For over two decades, Abdurraheem Green has stood at the intersection of faith and reason — at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park and on global platforms — confronting one of the most pervasive ideas of our age: that atheism is the rational default, the position of the scientist, the intellectual, the free thinker. In this landmark lecture, Green challenges that assumption at its root. Drawing on twenty-five years as a Muslim and countless encounters with atheists in structured debates and street-level dawah, he argues that the atheist’s rejection of a Creator is rarely driven by logic. It is almost always driven by emotion — whether personal pain, a desire for unchecked freedom, or a fundamentally mistaken understanding of what it means to believe. This is not simply a theological debate; it is a forensic examination of the intellectual honesty — or lack thereof — behind one of the most confident worldviews of the modern era.
Atheism as an Emotional Position: Unpacking the Two Root Causes
Green identifies two primary emotional drivers behind atheism, and both, on close examination, fail as rational arguments. The first is what he calls the “God has let me down” phenomenon — people who were once religious but abandoned faith after encountering hardship, illness, or tragedy, reasoning: “How could God allow this to happen to me?” This response, while understandable, stems from a flawed concept of God and of the purpose of human existence. Islam is unambiguous: life is a test. The Quran states that Allah created life and death to examine which of us is best in conduct, and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ taught that Allah tests those He loves most, because it is precisely through difficulty that human character is refined — like ore purified by fire to yield pure metal. The second driver is a desire to live without moral accountability: to reject divine rules, sidestep the concept of a Day of Judgement, and answer to no one but oneself. Green notes that both he and his colleague Hamza Tzortzis — nicknamed “the Muslim Aristotle” for his rigorous philosophical debates with the world’s leading atheists, including Ed Buckner of the American Humanist Association and former evangelical-turned-atheist Dan Barker — reached the same conclusion independently after years of dawah experience.
“Most atheists are not atheists because their belief is rational. I would conclude, and Hamza has concluded, that most atheists are atheists because of emotional reasons, not rational reasons. Their position is an emotional position, not a rational one.” — Abdurraheem Green
- Atheism is a truth claim, not a neutral position — the atheist asserts God does not exist, which requires knowledge, not mere doubt (agnosticism is the honest position of uncertainty)
- The “problem of suffering” does not disprove God’s existence — it is a separate question about why, not whether; an organised, law-governed universe rationally points toward intelligence and will behind it
- The Prophet ﷺ said Allah tests those He loves most — hardship is not divine abandonment but a process of purification and spiritual growth
- The second root cause — rejecting accountability — is a desire for what atheists imagine to be freedom, not freedom itself
- Historical conflict between the Catholic Church and science (e.g. Galileo) has unfairly coloured all religion in the Western scientific imagination — Islam has no such conflict; Muslim scholars pioneered the scientific method that the West later inherited
- The claim that most scientists are atheists is demonstrably false: Einstein, Newton, and even Darwin for the greater part of his life all acknowledged belief in a Creator
- Arguments such as “religion causes wars, therefore God does not exist” are logically non-sequiturs — emotionally resonant, but rationally empty
The Fitra: When Modern Science Confirms Ancient Islamic Truth
Perhaps the most compelling dimension of Green’s lecture is his introduction of a landmark Oxford University study — a £1.9 million, multi-year research programme involving over sixty academics from across the world, conducted by the Institute for Anthropology and Mind. Their conclusion: belief in God, in religion, and in the afterlife is not something children are taught. It is instinctive. The very architecture of human cognition, the researchers found, is shaped by religious values — a finding that aligns precisely with the Islamic concept of the fitra, the innate disposition with which every human being is born, naturally inclined toward recognition of the One Creator. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said it is only our environment and upbringing that distorts this natural state. The study tested children even in actively atheistic societies — including China — and found that they independently developed concepts of God and the afterlife without being taught them. Atheism, Green concludes, is the acquired position. Belief is the original, natural one. Even Richard Dawkins — arguably the world’s most prominent atheist — illustrated this instinct involuntarily: caught off-guard in a televised interview and unable to recall the full title of Darwin’s own book, he reflexively blurted, “Oh God.” That spontaneous, unguarded appeal to the divine is not irony. It is fitra breaking through. Allah gives this very example in the Quran: when people are on a boat and a violent storm threatens to destroy it, all pretence falls away — they call upon the Creator instinctively, knowing in their depths that there is a Being distinct from and sovereign over the entire universe.
“You know there’s a God. You know it. It’s in your nature. Every single one of you knows it — and this is the reality.” — Abdurraheem Green
What this lecture ultimately illuminates is that the question of God’s existence and the question of human suffering are two entirely different conversations — and conflating them is one of the central intellectual deceptions at the heart of modern atheism. The organised, systemised universe we inhabit — governed by precise physical laws, mathematical constants, and intricate biological complexity — rationally demands a Creator. Suffering does not refute this; it simply raises the deeper question of why, and that question, followed honestly rather than emotionally, leads not away from God but toward the urgent need for divine guidance and revelation. Islam answers that call. The Quran speaks directly to the human soul in its moments of doubt, explains the wisdom behind trials, and restores the fitra to its natural alignment with truth. For any sincere seeker — one genuinely prepared to examine the evidence rather than retreat into emotional reaction — the path is open: engage the arguments, test the claims, and trust the instinct that has always been there. The Creator has never been far. The fitra has never gone silent. It simply waits to be heard.
