Confessions of a 70-year member of Communist Party

  

Photograph: Andre Durand/AFP/Getty Images

“First they arrested my wife. She went to the theater and didn’t come back. I got home from work and found my son sleeping on a little rug in the hall next to the cat. He’d waited and waited for Mama until he finally fell asleep. My wife worked at a shoe factory. She was a Red engineer. “Something strange is going on,” she’d told me. “They’ve taken all my friends. For some kind of treason…” “You and I are innocent, so no one is coming for us.” I was sure of it. Absolutely positive…Sincerely! I was a Leninist, then a Stalinist. Until 1937, I was a Stalinist. I believed everything Stalin said and did. Yes…The greatest, the most brilliant leader of all eras and peoples. Even after Bukharin, Tukhachevsky, and Blyukher*14 were all pronounced enemies of the people, I still believed him. It seems stupid now, but I thought that Stalin was being deceived, that traitors had made their way to the top. The Party would sort it all out. But then they arrested my wife, an honest and dedicated Party warrior.

Three days later, they came for me…The first thing they did was sniff inside the oven: Did it smell like smoke, had I burnt anything in there recently? There were three of them. One walked around the apartment picking things out for himself: “You won’t be needing this anymore.” He took down the clock from the wall. I was shocked…I hadn’t expected that…At the same time, there was something human about it that gave me hope. This human nastiness…yes…So these people have feelings, too. The search lasted from 2 A.M. until morning. There were lots of books in the house and they flicked through each and every one of them. Rifled through all of our clothes. Cut the pillows open…It gave me a lot of time to think. Trying to remember, feverishly…By then, there was a mass incarceration going on. People were being taken away every day. It was pretty frightening. They’d take someone away, and everyone would be silent about it. It was useless asking what had happened. At the first interrogation, the investigator explained, “You’re automatically guilty because you failed to inform on your wife.” She was already in jail…During the search, I racked my brains, scrutinizing every last detail…I only remembered one thing…At the most recent citywide Party conference, they read a salutation to Comrade Stalin, and the whole auditorium had stood up. A storm of applause: “Glory to Comrade Stalin—the organizer and inspiration behind our victories!” “Glory to Stalin!” “Glory to our Leader!” Fifteen minutes…Half an hour…Everyone kept turning and looking at one another, but no one wanted to be the first to sit down. So we all just stood. And then, for some reason, I sat down. It was mechanical. Two plainclothes officers went up to me: “Comrade, why are you sitting?” I jumped up! I jumped like I’d been scalded. During the break, I kept looking around. Waiting for them to come up and arrest me on the spot. [A pause.]

“The search ended toward morning. They ordered me to pack my bags. The nanny woke my son. Before I left, I managed to whisper to him, “Don’t tell anyone about your mother and father.” That’s how he survived. [He pulls the tape recorder toward himself.] Record this while I’m still alive…“S.A.”…“Still alive”…That’s what I write on cards. Although there’s no one to send them to anymore…People often ask me, “Why did you keep silent?” “It was the times.” I thought that the traitors were to blame—Yagoda, Yezhov*15—not the Party. It’s easy to judge us fifty years later. To laugh…mock us old fools…but in those days, I marched in step with everyone else. And now, there’s nobody left…”

**
“I ended up in a group cell with fifty people. They would take us out to use the toilet twice a day. And what about the rest of the time? How can you explain this to a lady? There was a big pail by the entrance…[Angry.] Try taking a shit in front of a cell full of people! They’d feed us herring and wouldn’t give us any water. Fifty people…all English and Japanese spies…an illiterate old man from the country…He was in there for starting a fire in a stable. A student was in for telling a joke: “A portrait of Stalin hangs on the wall. The lector reads a report on Stalin, then the choir sings a song about Stalin, and finally, an actor declaims a poem about Stalin. What’s the occasion? An evening commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death.” [I laugh, he doesn’t.] The student got ten years in the camps without the right of correspondence. There was a chauffeur who had been arrested because he looked like Stalin. And he really did. ”

