There is no god but Allah, and He can prove it! Part 1

Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim

Qul Huwa Allahu Ahad

Allahu as-Samad

Lam Yulid wa Lam Yulad

Wa Lam yakun llahu kufuwan Ahad

(Surah Al-Ikhlas)

DOES GOD EXIST?

Years ago, the philosopher, Friedrich Neitzche announced that God was dead. (Istaghfirullah).  He did not mean so literally.  He meant that the influence of the belief in God on society was gone.  He was right.  Today, people are behaving in increasingly unethical ways.  They care little for others, or even for themselves.  Our lives may be longer, but they are even more nasty and brutish than at times in the past.  We have no families, no friends, nothing but endless work and wasted time.  We have a new religion of the self, with its sacrament of the "endless PARTY."  We have been come no more than hollow clay, sounding with endless bellowings of nonsense and petty, desperate noises.  We are barely human any more.

So one might wonder, with all this human misery, does God exist?  If Allah SWT gives us life, we may ponder the problem of evil and its answer from Allah SWT found in sural Al-Kahf, but today, we deal with the issue of existence - the metaphysical problem of proving the existence of God.

First, in investigating whether God exists, we must first define that which we are trying to prove.  Some claim that Jesus Christ - the Second of the Trinity - who sits on the Right Hand of God, being One Substance with the Father - is God, and that this God exists, This conception of "God," ie a tripartite being who had one part that created the universe, another that came and lived in it and then died and was reborn, and one part that is invisible and is a spirit, exists.    But do we all agree on this?  Not really? Some religions posits more than one "god."

Islam posits that Allah is a singularity without extension and duration, who is completely independent of any natural law, who has all knowledge, and who neither began nor will end. However, Christian philosophers have generally placed The Creator within His own Creation and within time, and made Him subject to natural laws. So even the "monotheistic" religions do not we agree on the definition of the term, "God?"

However, most seem to believe that this Supreme Being is infinite.  Christianity expresses this as His being Alpha and Omega.  Many Muslim and Jewish theologians have expressed similar views.  Allahu says that He is "Asr."  Asr can mean time, but it can also mean the "middle" so that He has no beginning nor end, no bounds or limits.  He is not subject to time, or to extension.  He does not exist in any place and cannot be physically delimited. So is Allah infinitely big, is He the universe in some sort of pantheistic manner?  Or ... is He, as the Qur'an mentions, ahad, singular, having no extension, a singularity?  Allah SWT is reported to have said that He is Witr - singular. 

Leaving that issue aside for now, we can also ask - is He all-powerful, all-knowing?  Does He have complete foreknowldge of the future?  Does He control everything?  Do we, then, have free will?  If we have free will, does this somehow limit His power?

Well, these are some of the endless debates we humans have had over the years.  If Allah SWT gives us life, we can explore them in terms of Allah's own answers in the Qur'an, but for now we move on to something we might be more able to agree upon.

As I said, we all seem to agree that this Divine Being, if He exists is all powerful.  We also seem to agree that He has the power to create us, and that we do not have the power to create ourselves.  We agree He is greater than us, whatever "greater" means.  We are finite beings.  We at least have a beginning and are all created.  Even if we believe in an afterlife and that the hereafter will not end, we still acknowledge we begin and that God does not.  So even if we posit some kind of greater version of us, we can agree that God is greater and that he has no beginning nor end, and that He can create and that He is all powerful.

So, does this Being exist?  Can we prove it?

PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

Mankind has devised various proofs for the existence of God.  Plato considered logic and proposed that there must be an ultimate first principle, and that this ultimate first principle must be The First Principle.  He dared not call this God, because his teacher, Socrates, had been forced to drink hemlock for positing a single god.  (This belief was considered heresy and Socrates was convicted of "corrupting the youth" of Athens).   Aristotle, Plato's student, looked to the apparent veracity of causation to posit an Unmoved Mover. Much later, Descartes considered his own ability to think as proof of his own existence, and since he could not have created himself, nor his concept of a being greater than him, there must be a God.  The Catholic church father, Augustine, also posited some proofs of God, one of which is inductive, but fails to be very compelling. (More on this in a minute).  But all of these attempts to prove God's existence fail.

Plato and Aristotle both fail because they really have not proved anything.  All they have said is that there cannot be an infinite regress, ad infinitum, as they say. There cannot be an infinite regress of either first principles or causes in a causal chain.  But this is an assumption that cannot really be proved.  We have yet to be able to prove such a thing via experiential evidence, and such a thing cannot be proved by logic.  Here is why.

THE JOYS OF MANTIQ

 As human beings, we experience in two different ways.  We have sensations that arise due to the agency of the so-called five senses, sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. We also experience propositional attitudes.  These include concepts (tasawir) and assents (tasdiq).  Concepts or tasawir are either possible or impossible.  For example, a cat is certainly a possible creature, and many individual examples exist in nature.  A unicorn is also possible, after all it is possible to have a horse with a horn in the middle of its head even if no individual unicorns exist in nature.

