In various periods philosophers, moralists and theologians have advanced different proofs for the existence of God, but for one reason or another none of these can be accepted. The question arises: Can we furnish a valid proof of God’s existence? Even if one answers in the affirmative, it will not imply that one has established God’s existence. An argument that makes strong appeal to the theologians could be expressed in classical syllogism and a valid conclusion drawn, but a valid conclusion may not be a true proposition. Mere validity does not establish truth. The argument is:

If Moses is trustworthy, God exists.

Moses is trustworthy.

Therefore God exists.

Does the argument establish God’s existence; does it fulfil the constitutive and epistemic conditions of inference? Granted that Moses is trustworthy, does his trustworthiness permit us to accept his recommendation for a belief in a trans-empirical reality? The epistemic condition of inference is not fulfilled here. The gulf between the empirical and the transempirical cannot be bridged by logical reasoning. Nor is the constitutive condition met: the relation between the constituents of the major premise is not that of implication. I believe that God’s existence has to be intuited. I do not know myself by inference. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum is fallacious when he inferred thinker from thinking. Hume, too, wanted to have a perception of ‘I’ or self but could not get behind the passing states of consciousness to an enduring self and thus was led to deny the reality of self. In fact, I do not need any proof to know that I exist. In Payam-i-Mashriq (Ruba‘i 54, p. 38), Iqbal beautifully makes this point:

I am silent on the question of my being and non-being.

If I say ‘I am’, I commit myself to "a worship of myself.

But whose voice is this simple note?

Someone in my bosom says that I exist.

I intuit myself and there the matter ends. I also intuit the external world. Unless this is granted, no transition can be made from thoughts or states of consciousness to the objective situation. Berkeley wanted to prove the existence of the external world, but was led to his subjective idealism. Leibniz’s reasoning about the unity of force led him to conclude that monads or metaphysical points had no windows, yet he knew that there were an infinite number of monads each reflecting the same universe from its special point of view. Berkeley believed in the existence of the external world, but his presuppositions that ideas are passive and spirits alone active and that passive ideas cannot act upon the active spirits forced him to make his ideas (things) exist in the mind of God. Descartes’ reasoning that because the senses sometimes deceive us, therefore they have to be distrusted completely, is hard to understand. His inquiry should have been directed towards sifting true perceptions from illusions and hallucinations. He was not justified in doubting the existence of the external world from the fact of illusions. His reasoning about the reality of the external world, on the basis of the veracity of God, is quite illogical. Kant intuits the existence of the external world and of the self, but declares them unknowable. He held that all knowledge is through categories and that the latter are applied not to things, but to our thinking of them. Kant’s followers made things to be only thoughts (the identity of thought and being) and were thus committed to objective idealism. This destroyed the distinction between the subject and the object and reduced the individual, in the words of Kierkegaard, to a mere paragraph in a system.

Thus, we find that in the history of modern thought the attempt to prove the existence of self or the external world has landed philosophers in great difficulties. Such attempts presuppose a belief in the reality of the two. The real problem of the self and the external world belongs to the field of description and logical positivists are justified in stressing this aspect of philosophical inquiry.

We intuit our own existence and also the existence of the external world. God also has to be intuited; the most authentic form of intuition which yields knowledge of God technically is called religious experience. But this is not readily available to an individual. The whole history of mysticism points to the fact that it presupposes certain qualities of head and heart . A novice has always been tested by the preceptor and subjected to a strict moral discipline and self-examination before he is fit to enter the various "states" and "stations" of the sufi path. The preceptor helps his disciple from falling a victim to illusions and hallucinations. Thus the recipient of religious experience is cautious and takes great care to distinguish genuine from spurious experience. The Qur‘an too lays emphasis on the possibility of religious experience being vitiated by Satan. The following verse (xxii. 52) will make the point clear:

We have not sent an Apostle or Prophet before thee among whose desires Satan injected not some wrong desire, but God shall bring to naught that which Satan had suggested. Thus shall God affirm His revelations, for God is knowing and wise.

