Proving God's Existence
Question:
Respectable brother may Allah bless you with true knowledge and exact reasoning of matters, and bless you with His mercy against your efforts for His religion. Mostly your replies help me answer the non-believers who raise arguments.
Today I want to ask that atheists mostly say that there is no such creator. life exists because all the atmospheric conditions are suitable for life here on this planet? what you say about that?
Answer:
Allow me to first answer this in the way that I like and believe in. I will then also present an argument that is common and I think is still valied, but is not my preferred answer to this question.
My preferred answer is as follows: 'why trying to prove God anyway?' Proving God is a mere theoritical inquiry that is not going to provide any benefits unless it has some practical impacts. Therefore the question needs to be reformulated in a way that its pracical sphere becomes evident.
Accordingly I think instead of trying to prove God, we need to try to find an answer to this question: "Is it possible to have spiritual experience?" I do agree that 'spiritual experience' can have different meanings for different people, however I think many - if not most - people will answer 'Yes' to this question and most probably because they themselves have experienced it. In a world where we have atheists who promote spiritualism I think one needs to think twice if one denies possibility of spiritual experience (and I do appreciate that what an atheist refers to as spirituality seems to be very different from what a religious person means by this word, so I am not trying to 'hijack' this word, as Richard Dawkins puts it). If the answer of many people to this is Yes, then I think practically we are reaching the same 'practical' conclusion that answering Yes to the question of Existence of God will lead us. The next follow up question then will be, 'how is it possible to improve and increase our spiritual experience?'. In my understanding a strong and regular spiritual experience connects the person to God, whether that person believes in God or not.
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The above is my preferred answer.
A more common answer which as I wrote still seems valid but not preferred by myself is as follows:
Let us try this with an example: A stone! How has a stone been made? Well I am not an expert but this argument works for any answer, so let’s say the answer is that a stone is coming from Earth. Okay, next question, ‘How’ was the Earth made? As far as I know the most agreed upon answer to this is that Earth and other planets were the result of an explosion that is known as big bang. Okay so How was the big bang made? Now here is where my knowledge of science starts lagging, although to be fair to myself there does not seem to be an agreed upon answer to this question among scientists any way. A review of some of the great theories I managed to find reveals a number of answers to this. However the point is that it does not really matter what the answer is. Whatever the answer is, I would still like to know ‘How’. My ‘How’ question only stops when I reach a being that has always been there because it is limitless and independent to any other thing. That is what I call ‘God’.
I think one of the reasons that some people do not get this simple argument is that they get ‘existence’ (including the existence of physical rules) as granted. ...
It occurs to me that those scientists that deny God actually do not have any definit answer to the above 'How' questions. Long time ago the answer of most of the scientists to these 'How' questions was 'God' as well. It appears that in the past decades the trend has been to replace the answer 'God' with the answer 'We don't know yet'.
It is also worth mentioning that rational reasoning like the above is not the only way of being convinced about the existence of God. For many, a moment of reflection might do the same, for some, reading a passage of a book that is known as a divine book may do the job. God can be found in many ways.(1)
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Footnotes:
1. For instance although I do hold the above argument to be correct, for me personally the Qur'an is enough to believe in the existence of God.
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May 2013
Revised: December 2016
Farhad Shafti
