Space-Time and Metaphysics

If you ask any Muslim questions regarding existence of God, angels, heaven and hell, chances are that he/she will ignore you  or at best what you can hope for is an emotional response. There's also a 3rd category of Muslim who is so overwhelmed by scientific knowledge that he feels obligatory to answer these questions using Einstein's conception of space-time. He'll tell you stuff like angels  travel faster than speed of light, somewhere among these galaxies God will create heaven and hell once our solar system is destroyed, even to the extent that God resides in a throne somewhere in this universe. Such a person has a linear conception of time as shown below

Forcing empirical logic like this results in the following hypothetical scenario. Imagine that you get a chance to visit hell 30 years after judgement day i.e. year 2230 and there you meet a person who has been living there since judgement day. If you ask that person "how much time have you been living here?", a natural answer is 30 years.

Let's dig seep into this question from philosophical point of view. Imagine today if I ask you this question that "what is the composition of chemical X inside your body?", you're response will obviously be "WTF! Can you please tell me what this chemical X is?" The person living in hell who has been asked this question about "how much time he has spent in hell" will feel the same way. He has no perception of time just like you have no perception of that chemical X. God, angels, heaven and hell are metaphysical objects, the existence of which does not depend upon time.

Space-Time is a physical construct. Every object that we perceive in this physical world exists within a time span. I was born in 1985 and I will die in, say, 2050. This chair or the bed in which you're sitting was created 10 or 20 years ago and it has a life span as well. Infact every physical object of this universe exists within a time span. Time, therefore, is a necessary variable of existence in physical space. We cannot think of any physical object that has existed forever and will exist forever.

This is not true in metaphysics where time is not a variable for defining existence. Heaven and Hell can exist without time. Hence this question that how much time has a person spent in hell is invalid, since time is not perceivable in hell just like that chemical X is not perceivable in today's world.

Same goes for the constraint of space in this physical world. Every thing that we perceive in this world has a predefined shape. And everything including galaxies can be specified by a spatial coordinate system. This is not true in metaphysics. Heaven and hell is not like a planet somewhere in the galaxy. God does not reside in this physical space. In fact he remains outside the bounds of space itself. He created the space, he isn't bounded by it! Or to put it in Thomas Aquinas words, God created time instead of being created by time. Space-Time is thus a creation encapsulating other creations (like you and me) within itself.

Time is a criteria of judging a punishment in this world. For instance a person standing on fire for 1 minute will feel more pain that a person who stands on fire for 1 hour. But this cannot be extrapolated  to hell. One simply cannot say that a person living in hell for 1 day will suffer "less" than the person living in hell for 50 years. Time, as a basis for suffering becomes meaningless there.

So what is the criteria of punishment in Hell if not time? I simple don't know. What I know for sure is that isn't time. This is called negative theology, that is you can infer what a metaphysical object is not, but you cannot tell what it exactly is.

Analyzing a typical Friday Sermon

I recently came back to islamabad after couple of years. Among a number of things that have changed, our local mosque which was under construction back then has also been renovated. Since in Italy, we don't have huge mosques with traditional Islamic architecture, I was naturally enthusiastic when the newly appointed imam started delivering the sermon for friday prayers.

Among a number of things that imam said, he repeated this statement a number of times,
"انسانی ضمیر کا جواب جس طرح اسلام دیتا ہے ، کوئی اور مذہب نہیں دیتا"
or "They way that Islam addresses human conscience, no other religion does better".

I am not sure whether the audience chanting the slogans of  "Praise be to Lord" or even the imam himself understood what he said himself, so let me break it down for you !

For starters, "addressing human conscience" is not the only objective of Islam. Imagine a triangular relationship between society, state and an individual; now remove the collective aspect of society and state (or shariah as it is commonly recognized term), we'll focus only on "individual islam". Not even that, within individual islam, discard all philosophical and theological concepts (e.g. the concepts of hereafter, heaven, hell, angels, prophets, metaphysics etc), also remove "fiqh" out of the context (i.e. the arguments discussing practices of Islam including Zakat (charity), Hajj, prayers etc). Now what remains is the spiritual aspect of Islam commonly known as mysticism or "tasawwuf". This is what imam referred to as "human conscience" or "انسانی ضمیر", and according to him, no other religion satisfies human conscience better than Islam. However, one religion that discusses human conscience extensively is Buddhism.

The comparison between Buddhism and Islamic mysticism is also very interesting. The object of discussion in Islamic mysticism is God, while that in Buddhism is a human itself. Muslim mystics have always discussed conscience i.e. the ability of a human to determine what is right and wrong from an objective perspective of God, while buddhist usually differentiate between evil and good from a holistic yet subjective human perspective.  You'll hardly hear Dalai Lama mentioning God, while Ibn-Arabi hardly discusses anything but God. In buddhism, the objective is to explore universal human nature and keep one's conscience in sync with that objective human ideal conscience. In Islam, however, mystics argue that the potential moral compass is divinely bestowed upon a human being, therefore the objective is explore objective conscience and then to remove the dualism between what one thinks is right/wrong with respect to what God suggests how the differentiation should be.

To conclude, perhaps a more fair statement would be "when it comes to discussing human conscience from a subjective viewpoint of human itself, no religion does it better than Buddhism, while when it comes to discussing human conscience from an objective viewpoint of God, no religion does it better than Islam"

Allah knows the Best !