The next step in religious experience, communication, constitutes the crux of the difficulty. Language is the medium through which communication can take place, but language pertains to sensory experience, whereas religious experience refers to trans-empirical reality. Hence the language of religion is vague, full of similes, metaphors, allusions and symbols. The content of the experience is not communicable, but the interpretation which a mystic puts on his experience is communicated in the form of propositions. "Since the quality of mystic experience is to be directly experienced, it obviously cannot be communicated. "Mystic states are more like feelings than thought," says Iqbal. The result is that the accounts of the religionists regarding the nature of reality differ. This fact has been emphasised by the sufis. Rumi, for instance, said that if animals were to imagine God, every animal would see in Him his own magnified image. Muhammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi, a Muslim thinker of the 9th century of the Christian era, condemned religious experience on the basis of the contradictions in various religions. He had overlooked the fact that religious experience in its essence is a synthetic experience and does not easily lend itself to expression in words. It is the unanalysable wholeness of religious experience which makes its linguistic rendering an extremely difficult task.

Sciences deal with static facts, with abstractions, and thus can capture their data in concepts and categories. Religion deals with life in all its wholeness. Life is dynamic and not static; hence the language difficulty. But this does not mean that the language of religion has no meaning or that the verification of religious discourse is not possible. The criterion for establishing the truth of religious discourse is different from the criterion used in verifying descriptive statements of empirical sciences. The contributions which religious propositions have made to the moral and intellectual fund of the world make it abundantly clear that religious propositions cannot be brushed aside as untrue. One judges the truth of religious experience by its fruits and not by its roots, observed William James. Again, as has been pointed out by Professor C. A. Qadir in his article "God and Logic," the religious proposition pertains to eternity, and its rejection is not possible on the basis of experience which spreads over a small period of time.

Thus, for our knowledge of God we have to depend primarily on revelation as expressed in religious propositions. Of course, there are other sources too, e.g., the study of nature and history. Ibn Tufail showed in his romance, Hayy bin Yaqzan, the possibility of knowing God through a study of nature. These sources involve a purely intellectual approach and the Absolute thus arrived at appears more akin to thought and reason and hence static. For this reason we have to depend primarily on revelation for our knowledge of God. The facts of religion are genuine facts. Ghazali was justified in stressing this fact in his Tahafut al-Falasifah. In what follows, I accept the hypothesis of God as stated in the Qur‘an. I shall not try to harmonise religion with science or philosophy as has been the universal practice of almost all Muslim philosophers from al-Kindi to Iqbal, Hakim and Sharif. I shall only bring out the implications of the unity of God and in this connection my conclusion is that the true import of Divine unity is difficult to grasp. There is an element of agnosticism in religion. I contend further that the Qur‘anic concept of the attributes of God as ultimate values provides a sound basis for morality and lends meaning and significance to moral effort.

The Qur‘an conceives of God as an individual. He is one; all things depend on Him who neither begets nor is begotten. He is the bearer of beautiful names (attributes) and is nearer to man than his neck vein; He has direct contact with His creatures: there are no two but He is their third, no three but He is their fourth. He is the Creator and comprehends all creation: "My mercy encompasses all things" (vii. 156). He is powerful, wise and is not limited by anything. "He is the First and the Last, the manifest and the hidden; He is knower of all things" (lvii. 3).

The unity of God has been of special interest to Muslim thinkers and the Qur‘an lays major emphasis on this.

And your God is one God; there is no god but He! He is Beneficent, the Merciful (ii. 163).

Say, He is only one God (vi. 19).

Your God is one God: so those who believe not in the Hereafter, their hearts refuse to know and they are proud (xvi. 22).

And Allah has said: Take not two gods. He is only one God: so Me alone should you fear (xvi. 51).

Due to this emphasis, the unity of God has been the cornerstone of Muslim religious and philosophic thought. It was a cardinal principle with (i) the various schools of Muslim theology particularly the Mu‘tazilites and the Ash‘arites, (ii) Muslim rationalists (philosophers) and (iii) the sufis. Some of the sufis conceived God as the only reality and were led to the doctrine of the Unity of Being, Wahdat al-Wujud, a pantheistic interpretation of reality.

The Qur‘anic emphasis on the unity of God is directed primarily against polytheism. The Mu‘tazilites argued that the unity of God required the denial of His attributes. They called themselves the people of unity and justice (ahl al-tawhid wal ‘adl), and feared that admission of attributes would lead to a plurality of eternals and hence polytheism. They reduced the attributes either to relations or negations or made them God’s essence. Abul Hudhayl al-‘Allaf (748-840 a. c.), a disciple of the second generation from Wasil bin ‘Ata, the founder of Mu‘tazilism, taught that God’s attributes were not in His essence, but were His essence. The Mu‘tazilites reduced God to an abstract unity. The Ash‘arites, in conformity with the orthodox view, accepted God’s attributes as distinct from God’s essence, but at the same time warned that they were to be accepted bila kaifa, without asking ‘How’ and bila tashbih, without drawing any comparison. The Qur‘an says, "Nothing is like Him, and He is the Hearing, the Seeing" (xlii. 11). The philosophers al-Farabi and Ibn Sina made the unity of God a basis for their emanationist account of Being. The universe, which is a unity, was conceived by the Muslim rationalists as an eternal, i.e., non-temporal, emanation from God. God being the Necessary Being, His essence and existence coincided, while the possible beings depend on the Necessary Being for their existence. Thus Ibn Sina, despite his emanationistic account of Being, avoided committing himself to a pantheistic interpretation of reality by making the universe dependent on God for existence.

