Barahin-e-Ahmadiyya Part III — Page 45
Footnote Number Eleven 45 Reckoning. Thus, the perfect certainty that a seeker after truth looks for in the earth and in the heavens—and does not find there—is achieved here [in the divinely revealed book]. Hence, to convince an atheist of the existence of God, the best remedy is provided by a matchless book and not the observation of the earth and the heavens. It should be borne in mind that a person who relies exclusively on rational argumentation has a vein of atheism in him. The same vein becomes bloated and prominent in an atheist, while it remains hidden among the rest. This vein can be severed only by such a revealed book as is truly beyond the capacity of man to produce. For, as I have already mentioned above, people have always arrived at different conclusions from [the study of ] the heavens and the earth. Some have understood it in one way and others in another. Such difference, however, cannot arise with regard to a matchless book. No one, not even an atheist, can suggest that a matchless word has no speaker and has existed by itself since time immemorial, like the earth and the heavens [as he believes them to be eternal]. An atheist will debate about a matchless book only for as long as he denies its being matchless. As soon as he admits that, in fact, writing such a book is beyond human powers, a seed of belief in the existence of God will be planted in his heart. This is because, in this context, there is no room to imagine that the existence of the speaker is hypothetical and not real, since a word cannot exist on its own without a speaker. Moreover, another excellence of the matchless Book is that it gives within it—in factual terms—whatever knowledge of the origin of the universe and the Hereafter is needed for the complete development of the self. This characteristic is absent in the heavens and the earth because, first of all, one cannot discover the secrets of religion at all from their study alone; and the little that may be discovered is quite dubious, and reminds us of the proverbial mother who alone could understand the sign language of her dumb child. All this goes to illustrate that the uniqueness of the Divine Word is essential not only for the comprehen- sion of the system of the laws of nature, but also because without it, the