The rational reasons for believing in God

There are people who mistakenly think that the belief in a Supreme Being as Creator and Sustainer of the universe is a mere emotional aspiration, a superstition of ancient times, irrational and illogical and exploited by modern science.
Scientists (physicists, biologists, and others) are believed to have erected a theory that refutes and replaces the traditional belief in God.
Such ideas have only a very superficial basis and are the result of ignorance or indifference to both the foundations of religious belief and the scope of the physical sciences.
It is a significant thing in the history of thought that very few people have occupied themselves with attempting to disprove the existence of God.
Propositions about the universe that are considered anti-religious are almost all agnostic, not atheistic, that is, they try to ignore the existence of God instead of denying Him.
This applies to certain propositions of modern science, as well as to ancient non-religious theories.
The universe in which we live comprises an evident system of causes and effects, of phenomena and their results, which can be discussed indefinitely and theorized upon giving a superficial appearance of completeness.
However, this is done only at the cost of ignoring the fundamentals or claiming that they cannot be known.
If we were looking for a convincing statement based on firm principles that the existence of a Supreme Being is impossible, we would not find it.
The reason for this is that belief in God is at once instinctive, rational, evidential, and intuitive, and the non-religious attitude is maintained only by deliberately refusing to consider it.
It is instinctive because man has an innate feeling of his own inadequacy and helplessness, which accompanies him from the cradle to the grave, a feeling accompanied by the complementary desire to seek refuge and support in a being who controls all those forces before which he feels inadequate.
We perceive this feeling as instinctive, although we immediately realize that it is also evident.
Man’s weakness to all the innumerable influences over which he has no control is a fact so obvious that it requires no discussion.
What is not so normal that is not understood, by those who have pretensions to intelligence, is that belief in God is totally supported by reason and logic, the principles on which all human intelligence rests.
For example, it is a basic requirement of reason that an effect cannot exist without a cause.
No matter how hard we press our mental faculties, we cannot rationally conceive of an effect without a cause, and if for a moment we wanted to postulate only one we could do so by temporarily leaving our reason in the drawer.
Reason leads us to the conclusion that, just as the elements that make up the universe are effects of certain causes, the universe itself must be the effect of a cause, a cause that is more powerful than the universe and that is outside of it.
Non-religious thinkers have to ignore the origin of the universe and propose a theory in which something exists and has a beginning but no known cause.
This postulate is essentially irrational and therefore unscientific, but it is a necessity for those thinkers who have unconsciously or deliberately decided not to consider the fundamentals. Within these we even find those who openly proclaim their refusal to discuss or admit any metaphysical concept.
However, this kind of attitude can only be maintained by abandoning reason.
Reason itself leads us inexorably to the conclusion that there is an ultimate cause, the Cause of causes, beyond this universe of time, space, and change; in fact, a Supreme Being.
Another of the basic principles of reason is that diversity cannot exist without a fundamental unity.
Whenever the human mind is confronted with diversity, it immediately sets to work to synthesize it into units, then synthesizes these units into higher units, and so on until it cannot continue.
The end result of a rational consideration of diversity is to arrive at a unity of units, a Supreme Unity, producing all diversities, but itself One.
Whatever fundamental reason we select, if we follow its course, it inevitably leads us to the same goal: to believe in God, the Supreme Being.
In addition to the conclusion reached through purely rational processes, man is brought to belief in God through observation and experience.
One of the main reasons for man’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of God is the intellectual arrogance produced by the appreciation of his own powers of analysis and synthesis, of harnessing physical forces through his ingenuity, and of building complex machines to do his work for him.
But this pride is caused by concentrating too much attention on one’s virtues and blinding oneself to defects, what are man’s best mechanical inventions but a poor and crude imitation of what already exists in an infinitely finer form in nature?
By basically copying some of the functions of the human eye, man has been able to develop the camera; But how does this machine, made of lifeless materials, compare with the living matter of the eye and with the refinement, brilliance, clarity, flexibility, and stability of its vision, its immediate connection with the mind that sifts and appreciates everything it sees, all this without a complicated system and controls, and directly under the control of the human will?
If we take any organ of the body and study it—the heart, the brain—it will become immediately obvious that it is beyond the reach of man’s ability to conceive and design such an instrument.
Man’s insignificant imitations are attributed to his great cunning, art, and intelligence.
Is it then reasonable, logical, or scientific to attribute the infinitely finer and more perfect instruments of nature to such vague and blind energies called by names like “life force” or “evolving matter,” and leave them undescribed and unexplained?
If logic has any validity (and if it doesn’t, we should stop thinking and become animals), the intelligence that conceived and produced countless such delicate and amazing forms must be infinitely superior to human intelligence (even human intelligence is one of these) and must be in control of all the materials and workings of the universe.
Such intelligence can only be possessed by one Supreme Being, the Creator, the Shaper, and the Sustainer of all things. If we reflect on our place in the world, we discover that we (and all other beings) are held in existence by an intimate combination of forces and conditions so delicate that even a small dislocation would cause our total destruction.
We live, as it were, continually on the brink of annihilation, and yet we are able to continue our complex existences in immunity.
