OBSTACLES TO ACCEPTING THE TRUTH

particular idea, and accepting a new one would mean giving up that belief. When someone holds onto a specific belief for a long time, they become so used to it that it’s hard to imagine it could be wrong. This belief becomes something they accept as if it requires no evidence. Even if someone presents facts showing there’s no basis for their assumed belief, they’re still reluctant to abandon it. Such reasoning does not appear to him as reasoning at all, but rather as, in the words of the Quran, “a strange thing” (38:5). It was this kind of mindset that led past nations to call their prophets “sorcerers.” Having lived with certain ideas for so long, they believed in them as undeniable truths. Even when a prophet challenged these beliefs with strong reasoning, and they realized they had no real response beyond irrelevant arguments, they still refused to change and claimed, “This is a sorcerer who has deceived us with his eloquence. Otherwise, how could something believed for so long be wrong?” To illustrate this, let me share an incident involving the famous Italian thinker Galileo. He lived between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time when Aristotle’s ideas dominated the intellectual landscape. Aristotle held the view that if two objects of different weights were dropped from the same height, the heavier object would reach the ground before the