**
“You can’t judge us according to logic. You accountants! You have to understand! You can only judge us according to the laws of religion. Faith! Our faith will make you jealous! What greatness do you have in “your life? You have nothing. Just comfort. Anything for a full belly…Those stomachs of yours…Stuff your face and fill your house with tchotchkes. But I…my generation…We built everything you have. The factories, the dams, the electric power stations. What have you ever built? And we were the ones who defeated Hitler. After the war, whenever anyone had a baby, it was such a great joy! A different kind of happiness than what we’d felt before the war. I could have wept…[He closes his eyes. He’s tired.] Ahhh, we were believers. And now, they’ve passed the verdict on us: You believed in utopia…We did! My favorite novel is Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? Nobody reads it anymore. It’s boring. People only read the title, the eternal Russian question: What is to be done? For us, this book was like the catechism. The textbook for the Revolution. People would learn entire pages of it by heart. Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream…[He recites it like a poem.] “Houses made of crystal and aluminum…Crystal palaces! Lemon and orange groves in the cities. There are almost no elderly, people get old very late in life because life is so wonderful. Machines do all the work, people just drive and control them. The machines sow seeds and knit…The fields are thick with verdure and bounty. Flowers as tall as trees. Everyone is happy. Joyful. Everyone goes around in fine clothes, men and women alike, leading free lives of labor and pleasure. There’s enough space and work for everyone. Is this really us? Can this really be our Earth? And everyone will live this way? The future is bright and wonderful…” Get out of here…[He gestures in the direction of his grandson.] He giggles at me…To him, I’m a little old fool. That’s how we live now.”

**

“You think that communism was like an infectious disease, as they write in today’s newspapers? That it was brought over in a sealed train car from Germany?*17 Nonsense! The people revolted. There was no Tsarist “golden age” like the one that’s suddenly being remembered today. Fairy tales! Like the ones about how we fed America with our grain and decided the fate of Europe. The Russian soldier died for “everyone—that’s the truth. But the way people lived…In my family, there was one pair of snow boots for five children. We ate potatoes with bread and, in the winter, without bread. Just potatoes…And you ask me where communists came from.

I remember so much…and for what? Huh? For what? What am I supposed to do with all of this? We loved the future. The people of the future. We’d argue about when the future was going to come. Definitely in a hundred years, we thought. But it seemed too far away for us…[He catches his breath.]

[I turn off the tape recorder.]

“Good. It’s better without the tape recorder…I need to tell someone this story…

I was fifteen. Red Army troops had come to our village. On horseback. Drunk. A subdivision. They slept until evening, and then they rounded up all the Komsomol members. The Commander addressed us, “The Red Army is starving. Lenin is starving. While the kulaks are hiding their grain. Burning it.” I knew that my mother’s brother, Uncle Semyon, had taken sacks of grain into the woods and buried them. I was a Komsomol youth, I’d taken the oath. That night, I went to the troops and led them to where he’d buried the grain. They got a whole cartload. The Commander shook my hand: “Hurry up and grow up, brother.” In the morning, I woke up to my mother screaming, “Semyon’s house is on fire!” They found Uncle Semyon in the woods, the soldiers had cut him to pieces with their sabers…I was fifteen. The Red Army was starving…and Lenin…I was afraid to go outside, I sat in the house, weeping. My mother figured out what had happened. That night, she handed me a feedbag and told me, “Leave, son! Let God “forgive your miserable soul.” [He covered his eyes with his hand. But I could still see he was crying.]

I want to die a communist. That’s my final wish.”


Excerpt From
Secondhand Time
Svetlana Alexievich

For Teaching, Philosophy Makes a Difference

  

What’s the connection between philosophy of mathematics and teaching of mathematics? Each influences the other. The teaching of mathematics should affect the philosophy of mathematics, in the sense that philosophy of mathematics must be compatible with the fact that mathematics can be taught. A philosophy that obscures the teachability of mathematics is unacceptable. Platonists and formalists ignore this question. If mathematical objects were an other-worldly, nonhuman reality (Platonism), or symbols and formulas whose meaning is irrelevant (formalism), it would be a mystery how we can teach it or learn it. Its teachability is the heart of the humanist conception of mathematics.

