Spirit of Islam October 2017

9 Spirit of Islam Issue 58 October 2017 THE EXISTENCE OF GOD The Existence of Man is Proof of the Existence of God. Belief in God is strange, but not to believe in God is even stranger. So when we say that there is a God, we give preference to the strange over the stranger. God created man in His Own image. (Prophet Muhammad, Sahih al-Bukhari) I F man discovers himself, at the same time he can discover the existence of God. It may be said that if God is a great God, man is mini-god as compared to Him. When the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) tried to prove his existence, he said, “I think, therefore I am”. This logic is certainly right, but the same logic applies to the question about the existence of God as well. By using this logic one can say, “I am, therefore God is”. The British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was an atheist. In his Autobiography of John Stuart Mill , he narrates a story with reference to his father. He writes: “The question, ‘Who made me’? cannot be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information from which to answer it; and that any answer only throws the difficulty a step further back, since the question presents itself, ‘who made God?’ This premise itself is wrong. For the question here is about explaining a real phenomenon, and not to evade it by producing irrelevant logic of the kind stated above. Here, we are facing a phenomenon whose existence we cannot deny. Denying it is like denying our very own existence and the existence of the universe. The choice for us is not between a universe with God and a universe without God. Instead, the choice before us is a universe with God, or no universe at all. Since there exists a universe, to explain it, we have to take recourse to a Creator. If we deny the Creator, we will have to also deny the existence of the universe, which is not viable. We cannot deny the existence of the universe; therefore, we have to accept the existence of a Creator as irrefutable logic. Belief in God is strange, but not to believe in God is even stranger. So when we say that there is a God, we give preference to the strange over the stranger. The river of knowledge is flowing in favour of the afore-mentioned logic. In the ancient age, philosophy was the reigning discipline of the world, and almost all the philosophers were believers and not atheists.