[First written as the Sixteenth Note of the Seventeenth Flash, this part of the Risale-i Nur was later designated the Twenty-Third Flash because of its importance. For it puts naturalistic atheism to death with no chance of reanimation, and totally shatters the foundation stones of unbelief.]
This treatise explains through nine ‘Impossibilities,’ themselves comprising at least ninety impossibilities, just how unreasonable, crude and superstitious is the way taken by those Naturalists who are atheists. In order to cut short the discussion here and because these impossibilities have been explained in part in other sections of the Risale-i Nur, some steps in the arguments have been skipped. It occurs to one, therefore, how is it that those famous and supposedly brilliant philosophers accepted such a blatantly obvious superstition, and continue to pursue that way. Well, the fact is they cannot see its reality. And I am ready to explain in detail and prove through clear and decisive arguments to whoever doubts it that these crude, repugnant and unreasonable impossibilities are the necessary and unavoidable result of their way; in fact, the very gist of their creed.1
What occasioned the writing of this treatise were the attacks being made on the Qur’an by those who called everything that their corrupted minds could not reach a superstition, who were using Nature to justify unbelief, and were vilifying the truths of belief in a most aggressive and ugly fashion. Their attacks stirred up in my heart an intense anger which resulted in those perverted atheists and falsifiers of the truth receiving vehement and harsh slaps. Otherwise, the way generally followed by the Risale-i Nur is a mild, polite and persuasive one.