In the other direction, the philosophy of mathematics held by the teacher can’t help but affect her teaching. The student takes in the teacher’s philosophy through her ears and the textbook’s philosophy through her eyes. The devastating effect of formalism on teaching has been described by others. (See Khinchin or Ernest.) I haven’t seen the effect of Platonism on teaching described in print. But at a teachers’ meeting I heard this:

“Teacher thinks she perceives other-worldly mathematics. Student is convinced teacher really does perceive other-worldly mathematics. No way does student believe he’s about to perceive other-worldly mathematics.” Platonism can justify a student’s certainty that it’s impossible for her/him to understand mathematics. Platonism can justify the belief that some people can’t learn math. Elitism in education and Platonism in philosophy naturally fit together. Humanist philosophy, on the other hand, links mathematics with people, with society, with history. It can’t do damage the way formalism and Platonism can. It could even do good. It could narrow the gap between pupil and subject matter. Such a result would depend on many other factors. But if other factors are compatible, adoption by teachers of a humanist philosophy of mathematics could benefit mathematics education.
**

Political conservatism favors an elite over the lower orders. In mathematics teaching, Platonism suggests that the student either can “see” mathematical reality or she/he can’t.

A humanist/social constructivist/social conceptualist/quasi-empiricist/naturalist/maverick philosophy of mathematics pulls mathematics out of the sky and sets it on earth. This fits with left-wing anti-elitism—its historic striving for universal literacy, universal higher education, universal access to knowledge, and culture. If the Platonist view of number is associated with political conservatism, and the humanist view of number with democratic politics, is that a big surprise?

Karl Popper's Three Worlds

More recently he introduced a notion of “World 3”—a world of scientific and artistic knowledge, distinct from the physical world (World 1) and the world of mind or thought (World 2). In “Epistemology without a knowing subject” and “On the theory of the Objective Mind” he uses “World 3” to mean a world of intelligibles: ideas in the objective sense, possible objects of thought, theories and their logical relations, arguments, and problem situations (1974, p. 154). It seems Popper wants to put a Platonic world of Ideal Forms alongside the mental and physical worlds.

Peter Medawar was impressed by Popper’s World 3. “Popper’s new ontology does away with subjectivism in the world of the mind. Human beings, he says, inhabit or interact with three quite distinct worlds; World 1 is the ordinary physical world, or world of physical states; World 2 is the mental world; World 3 is the world of actual or possible objects of thought—the world of concepts, ideas, theories, theorems, arguments, and explanations—the world, let us say, of all artifacts of the mind. The elements of this world interact with each other much like the ordinary objects of the material world; two theories interact and lead to the formulation of a third; Wagner’s music influences Strauss’s and his in turn all music written since. . . . The existence of World 3, inseparably bound up with human language, is the most distinctly human of all our possessions. The third world is not a fiction, Popper insists, but exists ‘in reality.’ It is a product of the human mind but yet is in large measure autonomous. This was the conception I had been looking for: The third world is the greater and more important part of human inheritance. It’s handing on from generation to generation is what above all else distinguishes man from beast.” But the difficulty of explaining the interaction between these worlds is fatal for Popper, as for his predecessors.

Ethnomathematics

  

Mathematical ideas, like artistic ideas or religious ideas, are a universal part of human culture. This forthright claim isn’t made by Ascher, but her book compels me to that conclusion. Mathematics as we know it was invented by the Greeks. But mathematical ideas involving number and space, probability and logic, even graph theory and group theory—these are present in preliterate societies in North and South America, Africa, the South Pacific, and doubtless many other places if anyone bothers to look.

This is not to say that everybody can do mathematics, any more than everybody can play an instrument or succeed in politics. Many people do not have mathematical or musical or political ability. But every society has its music and its politics; so too, it seems, every society has its mathematics.

Some people count by tens, others by twenties. “There is an often-repeated idea that numerals involving cycles based on ten are somehow more logical because of human fingers. The Yuki of California are said to believe that their cycles based on eight are most appropriate for exactly the same reason. The Yuki, however, are referring to the interfinger spaces.” And how about Toba, a language of western South America, in which “the word with value five implies (two plus three), six implies (two times three), and seven implies (two times three) plus one. Then eight implies (two times four), nine implies (two times four) plus one, and ten is (two times four) plus two.”

