Preface
I want to start off by mentioning that I am discussing my own beliefs here. My intention is not at all to disrespect or belittle any other belief systems. You are free to believe in whatever you like and I have no ill-thoughts towards you. I find Islam and its teachings very important, and I wanted to share these thoughts with the world with the hope of possibly guiding people to my firm belief in the Truth. If you disagree with anything below and would like to have a discussion with me, please feel free to contact me. I enjoy having important discussions of this type.
Introduction
As a child, I had accepted Islam to be true blindly. My parents had told me that Islam is the true religion, Allah is God, and the Prophet Muhammad PBUH (Peace Be Upon Him) is the final messenger of Allah. I had no reason to believe otherwise as I had no reason to doubt my parents. Going into Islamic classes, this belief was further ingrained into me by the teachers and I accepted it. Growing older, like many, I started to have small doubts, however, I stuck to my faith because thinking rationally allowed me to come to the conclusion that there must be a God and He must be One.
Islam is the only religion that describes God as One in a manner that would befit a God. It also provides a purpose for life that makes rational sense and a multitude of evidence aside from these that prove its truth. For these reasons, I have and always will accept Islam as the only religion and way of life for myself and everyone in the world. Only with Islam can anyone attain true success.
Recently, I have started attending advanced Islamic studies classes and was presented with a more formal rational proof for the existence of a singular God. While I had already come to the same conclusion on my own, it was interesting to see it laid out formally. This proof that I will be outlining was first explained to me by Dr. Amro Ibrahim.
There are four main ways to believe in something:
- Blind faith
- Doubt/Uncertainty
- Natural Disposition
- Rational Thinking
Blind Faith
Blind faith is quite self-explanatory; it is believing in something without any evidence for it. Children typically believe everything blindly because their parents or others tell them.
A main component of growing up is confirming or negating these blind beliefs. For example, I used to believe that women became pregnant through praying to God and eating a lot of food. This was blind faith through my own assumptions. My parents would tell me God gave us children and I knew that eating a lot would make you fat (pregnant women have round bellies). Thus, I made this assumption and believed it blindly without any further investigation.
This type of belief in Islam is typically through being born into a Muslim family. People believe in Islam blindly as their parents told them they are Muslim and they must believe. Islam rejects this type of belief as an appropriate one with the verse in the Quran:
When it is said to them, “Follow what Allah has revealed,” they reply, “No! We [only] follow what we found our forefathers practicing.” [Would they still do so,] even if their forefathers had [absolutely] no understanding or guidance? - [Quran, 2:170]
The Quran is the unanimous source of truth for Muslims and it explains here how believing blindly is not an appropriate method of belief.
While this is obviously applicable to Muslims, for non-Muslims it is a quite natural conclusion that believing blindly is not sufficient for something as important as explaining the creation of our reality.
Doubt/Uncertainty
Belief through doubt or uncertainty would be believing in something through an unverified assumption. It’s obvious that this is not a true belief at all. As a rebuttal to Atheists, many people say “If God is real, I’m fine as I worshipped him in my life. If he’s not real, then I’m also fine as there is nothing afterward”. This is a belief through an unverified assumption; the fact that they are questioning whether God is real or not is an assumption that is not verified to them. This type of belief is similar to the English idiom “one foot out the door”. This idiom is typically used to describe relationships in which one partner is not fully committed to the relationship and is just waiting for their chance to end it. Believing through an assumption or with doubt is also the same in the sense that it is not a fully committed, evidence-backed belief. Something as important as the purpose of our life should not be left as “one foot out the door”, you should have complete faith in it.
Allah addresses those who believe in this manner in the Quran in chapter 53:
These [idols] are mere names that you and your forefathers have made up — a practice Allah has never authorized. They follow nothing but assumptions (conjecture) and whatever [their] souls desire, although [true] guidance has already come to them from their Lord - [Quran, 53:23]
The unbelievers of old assumed that their idols would be able to connect them to God and that worshipping the idols would allow them to gain what they wanted from God. They made up their own assumptions about what God has allowed, to follow their own carnal desires. Similarly, many “Muslims” assume that there is a God and they should worship him but if they do not believe completely and without any doubt, this is inappropriate.
Natural Disposition
While many may disagree with this, Islam believes that there is a natural disposition that all humans are born with. We believe that this natural disposition can be corrupted by many things, however, all sane humans are born with it. Not only is this an Islamic belief, but modern psychology has also shown this. A psychologist, Justin L. Barrett who is currently a researcher at Fuller Theological Seminary spent his career researching children and religious beliefs. In his 2012 book, Born Believers, he explores whether or not children are taught to believe in God or if there is a natural disposition for it. He found that children believe the world has order and purpose and concluded that children are born with a tendency to think there is a supernatural agent behind this order. In other words, children are born believing in God.