These are all possible concepts, but humans can imagine impossible concepts, like "round squares."  How do we do this?  No one will ever see a round square.  The definitions of "round" and "square" conflict in such a way as to be a contradiction - literally something that is contra or against the diction or saying.  So people can imagine impossible things, but is this really imagination or merely juxtaposing two conflicting concepts, what we sometimes call an "oxymoron."  "Military intelligence" is an oxymoron, and so are "round squares."  We cannot actually imagine round squares. 

This leads us to the next factor we must consider; actuality or potentiality.  Are concepts, tasawir, actual?  At any given moment in time, individual cats may be actual, but the concept "cat" is merely potential.  There is no "cat", only actual individual cats.  However when we see this symbol  ^..^  you will probably recognize it.  Plato called these tasawir "forms."  The forms are the essential aspect that makes a thing that kind of thing.  Allah SWT calls these "Asma."

Surah al-Baqara
2:31 And He taught Adam the names
Of all things (al-asma kullaha); then He placed them
Before the angels, and said: "Tell Me
The nature of these if ye are right."

32. They said: "Glory to Thee: of knowledge
We have none, save what Thou
Hast taught us: in truth it is Thou
Who art perfect in knowledge and wisdom."

33. He said: "O Adam! tell them
Their names (bi asmaaihi)." When he had told them,
God said: "Did I not tell you
That I know the secrets of heaven
And earth, and I know what ye reveal
And what ye conceal?"

So the forms or asmaa are real but they are only potential, in other words, they are not actualized until there exists in the universe, within Creation, a creature of that form.  I use the word creature here on purpose, for it is a thing that is "created."  And as a creature, the actualized asmaa has extension (the three dimensions of space) and duration (the fourth dimension of time).

However, a creature may be present in the universe, within creation and still have a degree of potentiality.  It may exist but not be fully actual.  Leaving aside what it is to exist, we can see that a creature within creation is partially actual and partially potential, for if it was fully potential, it would not be within creation.  As for being fully actual, only at the very moment of one's death, does one fulfill every potential as to extension and duration and become fully actual.  Ironic, huh.

However, tasawir are only the forms themselves, the concepts, and not any assertions made about them. So a unicorn is a horse with a horn, but to say that this is possible, impossible, actual or potential is an assertion, an assent, a tasdiq. Assents or tasdiq are either true or false. Hence, the tasdiq, "Unicorns are possible," is either true or false, the same as "My cat, Onxy, is actual."

Now, if we want to prove an assent, such as “Onyx is black,” we could use experiential observation.  We could use our senses to observe Onyx and determine if he has a color, and if that color is what is called, “black.”  But our senses could be fooling us.  Are they really reliable?  After all, some people have red/green color blindness and see both colors as the same.  So our senses can deceive us, but even if we assume that we are seeing correctly, does our observation of the color black really prove “Onyx is black.”?To prove that a tasdiq is either true or false requires logic.

Logic is a tree with two branches.  One branch is deductive logic, the other is inductive logic.  Let's start with induction, since most people are familiar with it.  Induction is the kind of logic we use in science, the so-called scientific method.  We look at particular and discrete events of a similar nature and then extrapolate a general thesis from them.  So:

1.      Swan A is white

2.      Swan B is white

3.      Swan C is white

4.      ……

5.      Swan Z is white

Therefore:  All swans are white.

The problem is that we cannot examine every single swan that has ever and will ever exist, and it is completely possible for swans to be black.  (In reality, there are black swans).  Nothing in the definition of swan as a concept precludes them being a particular color.

"Onxy, is a cat," however, requires another kind of logic.  Here we need to know the definition of the tasawir, "cat," and then observe if Onxy meets that definition. So if we want to deductively prove "Onxy, is a cat," we would do so in the following manner.

1. Cats are mammals that have triangle shaped ears, long whiskers, rough tongues, and that make vocalizations that sound like, "meow."
2. Onyx is a mammal that has triangle shaped ears, long whiskers, a rough tongue, and that makes vocalizations that sound like, "meow.
Therefore:  Onyx is a cat.


However, not all tasdiq are so concrete.  Some are quite abstract, such as the assents of mathematics or of logic itself.  In logic, assents that are the result of experience are called a posteriori.  Those that are abstract and do not require experience are called a priori concepts, because they are capable of being apprehended “prior” to experience.  Among these a priori statements are those that are so fundamental that they must be necessarily true.  We cannot imagine a scenario where they would not be true.  They are overwhelmingly compelling as to their veracity.  These are called first principles, and they form the bed rock of logic.  However, they are fundamentally unprovable.  

Take the most fundamental first principle in math – a = a.  How would you prove this?  It is not possible because there is nothing to prove it with.  This is the most fundamental tasdiq there is.  A thing must be itself, identity, but we cannot prove it logically.  Instead, we take the leap of faith and assume it.  The only thing more fundamental would be “a.” And this “a” would not be a tasdiq, for it is not an assent, but a bare tasawir.  Hmmm remember this.  Remember that tasawir are, sui species, either possible or impossible, and if possible, fully potential; and as individuals, either fully actual or partially actual and partially potential.

So, what about Allah SWT?  In shaa llah, if Allah SWT gives us life, we will continue in the second part of this post.