Professor Ascher knows of three cultures that trace patterns in sand—the Bushoong in Zaire, the Tshokwe in Zaire and Angola, and the Malekula in Vanuatu (islands between Fiji and Australia formerly called the New Hebrides). Sand drawings play a different role in each culture. “Among the Malekula, passage to the Land of the Dead is dependent on figures traced in the sand. Generally the entrance is guarded by a ghost or spider-related ogre who is seated on a rock and challenges those trying to enter. There is a figure in the sand in front of the guardian and, as the ghost of the newly dead person approaches, the guardian erases half the figure. The challenge is to complete the figure which should have been learned during life, and failure results in being eaten. . . . The tales emphasize the need to know one’s figures properly and demonstrate their cultural importance by involving them in the most fundamental of questions—mortality and (survival) beyond death. The figures vary in complexity from simple closed curves to having more than one hundred vertices, some with degrees of l0 or l2.”

In all three cultures, there’s special concern for Eulerian paths—paths that can be traced through every vertex without tracing any edge more than once. (The seven bridges of Königsberg!) All three seem to know that an Eulerian path is possible if and only if there are zero or two vertices of odd degree. The Maori of New Zealand play a game of skill called mu torere. The game is played by two players; the “board” is an eight-pointed star. Each player has four markers—pebbles, or bits of broken china. Prof. Ascher shows that with any number of points except eight, the game would be uninteresting. “Mu torere, with four markers per player on an eight-pointed star, is the most enjoyable version of the game.”

The Caroline Islanders north of New Guinea cross hundreds of miles of empty ocean to Guam or Saipan. “The Caroline navigators do not use any navigational equipment such as our rulers, compasses, and charts; they travel only with what they carry in their minds.” Professor Ascher reminds us that leading anthropologists once taught that preliterate peoples were at an early stage of evolution. (Western society was advanced.) Later it was said that preliterate peoples (“savages”) had an utterly different way of thinking from us. They were prelogical. We were logical.

Nowadays anthropologists say there’s no objective way to rank societies as more or less advanced, higher or lower. Each is uniquely itself.

Professor Ascher’s research is related to ethnomathematics as an educational program. This movement asks schools to respect and use the mathematical skills pupils bring with them—even if they differ from what’s taught in school. By increasing understanding and respect for ethnomathematics, this work may benefit education.

There’s a lesson for the philosophy of mathematics. Mathematics as an abstract deductive system is associated with our culture. But people created mathematical ideas long before there were abstract deductive systems. Perhaps mathematical ideas will be here after abstract deductive systems have had their day and passed on.

How platonism views mathematics

 

“Mathematical objects are real. Their existence is an objective fact, independent of our knowledge of them. Infinite sets, uncountably infinite sets, infinite-dimensional manifolds, space-filling curves—all the denizens of the mathematical zoo—are definite objects, with definite properties. Some of their properties are known, some are unknown. These objects aren’t physical or material. They’re outside space and time. They’re immutable. They’re uncreated. A meaningful statement about one of these objects is true or false, whether we know it or not. Mathematicians are empirical scientists, like botanists. We can’t invent anything; it’s there already. We try to discover.”

Russell and mathematical certainty

 

 “I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than elsewhere. But I discovered that many mathematical demonstrations, which my teachers expected me to accept, were full of fallacies, and that, if certainty were indeed discoverable in mathematics, it would be in a new field of mathematics, with more solid foundations than those that had hitherto been thought secure. But as the work proceeded, I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was no more secure then the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable.”

“Mathematics is, I believe,” says Russell, “the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as in a super-sensible intelligible world. Geometry deals with exact circles, but no sensible object is exactly circular; however carefully we may use our compasses, there will be some imperfections and irregularities. This suggests the view that all exact reasoning applies to ideal as opposed to sensible objects; it is natural to go further, and to argue that thought is nobler than sense, and the objects of thought more real than those of sense-perception. Mystical doctrines as to the relation of time to eternity are also reinforced by pure mathematics, for mathematical objects, such as number, if real at all, are eternal and not in time. Such eternal objects can be conceived as God’s thoughts. Hence Plato’s doctrine that God is a geometer, and Sir James Jeans’ belief that He is addicted to arithmetic. Rationalistic as opposed to apocalyptic religion has been, ever since Pythagoras, and notably ever since Plato, very completely dominated by mathematics and mathematical method.

Usta ile Margarita

 

The Power of Confronting Death

 

REGARDLESS OF WHETHER it is counted by watching the sun pass across the sky or by an atomic clock, time is something we tend to want to extract the most value from before we die. That might be because of our unique awareness that we will inevitably die, which gives us a nagging sense that we are wasting what little time we have.