We cannot live, for example, without daily rest, both the human body and the human mind are built to need it.
This fact in itself is not surprising, but what is surprising is that the solar system collaborates with our human frailty and provides us with a day and night exactly adapted to our needs.
Man cannot claim to have compelled or persuaded the solar system to do so, any more than the solar system can claim to have shaped human physical and mental energy to suit its own movements.
It is evident that both man and the solar system are linked in a total organization in which man is the beneficiary; the organizer of these inexplicable concordances can only be a Supreme Agent of the universe and humanity.
Fresh water is a necessary condition of human existence; It is equally necessary for those plants that produce basic food for man, which in turn depend on each other.
If seawater invaded our rivers and wells or rained down from the sky, is there any doubt that we would all end up dying of hunger and thirst in a short space of time and that the whole world would become an empty desert?
However, seawater is held back by an invisible barrier over which we have no control and the sun and clouds cooperate to desalinate the water and give us life.
This bond of interdependence and concurrence could extend indefinitely by taking examples from the physical world, and to describe them as “fortuitous” is only to ignore the issue; it is also a contradiction in terms.
Fortuity is the name given to something that is not included in any known system or regulation, an apparently senseless and random event.
To call a system that is a balanced and cohesive organization fortuitous is obviously contradictory and fallacious.
A “chance system” is simply an absurdity.
If we look closely, we can see that the entire universe is interdependent and interconnected and therefore not fortuitous but planned.
To believe in God means, precisely, to believe in a Planner of the universe.
A basic element in human consciousness, a suprarational element, is a sense of value and purpose with respect to life.
Even in the worst men this feeling prevents them from becoming beasts, and in the best of them it dominates their whole existence.
The sense of good and evil, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, suitability and inadequacy, truth and falsehood is such that, despite being continually attacked by the missiles of constructive analysis, it remains intact within its intuitive fortress.
In all times and conditions, man has not been able to shake off the idea that behind the external effect, every action possesses a quality by which it can be judged and ranked on a scale of final values. In addition to the awareness of the existence of these values, there is a sense that the purpose of man’s life is to attain those qualities which reflect the highest of these, which are not only excellent in themselves and worthy of acquisition, but which must be acquired and that man is created to acquire them.
The natural sense of qualitative purpose, if it is allowed to develop freely without the bonds of agnostic prejudice, leads it to the conception of an absolute good and an absolute truth as the ultimate standard of human existence, and thence (since a quality cannot exist except in a being who is qualified for it) to a being who is the possessor and author of these qualities. the Supreme Purpose.
The decisive vindication of God’s existence is evident.
At various times in history and in far-flung places, certain men have risen up and proclaimed that they have been inspired by God to convey His message to mankind.
These men were not mad; We have historical records of several of them, including all or part of the message they insisted they were called to convey, and it is obvious that they were men who were intellectually and morally impressive.
They did not all come at the same time, so in this way we could attribute them to a kind of historical fashion.
It came at different and distant times throughout history, usually at a time of great moral degeneration.
If we examine their message, we find that, apart from the differences in expression, attributable to the environment in which they lived, they not only have remarkable similarities but are basically identical.
What they were declaring was that God had conversed with them in some inspiring way, and had commanded them to proclaim His existence as the Creator, the Maintainer, the Controller, and the eventual Destroyer of the world, to describe His Mercy and Justice, and to warn mankind that only by remembering Him, worshiping Him, and following the moral and practical principles He has established could they achieve success and happiness in this life and in the world. next.
The last of these prophets was Muhammad, in Mecca, who declared that there would be no prophet after him, and it is a demonstrable historical fact that no one has been able to establish a claim to prophethood since.
Those who argue or refuse to discuss the existence of God invariably rely on rational or anti-rational arguments and rarely, if ever, consider the evidential factor.
The two basic elements in human knowledge are, first, our own observations and conclusions, and second, the evidence of others.
Among the branches of knowledge, the whole of history, for example, and most of the average man’s knowledge of science, is known only from the evidence of others, unless he himself is a specialist in the subject.
When specialists in a certain branch of knowledge continually claim that a certain thing is a fact, it becomes a necessity for the rest of humanity, who cannot acquire this knowledge directly, accept it as such. In the field of God’s direct inspiration and knowledge of His qualities and works, we have the repeated evidence of people in history who have affirmed their fear for Him and who have been commissioned to convey His message; not only that, but the realities of divine and spiritual Reality described by these prophets have been corroborated and confirmed to varying degrees by the spiritual experiences of countless numbers of their followers to this day.
These corroborators have been the saints and mystics of the various communities.
This continual and widespread evidence of God’s existence, the central and original evidence of the prophets, and the derived and confirming evidence of his followers, all based on modes of direct and intuitive perception of his Being, cannot be denied or ignored for any reason.
To deny or ignore it is patently illogical and unscientific, and it is against the basic principles of the acquisition and dissemination of human knowledge.
In addition to being instinctive, intuitive, and logical, belief in God has irrefutable evidence to prove its truthfulness.

Author: Sh.
Shahidullah Faridi Source: masud.co.uk