Iqbal explains the unity of God and the multiplicity of His attributes on the pattern of human personality. Despite the multiplicity of selves human personality is a unity. This unity or integration of ego is, of course, a matter of degree. For Iqbal the moral ideal is the attainment of a perfectly integrated ego. The moral worth of an action is determined by its tendency to promote integration of personality, "There are no pleasure-giving and pain-giving acts; there are only ego-sustaining and ego-dissolving acts. It is the deed that prepares the ego for dissolution or disciplines it for a future career." With God unity achieves perfection. This attempt to understand the unity of God in terms of perfected integration of egos is not to fashion God after the image of man, warns Iqbal; it is only to affirm that Divine Life is not a chaos, but an organised principle. It is our habit of pictorial thinking which lends anthropomorphic colouring to our concept of God.

Ever since the time of Hume, the sciences have tended more to restrict their field to the observable, to phenomena. The scientists believe in the unity of the universe, regard it as a cosmos and do not consider it justified to step beyond the phenomenal to the trans-empirical reality. Idealist thinkers lay emphasis on the unity of intellect or reason, but cannot go beyond reason. But for religion the unity of the universe and the unity of reason point to an ultimate unity which alone could explain the two opposing unities of matter and mind. In the words of the Qur‘an the experience within and without is symbolic of reality described by it as "the First and the Last, the visible and the invisible (lvii. 3). God is, therefore, both immanent and transcendent. He is immanent in that the universe is a visible expression of His creative activity; he is transcendent in that the universe does not exhaust the creative activity of God.

A complete comprehension of the unity of God is a difficult task. The degree of unity depends on the degree of individuality. With man individuality is a relative affair. We become conscious of our own self in opposition to the not-self. God can afford to dispense with all the worlds says the Qur‘an. This implies that the universe is not to be conceived as confronting God as His other. The Qur‘an is careful to state that all things depend on God. There is no spatial notion involved in the concept of dependence. A conclusion depends on its premises; a work of art depends on the artist; and an idea depends on the mind which conceives it; and these objects in one way limit their subjects. To form a complete notion of the unity of God is beset with difficulties. We can only have an approximation of it. Hence, I fully endorse the view of Dr. K. A. Hakim that "there is an element of agnosticism in all true religions and even in the deepest religious experience."

The Qur‘anic attributes of God represent ultimate values. These constitute the ideal which controls and guides the process of social evolution. The unity of God implies the unity of the Moral Law or the interrelatedness of values. Social progress is a fact: humankind today is wiser by his past experience. In all ages man has been gradually moving towards a fuller realisation of the social order calculated to secure well-being. At no time in the recorded history of man, did any group take upon itself the promotion of evil as its end. It is true that social progress has not been uniform. There have been periods when social order was greatly upset, but man emerged from every ordeal with greater determination to promote peace and harmony. The Qur‘an too takes a teleological view of the universe and man. The following verses are relevant to this point:

And we did not create the heavens and the earth and that which is between them in sport. We created them not but for a serious end, but most of them understand it not (xliv. 38-39).

Do you then think that we have created you in vain, and that you will not be returned to us(xiii. 115).

And everyone has a goal to which he turns, so vie with one another in good works (ii. 148).

That the attributes constitute ideals is clear from the following verses:

And that to thy Lord is the goal (liii. 42).

God desires the perfection of His Light (ix. 32).

(We take) Allah’s colour, and who is better than Allah at colouring (ii. 138).

