Before I continue any further, I would like to describe the few major religions in Malaysia. Firstly, there’s Islam, the official religion of Malaysia. I think it is quite safe to say that this is the religion with the most followers in Malaysia, due to the fact that Malays are Muslims. The reason? I will discuss it later. Then there’s Hinduism, of which Indians make up most of the followers, hence I think, the major religion in Malaysia with the least followers. Next will be Christianity. Christianity is surely more of a multi-racial religion in Malaysia, where the followers consist of mainly Chinese and Indians.

The finally, there is “Buddism”. “Buddism” in Malaysia is a very interesting topic which deserves a whole paragraph or two to itself. The reason I said “Buddism” as opposed to simply Buddism is because, well, in Malaysia, “Buddism” is not Buddism. In understanding this seemingly weird happening, we must first understand the Rukun Negara, or National Principles. To help refresh the memories of those who have long since left primary or secondary school, below is the Rukun Negara and its English translation.

Kepercayaan Kepada Tuhan,
Kesetiaan Kepada Raja dan Negara,
Keluhuran Perlembagaan,
Kedaulatan Undang-Undang,
Kesopanan dan Kesusilaan.

Belief in God,
Loyalty to King and Country,
Supremacy of the Constitution,
Sovereignty of Law,
Courtesy and Morality.

From the National Principles alone, you can see how important it is for a Malaysian to believe in God. In fact, you can even say that Malaysian should conform to these principles and hence are somewhat “defined” to believe in God. God, I believe, in the context of the Principles, refers to the Creator who listens to your prayer, monitors your actions and thoughts, and not to forget, judge you according to your performance during your life time. One of the common things about the other major religions in Malaysia is the existence of a Supreme Being who we refer to as God. However, for the case for Buddism, there is no teaching of the Ultimate Creator. From this fact alone, I believe it is quite safe to say that Buddism is not a religion. In fact, a few year ago when I was reading Reader’s Digest, I was so shocked that Dalai Lama said “Buddism is not a religion, but a way of life.” Now, I have to say, I am sincerely sorry to have called myself a buddist.

So, what’s with “Buddism”, you may ask. In Malaysia, “Buddism” IS a religion. This is because “Buddism” consists of not only Buddism, but also some of the other, usually Chinese, beliefs which does involves a Personal God, regardless whether the issue of creation is involved or not. The God of Wealth, Dragon, or the Old Man of the Moon are just a few of the many examples I can give. Some of the followers prefer to call themselves Taoist, but I believe that true Taoism is not how they defined it. In fact, Taoism is more of a moral teaching and a way of life. For those people who happens to call themselves Taoists, I suppose it’s totally fine with me, but certainly, they will encounter some inconvenience in their life, especially when it comes to filling in forms, even more so when they are forms from the government.

In Malaysia, filling in forms usually mean stating what your religion is. It is as if the religion which you are in affects how the forms are going to be processed. Maybe it does. The usual choices which you can tick are: Buddism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Others (please state). When a “Taoist”, agnostic, or even atheist sees it, guess what he or she will do. Yes, tick the box next to Buddism. Easy, fast and no hassle. It’s been a while since I have to fill in such forms. During this period of time, I have my consciousness raised on the matter of religion. Out of my respect for Buddism, I do not think it is right for me to tick the box next to it. And also as an atheist, I think it is right for me to state my stance, however odd it may seem in Malaysia. However, I’m not sure if I am actually allowed to write Atheism as my “religion”, or even if it is allowed by the law, considering the Rukun Negara.

In my attempt to understand more about this issue, I decided to take a look at the Constitution of Malaysia. Certainly, according to the Rukun Negara, the constitution is supreme and certainly can provide me a good answer. During this attempt, I actually came across some lines in the constitution which deal with the issue of religion. Some of them are common knowledge in Malaysia; some are just so interesting that I would really like to share it with you. Note that first number refers to the Article and the second number refers to the Clause in that particular Article.

(3, 1) – Islam is the religion of the Federation; but other religions may be practiced in peace and harmony in any part of the Federation.

(3, 2), (3, 3) and (3, 5), (32, 1), (42, 9) deal with the issue of who is to be the Head of Religion in the different states in Malaysia, and their responsibility as the Head of Religion.

(8, 2) – Except as expressly authorized by this Constitution, there shall be no discrimination against citizens on the ground only of religion, race, descent or place of birth in any law relating to the acquisition, holding or disposition of property or the establishing or carrying on of any trade, business, profession, vocation or employment.

(8, 5b) – This Article does not invalidate or prohibit any provision or practice restricting office or employment connected with the affairs of any religion, or of an institution managed by a group professing any religion, to persons professing that religion.

(11, 1) – Every person has the right to profess and practice his religion and, subject to (11, 4), to propagate it.

