must conclude that rain only comes after piled clouds, because what appears to be dark clouds, always is just piled clouds on top of one another. So, then why does one layer of clouds not result in rain, but two layers of clouds result in rain. So, let’s explore further: After it rains, the clouds disappear. They don’t travel away. They just vanish. This means that the clouds did not release the rain. Clouds were transformed into rain. The clouds were the rain, rain in much smaller water droplets. This means that clouds are actually water. We’ll explain later why they are white, but they are water, just like any other water, plain water, all clouds. So, if they are floating water in the air, then why that water only falls when two clouds happen to get on top of one another, but it does not fall when there is only one layer of clouds. Of course, we am simplifying because two layers can join and create one dense layer, and things are more complicated and continuous in reality, but for explanation purposes, we are separating it in a distinct idea to keep it simple. So, why two layers of clouds lead to rain, while one layer does not. Well it’s because the top layer creates a shadow for the bottom layer, and enables the microscopic water droplets to cool down, and they become denser when they cool down, and start gradually moving downwards, and the ones from the top of the lower cloud as they move down merge with other microscopic water molecules, like a snowball effect, the more they move down, the more water they collect, and they are connected until they merge with so many other molecules to create a water droplet. The water droplet because of the surface tension stays together, and now it is finally heavier than the air and falls down. So, there you have it. That’s how rain happens. But the question is, why do the droplets stay up in the air when they are microscopically small, but they fall when they make larger visible water droplet. Well, the truth is that water molecules are always lighter than the air. Water molecules are 2 hydrogens atoms and one oxygen atom, while air molecules are two oxygen atoms. Oxygen is 16 times heavier than hydrogen. And the air has two oxygen atoms, which is 32 times as heavy as hydrogen, while in comparison the atomic weight of the water molecule is only 18. So, water molecules are almost twice as light as the air molecules. So, their natural way is to float in the air, clouds, but they have this feature that when water molecules meet one another, they stay together, while air molecules, when they meet one another, they still stay separately. It similar to how a feather might float in the air, but a pillow with feathers does not float in the air, because now the feathers are held together by one outside layer of the pillow, which in the case of the water droplets, that outside layer is called surface tension. And this also explains difference in the color of the clouds vs. the water. It’s exactly the same material. Just water. But in the clouds, it’s separated water molecules, separated by molecules of the air in between, and in ground water, it is merged water molecules without any other molecules in between, and in the clouds, because it is separated water molecules, then when the light hits them, there are so many borders through which it has to pass, and it scatters much more, and scattered light in many directions is white light, but when they merge together, the light has to pass only through two borders through the water droplet and it does not change the direction much, except in the rainbow, but that’s another issue. So light changes direction at the borders of things, and if there are too many such borders, they will scatter light in so many directions, and we will perceive that thing as white. So, continuous water is transparent water, while detached water molecules seem white. The same thing happens with glass. When glass molecules are continuous, the glass seems transparent. If you shatter it into millions of pieces, then that glass will appear white. So, you can think of clouds like shattered water, shattered so much, that even the wind lifts them up in the sky, and keeps them there, until another cloud covers it. Of course, again, we are ignoring many other factors, like the need for some dust to start the process of rain, and things like that, but you can see now that it is possible to understand the rain logically. Now, just because, we can finally explain it, it does not mean that God is not doing it. God does what we see and what we don’t see, what we understand and what we don’t understand. In the Quran, God says, “I swear by what you see, and what you don’t see.” So, both what we see and what we don’t see are arguments for God.