Subconscious fears about death drive much of human thought and behaviour, according to psychology’s terror management theory. “The idea is that we would be overwhelmed with existential terror if we didn’t have some way to manage it,” says Sheldon Solomon, a psychologist at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. And we manage it, the idea goes, by doing things that give us a sense of meaning and value, from believing in the afterlife to creating art.

For Solomon, this leads to a startling conclusion: that we are all just “anxious meat puppets tranquillised by culturally constructed trivialities”. But while Solomon and his colleagues have shown that subtle reminders of death make people more likely to cling to their own world view and discriminate against outsiders, there is also a bright side to this awareness of the inevitability of death.

For starters, when a commodity is perceived as scarce, it becomes more valuable – and there is no reason to think time is any different. More specifically, research demonstrates that when people consciously reflect on death, they can boost their sense of self-worth, become more socially altruistic and more open to novel experiences.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25433911-200-how-do-we-make-the-most-of-our-time-the-power-of-confronting-death/#ixzz7WZKPteIU

DİN’İN KEMALİ VE İSLÂM’IN KIYAMET’E KADAR GEÇERLİLİĞİ

Daha önce de temas edildiği ve Hz. Üstad Bediüzzaman’ın ifade ettiği üzere, bütün peygamberlerin tebliğ ve temsil ettiği İslâm, Peygamber Efendimiz (s.a.s.) tarafından Cenab-ı Allah’ın varlıkta tecelli eden bütün İsimleri’nin nihaî tecellilerine mazhar olup, bütün İlâhî hakikatleri nihaî sınırları veya sınırsızlıkları içinde bünyesinde taşır. Ayrıca, İlâhî İsimler’in bütün tecellileri ve bütün İlâhî hakikatler, onda tam bir denge halindedir. Bu, şu demektir:

 

İslâm, Kıyamet’e kadar her seviyede herkes için her şartta, her durumda, her zaman ve her mekânda geçerlidir ve İslâm, insanın ferdî ve içtimaî hayatı adına hiçbir şeyi eksik bırakmamış ve onun her meselesine cevap verecek düsturları bünyesine almıştır. Fakat bu demek değildir ki, Kıyamet’e kadar insanlığın fert ve toplumlar planında karşılaşacağı bütün meseleler ve onların cevapları, çözüm yolları, Kur’ân-ı Kerim’de tek tek zikredilmiştir. Hayır. Kur’ân-ı Kerim ve Sünnet-i Seniyye, bu meselelerden bazılarını açıkça, bazılarını işareten, bazılarını ima yoluyla, bazılarını remzen, bazılarını da başka şekillerde zikrederken, bütün meselelere çözüm olabilecek düsturları vaz’etmiş, bu düsturlara dayalı olarak her meseleye nasıl cevap verileceği konusunda pek çok usule de zemin hazırlamış veya kapı açmıştır. Bu kapıdan giren büyük âlimler, bu zeminde meselâ Fıkıh’ta İçtihad, Kıyas, İcmâ, İstihsan, İstishab, Mesali-i Mürsele gibi prensipler ortaya koymuş, bunların yanısıra, meselâ İslâm Fıkıh geleneğinin son şaheserlerinden olan Mecelle’nin ilk 99 maddesi gibi, ‘kavaid-i külliye’, yani küllî, en kapsamlı kaideler adı altında kaideler vaz’etmişlerdir. Dolayısıyla, düşüncede, inançta, ferdî ve sosyal hayatın bütün şubelerinde İslâm’ın dışarıdan herhangi bir şey ödünç almasına ihtiyacı yoktur. Kur’ân-ı Kerim’de bu gerçek “Bugün dininizi sizin için kemale erdirdim; üzerinizdeki nimetimi tamamladım ve sizin için din olarak İslâm’dan razı oldum.” âyetiyle ifade buyurulmaktadır. İslâm’ın haricindeki dinler veya sistemlerle ilgili okumalardan ancak İslâm’ı anlamada faydalanılabilir. Bu gerçek dolayısıyladır ki, İslâm’a ona ters olarak hariçten her ilave bid’at olarak değerlendirilmiş ve hadis-i şerifte “Her bid’at dalâlettir ve her dalâlet Ateş’tedir.” buyurulmuştur. Hz. Bediüzzaman, bu gerçeği şöyle ifade etmektedir: “‘Bugün sizin için dininizi kemale erdirdim’ ve “Her bid’at dalâlettir ve her dalâlet Ateş’tedir.” sırrı ile, Şeriat-ı Garrâ’nın kaidelerini ve Sünnet-i Seniyye’nin düsturları tamam ve kemalini bulduktan sonra yeni îcatlarla o düsturları beğenmemek veyahut hâşâ ve kellâ, eksik ve kusurlu görmek hissini veren bid’atları îcat etmek, dalâlettir, ateştir.”