(11, 2) – No person shall be compelled to pay any tax the proceeds of which are specially allocated in whole or in part for the purposes of a religion other than his own.

(11, 3) – Every religious group has the right to manage its own religious affairs, to establish and maintain institutions for religions or charitable purposes, and to acquire and own property and hold and administer it in accordance with law.

(11, 4) – State law and in respect of the Federal Territories of Kuala Lumpur and Labuan, federal law may control or restrict the propagation of any religious doctrine or belief among persons professing the religion of Islam.

(12, 2) – Every religious group has the right to establish and maintain institutions for the education of children in its own religion, and there shall be no discrimination on the ground only of religion in any law relating to such institutions or in the administration of any such law; but it shall be lawful for the Federation or a State to establish or maintain or assist in establishing or maintaining Islamic institutions or provide or assist in providing instruction in the religion of Islam and incur such expenditure as may be necessary for the purpose.

(12, 3) – No person shall be required to receive instruction in or take part in any ceremony or act of worship of a religion other than his own.

(12, 4) – For the purposes of (12, 3) the religion of a person under the age of eighteen years shall be decided by his parent or guardian.

(160, 2) – “Malay” means a person who professes the religion of Islam, habitually speaks the Malay language, conforms to Malay custom and was before Merdeka Day born in the Federation or in Singapore or born of parents one of whom was born in the Federation or in Singapore, or is on that day domiciled in the Federation or in Singapore; or is the issue of such a person.

If you consider (11, 2) and (12, 2) clearly, you can see that they are somewhat contradicting. (11, 2) states that nobody should “pay any tax the proceeds of which are specially allocated in whole or in part for the purposes of a religion other than his own”. (12, 2) states that “it shall be lawful for the Federation or a State to establish or maintain or assist in establishing or maintaining Islamic institutions or provide or assist in providing instruction in the religion of Islam and incur such expenditure as may be necessary for the purpose”. And how do the Federation of the State pays for the expenditure? Tax payer’s money. And who are the tax payers? Malaysians, be they Muslims or Non-Muslims. Ah… of course, of course, Income Tax is not “specially allocated in whole or in part for the purposes of a religion”… My bad.

Clause (12, 3) and (12, 4) are somewhat contradicting also. It implies that if you are under 18, you have no right to choose your own religion, and if your parents demand of you, you must conform to their decision on the issue of religion. Also, since a religion is “chosen” for you, by what (12, 3) implies, you should “receive instruction in or take part in any ceremony or act of worship of” your religion. What if you have Christian parents but you found out that Islam is obviously the One True Religion? That would make a scene.

If you are wondering why all Malays are Muslims, you can clearly see it in (160, 2), where Malay is actually defined as a person “who professes the religion of Islam”. Alright, you may wonder, what happens if a Malay found out that Christianity, Judaism, Mormon or heck, Scientology is more suitable for him of her? The only answer I can think of comes from mathematics: function is not defined as it is out of the domain.

From the above clauses in the Constitution of Malaysia, you will more or less find that Malaysians do have freedom of religion, regardless of the few seemingly contradicting clauses. Thankfully, I have not found a single clause which demands Malaysians to have a religion. Hence, I believe, atheism must be allowed in Malaysia.

Reading the Constitution of Malaysia, I realized that secularism can never happen in Malaysia, at least not in the near future. In fact, of what I see now in Malaysia, secularism would surely take away the whole identity of Malaysia, if you know what I mean. However, this is not what I am asking for. What I am hoping is this: stop asking me what my religion is, or at least prepare a check box specially for Atheism!

A Help In Understanding What God Is “borrows” the analogy from a famous book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbot. When I was reading it, I came across a few confusing and misleading ideas which I want to point out here.

Firstly, you can notice a clear difference between Flatland and the analogy (to distinguish the book Flatland and the analogy used by the author of A Help in Understanding What God Is, I shall call the analogy Help in this paragraph.) used in that article of the main characters. In Flatland, the main character is a Square, while a Man (or assuming it is at least some sort of complex being, of which we will just call it Man) is the main character in the analogy. Both these characters live on the world a 2-dimensional world. I hope that you can pin point the biggest flaw in the analogy now. In a two dimensional world, a Square can exist, but a Man cannot. A Man, being a complex being, would most probably have a complex digestive system much like our own. If that is the case, the Man would simply fall apart, and hence cannot exist in a 2-dimensional world. You can argue that in Flatland, Square is seen as a living complex being, capable of logical analysis too. However, what you can notice in Help that the author is trying to compare our world (3-dimensional as we see it) to a 2-dimensional one. Complex beings in our world just simply can’t exist in 2-dimensional plane.

