The Rise of Atheism in Pakistan

An increasing number of young Pakistani’s are adopting Atheism and openly questioning the existence of a God. Many analysts have attributed this trend to the rise of Islamist militancy in Pakistan as well as access to social media and other technological tools that allow people to share and explore new ideas.

A Facebook group called ‘Pakistani Atheists and Agnostics’ was launched a few months ago and has already attracted over 800 members. I caught up with the founder of this group, a young Pakistani Technologist operating under the pseudonym ‘Hazrat Nakhuda’, in order to discuss this new phenomenon.

Ghaffar: What inspired you to launch the Pakistani Atheists and Agnostics group?

Hazrat Nakhuda: Atheist groups and movements are a global trend. PAA is a part of that but it is different. The problem is that most of the groups for freethinkers are in secular countries. In my view the battle for reason, rationality and freethinking doesn’t need to be fought (with urgency) in England, Holland or Canada. It is here, in countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia where we need to fight the battle for reason. It is here where the battle will be the most hard-hitting, it is here where reason needs to triumph, and it is here where we can’t afford to lose.

Almost every Muslim-majority country is under-developed economically or socially. I believe that when a religion is adopted by a state it stifles progress. Pakistanis are running 40,000 Madrasas but 30 percent of the children under the age of 5 are malnourished.

We missed our millennium goals to eradicate polio because we couldn’t run the refrigerators that housed the vaccine, but we spent a fortune on the ‘Islamic bomb’.

This country would praise Mumtaz Qadri (the murderer of Salman Taseer), and yet marginalize the only Nobel laureate of the country because he was from minority sect.

If you want to see how much a hindrance religion can be in the progress of a nation, look at Pakistan.

HN: I was an Islam Apologist. The thing that got me started was the idea that the reason I was a Muslim was simply because I was born into a Muslim Family.

The nerve to claim one specific religion and one specific God out of hundreds as the real God, and rejecting all others merely because ones parents asserted so, seemed too presumptuous.

That is when I started rejecting and accepting ideas based on arguments rather than scripture. Once you start doing that, it is only a matter of time.

HN: Within my circle of friends I am very open. My family knows I don’t believe in God but they don’t know that I am in a leading role in such an organization. Obviously I use a pseudonym that alone should tell you how open I can be.

HN: It is on the rise. Not as much as I hoped to but it is on the rise. There is a huge amount of closet atheists in Pakistan. For every member of the organization I get an email from five others telling me that they want to join but can’t.

HN: Why is it on the rise? Well if I had to put forward what I see as the most pertinent reason, it would have to be the internet and social media. We are connected like nothing else. A boy in a small town outside Lahore can watch a lecture by Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan and Christopher Hitchens. Ten years ago it wasn’t that easy.

Another reason is the fact that Pakistanis are obsessed with trying to prove to the world that Islam is right. When people like that go to online forums to debate other people they get asked questions that, as a born Muslim, they don’t ask themselves.

HN: The majority of the members are young, between the ages of 16 and 32. Most of them are urban Middle class and Educated; doctors, engineers, computer programmers, lawyers, business persons, artists, and so on. Most of the members also tend to be from the three major cities: Lahore, Karachi & Islamabad.

But we have people from as far away as FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas). There is also a huge overseas Pakistani population. Interest areas range from politics, economics to domestic issues.

HN: So far it is encouraging. But there is the odd individual who expresses his desire to behead me.

G: How much of this trend is attributable to political events and the rise of Islamist militancy in the region?

HN: The rise of Islamist militancy has made more ‘closet’ atheists ‘come out’. Has it made more people in Pakistan become atheist/agnostics? No it hasn’t. It has in some cases put people on the path to questioning their own faith but not to abandoning it. I find that almost all people abandon faith because of scientific and philosophical arguments rather than geo-political events.

HN: It is the backbone of everything we do. It is how members interact with each other. All this started out on forums and groups on the social media.

HN: Right now most Pakistanis aren’t even aware that there is an option to not believe in God; they don’t question the existence of God and generally don’t believe that Atheists exist. What is more, according to a Gallup poll, 78 percent of Pakistanis believe that a person who leaves Islam should be killed. And finally, Pakistan has very strict blasphemy laws. If I get to change these three things in my life time, I would die a happy man.

Of course the sums, the shape of the earth and the number of moons are subject to direct verification.

Not as direct as the existence of the observer themselves. I can not be absolutely sure my body exists. I CAN be absolutely sure that I exist...which is the ONLY thing that can be know by direct verification.

Sums can be known only if you trust reason. If you do not trust reason, you can not know sums or know anything else except that you exist.

Observation and reason however, can show what is LIKELY to exist beyond your own soul. It seems LIKELY that your body exists and the natural world that you observe through it exist. However this is based on faith. A very reasonable faith...though not something you can be certain of.

All the things observed at that level of nature available for study with the senses show a pattern...the patterns can be studied and put together and inductions made and LIKELY conclusions drawn. Some of the ways to do this are called "science" some are not and some people argue about whether it is "science" or not.

An observed pattern that happens again and again and again everywhere we see is that all things in nature are not self existent. Hamburgers do not simply come into existence as if by magic. Nor do cars. Nor airplanes. Nor atoms. Nor molecules. Nor inorganic matter. Nor organic matter. The overwhelming pattern is that all the actual things subjected to nature must have causes outside themselves.

One could speculate, like Hume, that things must have always existed and are an infinite chain of temporal causes. But one familiar with mathematical limits or the calculus can reason that stretching the problem of dependency into the past can not solve the problem even if one presumes an infinite amount of time. For instance the limit of pi as n approaches infinity can not be zero. For pi does not care about the value of n. Nor does set of all the things operating in nature care about the value of time as it approaches infinity.

Put another way. As we all would not assume that a hamburger would simply exist by itself at a certain point of time for no reason outside itself. An intelligent person who considered it carefully would expect a universe with many hamburgers and much more to exist by itself for now reason outside of itself for all eternity.

And YET...we have a universe just like that. Thus, however hard it is to imagine though, no matter what your cosmology, reason demands that at least SOMETHING MUST be immune from needing an external cause. Intelligent people for centuries have speculated about what that thing might be like...but it seems silly not to recognize that such a cause is not transcendent of nature and God like.

Thus if you are to trust what seems most LIKELY you should be inclined to recognize nature exists and that it is dependent on something greater than it that transcends it to make it exist.

Sorry that I covered a lot of ground quickly in this response...but I was trying to keep it post size, so it is not exhaustive of the subject. Nor am I an authority on it, I am only presenting these arguments as an outline of one of the most obvious "proofs" of God (I put proof in quotes because, as I said above, nothing is certain except the existence of one's own soul...for the observer can be fooled by illusion...but if there is no observer no fooling can take place).

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