 

Yalnız burada şu hususu vurgulamak gerekir ki, bazı yanlış anlamalar ve vaktiyle bazı Müslümanların yanlış takdimleri neticesinde teknoloji veya ilmî keşifler Din’e zıt ve bid’at gibi gösterilmiş ve bundan dolayı İslâm, ilmî gelişmelere karşıymış gibi tenkit ve suçlamalara maruz kalmıştır. Böyle bir iddia da, böyle bir suçlama da, Kur’ân’ı ve İslâm’ı anlamamak manâsına gelir. Yerinde temas edildiği üzere, kâinat ve insan, Cenab-ı Allah’ın İrade ve Kudret sıfatları’ndan gelen ve Kelâm sıfatı’ndan kaynaklanan Kur’ân’ın bir başka malzemeyle yazılmış iki kitaptır. Dolayısıyla, Allah için olmak kaydıyla onları, yani kâinat ve insan kitaplarını çalışmak da, Kur’ân’ı okuyup incelemek ve anlamaya çalışmak gibi bir ibadettir denebilir. İnsanın yeryüzünde halife kılınmış olması da kâinatı incelemeyi ve tanımayı gerektirir ve bu sahada kendisine verilen kapasite ve ilimden dolayı melekler insanlığın temsilcisi olan Hz. Âdem önünde secdeye çağrılmıştır. Ayrıca, hayat ve kâinat, Cenab-ı Allah’ın Şeriat-ı Tekvîniye denilen kanunlar mecmuasıdır. Kur’ân, kâinat ve insan kitaplarını okumayı teşvik, hattâ emir buyurur. Bunu İslâm’ın dışında zannetmek cehaletten ibaret olduğu gibi, kâinat ve insan mevzularında yapılan çalışmaları da bid’at telâkki etmek, yine İslâm’ı hem anlamamak, hem de sahasını daraltmak manâsına gelir.

 

Peygamberlik ve Mûcize

  

Eğitim ve uygulama zora dayanmamalıdır; çünkü zora dayanan hiçbir şey, tam tesirli ve devamlı olmaz. Bu sebeple, peygamber olan zât, halk üzerinde her bakımdan tesir sahibi bulunmalı, onların zihinlerini ve kalblerini fethetmelidir. Bu da, öncelikle onun peygamber olarak kabûl edilmesini gerektirir. Her ne kadar peygamber olan zâtın ilmi, ahlâkı, rehberliği peygamber olduğunu gösterse de, halkın çoğunluğu bunu tam göremez; görse de, bu tür sıfatlar daha bazı kişiler de belli derecelerde bulunabildiği için, onlara dayanarak peygamber olan zâtın peygamberliğine hükmedemez. Ayrıca, Din’e ve peygambere inanmak insanın tâbi olduğu imtihanın aslî gereklerinden de olduğu için, Cenab-ı Allah, kullarına olan hususî merhametinden peygamberin peygamberliğine inkârı mümkün olmayan deliller yaratır. İşte bu delillere mûcize diyoruz. Mûcizeler de, Cenab-ı Allah’ın kâinattaki, yaratma ve kâinatın hayatını devam ettirmedeki bizim kanun olarak algıladığımız icraatını, âdetini bizim olağanüstü, beşer için imkânsız olarak niteleyeceğimiz şekilde kırması veya değiştirmesi şeklinde cereyan eder. Meselâ, peygamber olan zât, ölüleri diriltir; asâsını taşa vurduğunda ondan su fışkırır, denize vurduğunda denizde yol açılır. Ateşe atılır, ateş gül bahçesine döner. Bir işaret parmağıyla ayı ikiye böler; parmaklarından beş musluklu çeşme gibi su akıtır. İnsanların evlerinde neler yediğini, neleri depo ettiğini bilir ve söyler. Gelecekte olacak pek çok hadiseleri haber verir. Böylece Cenab-ı Allah (c.c.),hem peygamberlerin peygamberliğini inkârı mümkün olmayacak derecede ortaya koyar; hem de kâinatı yaratanın ve idare edenin Kendisi olduğunu, kâinattaki hadiselerin birbirini tekrarlamasına, ondaki düzen ve intizama bakarak, kanunları Allah’ın icraatına birer unvan, ismî birer gerçek olmaktan çıkarıp, onlara ve kâinatın kendisine, tabiata, maddeye yaratıcılık vererek dalâletlere düşmememiz gerektiğini bize hatırlatır.