In Help, When the Man asked the Sphere “what it is like to be a sphere?”, the Sphere answer, “I’ll tell you what it’s like; draw a circle on your floor.” The first question which came into my mind is “A what on the what?” If the 2-dimensional Flatland is analogous to our 3-dimensional world, then logically, our 2-dimensional floor would be analogous to a 1-dimensional line in Flatland. I can only wonder how the author is going to draw a 1-dimensional circle.

If this is not weird enough, the author did mention Man’s “perception of a circle is a constantly curving line that returns to its origin, but he cannot see all of the circle at once”. Not exactly a circle on the floor, is it? Try imagining it in 3-dimensional. If you were to look at a face (other than the top and bottom) of a cylinder, you’d not be able to see the whole of its surface at the same time. Instead, you will see rectangle. I repeat, rectangle. I use a cylinder as an example because the cross section the cylinder is of constant area, which the cross section of a sphere is not. If we were to consider a case which is valid for all possible Flatlands, it is better to consider a circle which is of constant rather than one which is valid for only some Flatlands, as the circle would exist in only a finite number of Flatlands (Of course, a rectangle is not a valid comparison also, since the cylinder would be of infinite length. You can’t actually see a rectangle from that. However, for easier comparison, we will consider only a finite domain, hence a rectangle). If we reduce the rectangle by 1 dimension, it is a straight line of certain length. This means that a Man in Flatland will see a circle as a straight line, NOT a curving line. And if Man sees a curving line, of which I can’t imagine how he can, I assure you that it is certainly not a circle. Perhaps the author is trying to describe this: the Man will see an infinitely long line (remember that he is 2-dimensional) enclosing a finite area.

The author then says “People in Flatland commit suicide by drawing circles around themselves that they can never get out of.” That sounds quite logical at first. If the 2-dimensional Man is enclosed in a circle in a Flatland, “air”(which is 2-dimensional in Flatland also) cannot get through the circle. The Man would slowly suffocate to death. However, by closer inspection, you will notice that this is not a valid comparison to our 3-dimensional world. For the circle to be valid in every possible Flatland, I already pointed out that it must be a cylinder in a 3-dimensional world. In fact, the cylinder must be of infinite length. If you are enclosed in a cylinder of infinite length, that means the volume air in the cylinder is infinite also. You can never suffocate to death in this case. Secondly, a Man can never draw a circle in Flatland as it is analogous to you building a cylinder of infinite length. Another reason a Man can never DRAW a CIRCLE in Flatland because it is analogous to you creating matter out of nothing. That would be a violation of the Mass-Energy equivalence.

The story continues with the Man miraculously able to draw a circle (or in our 3-dimensional world, building a cylinder of infinite length and creating matter out of nothing), he is asked by the Sphere to “rotate the circle about its diameter producing a sphere”. We can do that in our 3-dimensional world. If we rotate the supposedly cylinder by the cross-sectional circle’s diameter, we would get something of an enclose space with infinite length and height but with finite width. You will notice that we are still rotating the circle in the world that we know – within the 3-dimension that we live in. If you were asked to rotate a circle to a 4th Space Dimension, you can never actually get a visible result. Compare this logic to a 2-dimensional Flatland. It makes little sense to ask the Man to “rotate the circle about its diameter”. Note that I used the phrase “can never actually get a visible result” and “little sense” rather than “can never do it” and “no sense”. This is because with our understanding of mathematics, we CAN do it. For example, trying to find the volume of a sphere by integration.

The purpose of the true story of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbot is to raise our awareness about dimensions other than the 3 that we are used to. However, the author of the mentioned analogy says the only thing the Man “can understand is the world or dimension in which he lives.” Luckily, by mathematical means, we are able to understand and do calculations about the extra dimensions then the 3 we are used to. One great example would be Einstein’s 4-dimensional Space-Time in his theory of Relativity, where Time is of course an extra dimension. You can see that the “conclusion” which the Man has come to is in no way the same as what happened in the story of Flatland by Edwin Abbot, where Square’s mind is opened to the concept of extra dimensions.

In the last paragraph, the author said that God is of higher dimension than we are. The funny thing is that if Flatland does exist, by what the author implies, we would all be Gods to the Flatlanders. In addition, if we don’t see that matter is created out of nothing, our current description of the universe is good enough, though not perfect. However, if we do see that matter is created out of nothing, we would be able to investigate it further mathematically without involving the entity of which the author refers to as God. It is interesting that the author would attribute God with more-than-3-dimensions. If we were to look at the theory on quark(not 3-dimensional) as more of a fundamental element than the elements for an atom (the proton, neutron and electron), why not attribute God with less-than-3-dimensions? What about The String Theory? If it is true, we’d be attributing God with 1-dimension. Why not we don’t call it God, but call it Nature instead?

