THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
The Existence of Man is Proof of the Existence of God
God created man in His Own image.
(Prophet Muhammad, Sahih al-Bukhari)
IF 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.
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. Without referring to the word ‘God’, they were believers in some higher power.
For example, the German philosopher, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) called it the “world spirit”. So was the case of other philosophers, although they gave it different names. For the philosophers, it was difficult to believe in a personal God. They were believers of God as a pervading spirit, and not as an independent being. This philosophical theology is called idealism in history. It was this philosophical theory that was accepted by theologians in the name of Monism. These theologians believed in God, but not in terms of a personal God. Instead, they believed in God in terms of a spirit pervading throughout the cosmos.
Scientific studies of the modern era were not related directly to the question of God, but they influenced the belief system indirectly. In fact, modern science started a new intellectual process in the divine field. Now this process has reached the extent where science and theology seem like a single discipline although with two different names.
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.
In the realm of the physical sciences, we have had three major paradigm shifts in the last four centuries. The first is attributed to Isaac Newton (1643–1727). Here we have the Newtonian hypothesis that matter was the basic building block of the universe. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century Albert Einstein (1879–1955) developed the Einsteinian paradigm of energy being the basic building block. Currently, research in quantum physics has shown a relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness with scientists like David Bohm (1917–1992) and many others accepting consciousness to be the basic building block of the universe.
These shifts have had inevitable consequences for the new age philosophy, which has moved away from the philosophy of crass materialism to that of spirituality.
Perhaps this is the final word of science, but the final word of science has only opened the door to another realm or discipline, and that is religion or theology. If the building block of the world is consciousness then what is the difference between consciousness and God? God is nothing but an embodiment of consciousness, so if the existence of consciousness is proved, the existence of God is also proved.
British scientist Paul Charles William Davies (born 1946), currently a professor at Arizona State University as well as the Director of BEYOND: Centre for Fundamental Concepts in Science, summarizes the latest scientific stand on the subject:
Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth—the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient “coincidences” and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change anyone of them and the result would be lethal.
To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger. It happens that you need to set 30-something knobs to fully describe the world about us. The point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned precisely, or the universe would be sterile.
Example: neutrons are just a little heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms could not exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after Big Bang. No protons, then no atomic nuclei, and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life.
This is the final logic to which scientific discoveries have reached in the twenty-first century. Now the problem is only one of idiom. If you use the scientific idiom, you will speak the above kind of language. But if you speak in the religious idiom, you would say that the river of knowledge has reached its final stage, that is, the realization of God.