Some of the attributes of God which the Qur‘an describes are Life, Power, Wisdom, Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Love and Justice. "He is Allah the Creator, the Maker, the Fashioner. His are the most beautiful names" (lix. 24). In philosophical terminology the verse implies that God is the locus of all ultimate and intrinsic values. His being guarantees the objectivity of values. But as God is nearer to man than his neck vein, one carries value-consciousness with him. It is the "Moral law within" and not "the starry heaven above" that bestows on the individual his true status and prepares him to be deputy of God on earth. It is this development of the ethical personality that the Prophet of Islam, peace be upon him, signified when he enjoined Muslims to assimilate Divine attributes. With God as the locus of all values it follows that there is no distinction in Islam between the spiritual and the mundane, the religious and the secular. Material prosperity is a condition of the spiritual growth of a people. Islam recommends a positive, seeking attitude towards life in all its manifestations.

The objectivity of values does not rule out difference of opinion in moral matters. The content range of a value widens with experience. Kant was wrong when he recommended complete divorce between morality and experience. He held that the moral law needed no content to be filled in by experience. His moral system remains formal and barren. The true significance of values in the ever-changing social set-up is discovered gradually by the advancing consciousness of man. Ultimate values or formal ideals of value need a content to be filled in by experience.

With God as the locus of all intrinsic values the requirements of morality are fully with. This implies that moral effort is in tune with reality. A morally developed individual or society is more truly real. Further, the Qur‘anic emphasis on the continuity of life after death makes moral effort all the more meaningful. In this moral effort, according to the Qur‘an, God becomes co-worker with man.

The existentialist thinkers deny the objectivity of values. When Nietzsche killed God, he thought that he had made the individual bold and courageous. Man had been working, thought Nietzsche, from the dawn of history under the fear of mighty and revengeful gods of God, but now man had become mature enough to walk fearlessly without the support of God or gods. This loss of faith in God led to anguish, anxiety, dread feeling of being forsaken, which concepts are the prize possession of existentialist thinkers. There is no purpose in life, they say, but you can make it meaningful by making a certain commitment. Man is just wedged between life and death, merely a freakish accident. But if absurdity, irrationality and purposelessness be the key notes of existence, why should we try to make it meaningful by making commitments? Why endure non-authentic or authentic existence at all? Existentialism is the philosophy of pessimism, frustration and failure. It had stepped in to save the individual, to plead for him, but succeeded only in bringing home to him that he is a mere supernumerary, something superfluous. For Camus, the symbol of man is Sisyphus who was condemned by the gods to perform a meaningless task. He was to take a rock to the top a mountain and when he scaled the mountain the rock was dropped down, and Sisyphus set to the same task again and found a certain happiness in that meaningless routine. The cycle of existence is very much like the routine performance of Sisyphus. The individual’s life history is nothing but a series of contingent happenings. The schools and colleges where you are educated, the teachers you meet and the friends you make or the person you marry and even your birth are all mere contingent happenings.

These philosophers forget that contingency is the result of the mobility and freedom that man enjoys. Let all person be earth-rooted like mountains or trees and most of the happenings will disappear. Choice presupposes a variety and multiplicity of possible events or courses. Contingent happenings are the price we pay for our freedom and choice. William James was right when he asserted that the mere fact that one continues to live is sufficient proof that one regards life as worth living. It is the meaningfulness of life that sustains you to live it. Your commitments yield you a richness of experience and an increase in the depth and fullness of life.

Life is not meaningless. It is directed towards ends and goals, as becomes obvious when we reflect on the working of our own minds. It is true that a well-planned action may not meet with success but that is no basis for condemning life as meaningless. Failure sometimes goads one on to greater effort. The existentialist thinkers forget that the values one finds in society at one time are the operative values. These are the choices made by persons who were here before us. These are their interpretations of the formal ideals of values, which are the same for all human beings, values which the Qur‘an describes as the beautiful names of Allah. We start our lives by adhering to the operative values of our group. But it is for us to reflect on these values and see if they agree with the formal ideals of values. This implies that we have to check if the operative values continue adquately to guide life. "Virtue without imagination is a constant danger in civilisation," says F. Mayer. Changes in operative values are brought about by thinkers who, by active participation in and reflective withdrawal from the social life of the community, reinterpret them by pressing them back to the principles on which they rest. Thus operative values undergo a steady process of change in the individual and the race. But the formal ideals of value remain the same. It is these which give universal character to morality, and the unity of the moral law follows from the unity of God. We do not talk in terms of American or Chinese or Russian moral law. Societies differ in operative values only, but the formal ideals of values are the same for all. According to Islam these values have their locus in God. "And to thy Lord is the goal" (liii. 42). Belief in God guarantees the objectivity of values, and the objectivity of values gives all the meaning and significance to moral efforts.