Before I continue, I have to clarify what being an atheist means. In general, atheists are people who do not have the belief in the existence of deity or god. Some atheists have a conscious rejection of theism – they have a strong believe that God does not exist. Some atheist just do not care, some atheist just have the tendency to not believe in God. The reason for atheism can vary. Some are just brought up not believing it; some have seen the abundance of scientific research, studied and understood them, and made a choice that atheism suits them better. In short, as oppose to most theist nowadays, atheist do not usually share the same thoughts, or the reason for atheism. Most atheists do not claim anything but their absence of the belief in God.

Now, why do I find that article annoying? Statements such as “Most atheists maintain that there was no beginning, “‘Matter is self-existing and not created,’ and that is a concise statement of the atheist’s belief” and “The atheist, on the other hand, will try to convince us that we are the product of chance”. I will again remind you that most atheist do not make any claim. That article is misleading because readers will have the tendency to think that those, as stated, are what all or nearly all atheist think or claim. That is simply not true.

Most people have heard of the name Albert Einstein, some know that he was a Nobel laureate. The interesting thing is that he did not win the Nobel Prize based on what I think was his greatest contribution to the scientific world – The theory of Special and General Relativity. Special Relativity not only gives us an accurate explanation of what happens when something is moving close to the speed of light, it also expresses the mass-energy equivalence. Now, we know that the mass-energy equivalence is true, it explains natural phenomenon such as nuclear fusion and nuclear fission and technologies have been developed based on it, such as the nuclear bomb and nuclear power plant.

Part of Stephen Hawking’s work on Bing Bang is actually based on Einstein’s work. Bing Bang originated from singularity, and singularity does contain mass and energy. A Practical Man’s Proof of God actually claims that atheists believe matter came out of nothing. This, however, is not true. The matter and energy we see in the universe today came from the singularity, and as I said, singularity does have mass and energy. However, theistic belief that God created the universe is precisely “matter came out of nothing”. The first “proof” introduced in that article is that there was a beginning of the universe. Science explains it with Big Bang.

The second “proof” introduced was based on Nuclear Fusion (It is interesting that the author talked about nuclear fusion and yet seemed to be confused about Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence). In a nutshell, he was trying to say that there must be a beginning because if the universe has existed for infinitely long (or forever), hydrogen as a fuel for nuclear fusion would have run out a long time ago. I have to congratulate him understanding that there is a beginning of the universe, however, he didn’t provide any proof of God’s existence at all.

Now, the third “proof” – The Second Law of Thermodynamics. As stated by the author, The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that – In any closed system, things tend to become disordered. That statement is not incorrect, but I shall provide a more precise statement of the Second Law – Entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

The author stated this: “If an automobile is driven for years and years without repair, for example, it will become so disordered that it would not run any more.” However, what he didn’t realize is that an automobile which is being driven is not an isolated system. An automobile uses fuel by converting the chemical energy to heat and work. Now, he was referring only the automobile as an isolated (or closed) system. An automobile, which is driven uses fuel, hence, is NOT an isolated system. Furthermore, there will be heat lost to the surround, again, making the automobile NOT an isolated system.

The author then said, “The atheist’s assertion that matter/energy is eternal is scientifically wrong. The biblical assertion that there was a beginning is scientifically correct.” So far, from those proves alone, I do not see even one pointing to God’s existence. The author’s interpretation of The First Law of Thermodynamics (Energy is being conserved, hence mass-energy equivalence) and Second Law of Thermodynamics are totally flawed and misleading.

The First Cause argument is then briefly used by the author. I can only wonder why some theists like clings to this argument, and yet, the argument itself would make us ask “Who then, made God?” Of course, some theists can explain to you through the scripture, and “God is a Spirit” is quite a common quotation. The bible is not a proven truth, and I do not think such scientific argument based on unproven scripture hold much weight. If we were to attribute the First Cause to an intelligent, complex being (God), why not just take it as Nature?

Anthropic Principle and the name Frederick Hoyle were mentioned in the article. Interestingly, Frederick Hoyle was an ATHEIST! Also, the anthropic principle does imply that our existence is not by chance, but it doesn’t serve as a proof for God’s existence either. The Anthropic Principle is incredibly interesting, but I will not dwell on it in this blog entry. The author also somewhat “proved” that evolution is not true by saying “for most of us, simply looking at our newborn child is enough to rule out chance”. Not only that he did not explain that statement, he clearly did not understand what evolution is. What I can tell you for certain is that evolution is not by chance. Interestingly, a lot of theists tend to make a synonym between “come about by chance” and “come about with the lack of deliberate design”. However, this is not true. I’m sorry to say that evolution is another interesting topic which I will not dwell into in this entry.

With the above explanation, I sincerely hope that you can see that The Practical Man’s Proof of God is, in short, inaccurate and misleading, and precisely impractical. Please, I urge you, be skeptical of what you read and question their justifiability. Yes, you should be skeptical and question what I write too, and that’s the way we should learn.