The Quran also confirms this in chapter 30:
So be steadfast in faith in all uprightness, [O Prophet] — the natural Way (fitrah) of Allah which He has instilled in [all] people. Let there be no change in this creation of Allah. That is the Straight Way, but most people do not know. - [Quran, 30:30]
Believing in God through the natural disposition is a completely acceptable method of belief as it is natural. Many reverts (converts) to Islam have found their belief through this method. Any sane human being without any mental illnesses would agree that it is natural to believe that hurting another human being without sound cause is morally wrong. Just like this, there are other natural beliefs that come ingrained with being a human. Left untainted, a belief in the existence of God is one of these natural beliefs.
Rational Thinking
This is the method through which most people believe in anything. Reaching a conclusion through rational thought and intellectual evidence. Oftentimes, religion and rational thought do not come together, however, Islam encourages rational thought heavily. Believing in something through rational thought involves accepting premises and deriving conclusions through these premises. A coherent rational argument would be an objective truth as long as you accept the underlying premises. It is quite obvious why this would be an extremely appropriate method for any type of belief as rejecting it would be nonsensical. One of the major reasons why Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world is because of its overwhelming rationality.
The purpose of this post will be to prove the existence of God through rational thought. Believing in the existence of God is the first step towards success, becoming a Muslim. After understanding that there is a God, realizing Islam is the truth is trivial.
The God Proof
Axioms
In order to set up this proof, there are two premises that must be accepted. These premises are extremely basic and any sane human will accept these premises. If you do not accept these premises, reading the rest of this article is not required for you as you are willfully and compoundly ignorant.
- Law of Causality
- Law of Contradiction
Law of Causality
The definition of causality is: “Every change in nature is produced by some cause”. This is not meant to be a profound claim, it is meant in its most simple form. Everything you see around you has some cause, it did not appear there out of thin air and even if it did, the cause for it is just unknown, not non-existent. If you were in a desert with no civilization around and you saw a smartphone on the ground, you would not think it was there for no reason. You would have many thoughts about its cause; how did it get there? did someone drop it? did the scorpions become sentient and construct their own smartphones? Whatever your thought is, the fact that you are thinking about this means you believe in the law of causality.
Law of Contradiction
The basic explanation of this law is that contradictions do not exist. You cannot be human and not human at the same time. This is simply illogical and an insane way of thinking. There is not much more explanation needed for this premise.
Infinity
The concept of infinity must also be understood in order for this proof to make sense. Infinity is a mathematical abstraction, it is not a cosmological reality. Nothing in our universe is infinite. Many may automatically think of time, however, time is not a physical reality. It is a measurement of change or, in other words, the rate of change in space. There is no change without time and no time without change.
Arithmetic with infinite quantities must also be explained and understood, otherwise, an illogical argument may seem logical to those who are ignorant about the concept of infinity. Adding any quantity to infinity or multiplying any quantity by infinity will still result in infinity. Subtracting any quantity except infinity from infinity will still result in infinity. Similarly, dividing infinity by any quantity except infinity will still result in infinity.
An analogy as to why this arithmetic is important is to imagine you have a jar with an infinite amount of candies. If you were to take one candy out, does it decrease the number of candies you have? It would not as they are infinite, endless. Similarly, if you were to add one candy to the jar, would you have more candies now? You would not as you already have an endless amount. These examples seem confusing as they are intended to be that way. Infinity is not a logical reality, it is an abstract concept used by mathematicians to make certain types of math possible.
Proof
Step 1: Observation
Observing the universe through our lens of causality and non-contradiction, we can come to the conclusion that everything is:
- Limited
- Changing
- Dependent
Again, these observations are not meant in a profound or evangelical way; they are meant very simply. Think of any physical thing in our reality and you can conclude that it is limited, changing, and dependent. For example, a smartphone is limited in its abilities. A smartphone can perform certain tasks, but, it cannot, for example, make you scrambled eggs. It is changing in many ways, while it may not be noticeable, the individual electrical components are slowly degrading. After many years, the battery will lose its original potential as the components are degrading. It is also dependent on many things, the most important being the person operating it. The smartphone cannot do anything on its own, it must have a person telling it what to do. Like this, anything you can think of is limited, changing, and dependent.
What about the universe itself?
Some may come to the thought that the universe does not follow these conditions. However, this is incorrect. Modern science confirms that the universe is changing through expansion. It also confirms that is dependent on the Big Bang (among other theories). Without the Big Bang, the universe would not exist confirming it dependence. Even if the Big Bang theory is incorrect, there must be some other cause which it depends on to start due to its expansion. If it is expanding, it must have started from somewhere and something must have started that expansion. If nothing started the expansion, it would not exist and we would not be here. The universe is also limited in many ways, the most simple to explain and understand are the physical laws that science has studied and proven. The universe is limited by the laws of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of matter, and others.