Mûcizeler bu gayelere açıkça hizmet ettiği ve bu gerçekleri ortaya koyduğu halde, bazı insanlar yine de inanmamakta diretirler. Diretmelerine güya gerekçe olarak da, mûcize ile büyü arasındaki farkları bildikleri ve apaçık gördükleri halde, mûcizeye “büyü” derler veya başka adlar takarlar. Cenab-ı Allah, mûcizelerle insanları imana zorlamaz. Çünkü iman ve din, bir tekliftir; insanlar imtihandadır. Teklif, sorumluluk ve imtihanın gereği olarak, insanlar inanmaya mecbur edilmez. İnanmaları için aklı ikna edici deliller sergilenir ve onların inanıp inanmamaları, tamamen nefislerine, vicdanlarına ve iradelerine, nefislerine söz geçirip geçirememelerine, hak ve hakikate boyun eğip eğememelerine bırakılır. 

Virüslerin Çoğu Faydalıdır

Birçok insan için ilk duyulduğunda çok ters gelse de çoğu virüs insanlar için iyidir. Vücudu-
muzda kendi hücrelerimizden daha çok bakteri olduğunu duymuşsunuzdur. Ancak bağırsaklarımızdaki bakterilerden çok daha fazla virüs olduğu da doğrudur! Aslında, bu virüs topluluğu ("virome" olarak adlandırılır)? hikmetsiz olmayıp vücudunuzdaki bakteri sayısını ve türlerini düzenlemede önemli bir rol oynar. Bu virüsler olmasaydı bağırsaklarımızda yaşayan milyarlarca aç bakteri, hızla ölümümüze sebep olabilirdi.

Hiç okyanusta yüzmeye gittiniz mi? Aslında okyanus suyu çok çeşitli türleriyle konsantre bir bakteri çorbasıdır. Ancak tıpkı bağırsağınızda olduğu gibi orada da bakterilerden daha fazla virüs vardır ve muhtemelen bu virüsler, okyanus sularındaki bakteri popülasyonunu korma ve dengelemede rol oynarlar. Virüsler olmasaydı acaba denizlerde balk bulabilecek miydik? Bu, bilim insanlarının cevap araması gereken ilginç bir sorudur.

Hiç bir gölde yüzmeye gittiniz mi? Burası da bakteri ve virüslerden olusan bir çorbadır. Gölde yüzen ördek, kuğu veya kazlarla beraber grip virüsleri de bol miktarda bulunmaktadır. İşte aslında bu su kuşları, insanlara bulaşmayanlar da dâhil olmak üzere muhtemel bütün grip virüsü türlerini taşır. Bu virüsler kuşların dışkılarıyla suya karışır. Ancak genellikle bu kuşlarda hastalık üretmediği gibi, yüzen insanların da gözlerinden, kulak, burun ve ağızlarından girse bile, normal şartlarda insanda da hastalık yapmazlar.

Kuşların (genellikle) hasta olmamalarının sebebinin, virüslerle milyonlarca yıldır savaşmış olmaları ve kuşların immün sistemleriyle tanışıp âdeta bir ateşkes düzenlemiş oldukları söylenebilir. Ancak İlahî hikmetler açısından bakıldığında, grip virüsünün muhtemelen kuşlar için henüz keşfedemediğimiz faydalı bir rolü de olabileceği düşünülmelidir.

İrfan Yılmaz, Çağlayan Dergisi, Haziran 2022