Step 2a: Everything Limited Must Have A Beginning
As everything limited is changing, this change takes some amount of time. So, we can say any change, takes time, , as in, is a function of change () outputting the time taken:
So, to answer the question of “Is there a beginning?”, let’s assume there is no beginning, change has been happening forever.
This stipulates that time is an infinite quantity which does not make sense. If time is infinite, then time would have never reached us right now. Thus, we would never exist. As we do exist, time is not infinite, it had a beginning, and, therefore, change has a beginning and so does everything limited.
To explain why time being infinite means it would never reach us, we can use an analogy. If you had to knock on an infinite amount of doors before you got to the door that has a lion behind it, would you ever get to the door with the lion behind it? You would not as the doors before it would be infinite. If there is an infinite amount of time before the current moment you are in, you would never arrive at the current moment.
Step 2b: Everything Dependent Must Have A Beginning
As stipulated in Step 1, everything is dependent. However, a more accurate description is that the existence of everything is dependent on something else. Take yourself for example, your existence is dependent on the existence of your parents, their existence is dependent on your grandparents, and so on and so forth. Anything else you can think of is dependent in a similar manner. The smartphone spoken of in Step 1 is dependent on the person or company who invented it, the people who extracted the raw material to make it, and the factory workers who assembled it.
Due to this, everything dependent must have a beginning, otherwise, we fall into an infinite regression. Infinite regression is non-sensical and would stipulate that nothing exists. As in step 2a, our existence is a testament that this infinite regression is not possible. Similar to the previous analogy, if an infinite amount of dominos had to fall before reaching the one in front of you, would the one in front of you ever fall? It would not as the infinite amount before would never end. If an infinite amount of dependencies have to be satisfied before reaching your existence, you would never exist.
Step 3: Everything With A Beginning Must Have A Cause
We have three possible explanations or causes for the beginning of our reality:
- Nothing
- Itself
- A Cause (Limited or Unlimited)
Nothing
If reality was caused by nothing, this invalidates the law of causality.
Itself
If reality was caused by itself, this invalidates the law of non-contradiction. Something creating itself is a contradiction. How can it create itself if it does not exist yet?
A Cause
The only explanation that does not invalidate our two basic axioms is that there must be a defined cause for our reality. Now, is this cause limited or unlimited?
Step 4: Cause Must Be Unlimited
In order to prove that the cause must be unlimited, we can use proof by contradiction.
To start, let’s assume the cause, , is limited. As proven in step 2a, every limited thing must have a beginning. Therefore, must have a beginning. Since has a beginning, it must itself have a cause, as stipulated in step 3 ( has a cause, which has a cause, , and so on). This leads to infinite regression and we would cease to exist. However, we do exist (contradiction), therefore, the assumption is invalid. The cause, C, must be unlimited.
Limited Cause
Unlimited Cause
Step 5: The Unlimited Cause, C, Must Be One
In order for the cause to be unlimited in essence, there can only be one unlimited cause. If there was more than one unlimited cause working in tandem, then neither would be unlimited as they are limited by the actions of the other cause. Thus, the unlimited cause must be One.
An unlimited, singular cause that is external to our reality is the definition of the monotheistic God. Thus, these simple premises and 5 steps ontologically prove the existence of God.
What does Islam say about this?
Anyone who has any exposure to Islam knows that we believe in a single, all-powerful God. The Quran references these rational thoughts to show that God or Allah is the unlimited, singular cause. In chapter 52, Allah states:
Or were they created by nothing, or are they [their own] creators? Or did they create the heavens and the earth? In fact, they have no firm belief [in Allah]. - [Quran, 52:35-36]
He references those who reach the conclusion that there must be a cause and attribute it to nothing or itself. To a person of sound intellect, these are nonsensical as they violate basic axioms of rationality. Allah calls them out by stating, “They have no firm belief”.
In reference to the cause being unlimited, Allah responds with:
He is the First and the Last and the Manifest and the Innermost, and He is All-Knowing of everything. - [Quran, 57:3]
stating that he is the first and the last, the unlimited cause of our entire reality.
While there may be many who find issues with the arguments I presented, I hope that I was at least able to get people thinking about these concepts as they are very important. We must understand our purpose in this life, otherwise, it is a very depressing one. Realizing the existence of God and his attributes is the first step towards understanding the purpose of our existence and how we should live our lives.
In conclusion of this, I leave you to contemplate the following statement from Allah in the Quran:
Have they not travelled throughout the land so their hearts may reason, and their ears may listen? Indeed, it is not the eyes that are blind, but it is the hearts in the chests that grow blind. - [Quran, 22:46]