What is the Islamic response to the atheist demand for 'proof' of God

Question

Can a Muslim prove to an atheist or an infidel that God actually exists?

As far as I know most atheists will argue that since they can't hear, see or feel God then He doesn't exist.

Note that an atheist might not even care about reading the Qur'an and exploring His miracles until he accepts the idea that there is actually a god.

Answer 1

If there was a clearcut incontrovertible proof that was acceptable to everybody (like say a mathematical proof) then this life wouldn't be a test. It wouldn't be a test of someone's submission to Allah, it would be a test of whether they have the brains to accept logic or not. And the whole point of this life is to test whether we are humble and accepting of Allah's Lordship over us, or whether we are arrogant and reject and deny Him. So my contention is that such a proof cannot exist. Allah says that if He had wanted, everyone would have believed. This is one such way of having everyone believe - but then what's the point?

Then the question becomes - what kind of proof does exist? And before we get into that, we have to take a step back and define the parameters of what constitutes proof. In the scientific world (and this is perfectly fine) it requires physically proving something. It requires a hypothesis and then an experiment to falsifiably prove something (vastly oversimplifying here). So the only evidence considered in scientific experiments is somewhat restricted.

The problem comes when one tries to take the scientific method and apply it to things it wasn't meant for, like philosophy or religion. In Islam we accept divine revelation as a source of proof as well because we believe in the truthfulness of the Messenger (saws) to deliver the message of God.

Even if you don't believe in divine revelation, the Qur'an itself commands humans to ponder over Creation and to reflect over it, and to let that guide them to Allah. It even provides arguments against atheists. For example, in Surat Toor and other places. There is another place where Allah offers 4 possibilities for the provenance of Creation - will update the answer if I find it.

Lastly, if you apply Bayes Rule to find the probability that everything came into being just on its own and try to find the posterior probability of every single coincidence and complexity and start multiplying them together, you have a vanishing probability of everything just happening on its own. You can make it as small as you like when you keep adding events to the chain. This is a probabilistic proof so it doesn't count as an absolute proof.

Answer 2

No, you cannot prove the existence of God to an atheist. The reason is simple. Whenever you present any evidence to an atheist, they can either say "there's a scientific explanation for this", or "there's no scientific explanation now, but at some point in the future, science will have advanced sufficiently to be able to supply an explanation". These two options are available to the atheist, no matter how compelling the evidence might be.

For example, suppose God wished to make His presence unambiguously known to everyone in the world. So, he decided to paint large multi-coloured semi-circles across the sky, in order to tell everyone that there's an intelligence "up there" who can create such things. (Note that He only does this on days when rain is falling and the sun is shining). Immediately, scientists started seeking an explanation for these semi-circles; one that doesn't require any kind of Divine Agency. Eventually, they came up with an explanation - something about light being reflected off the backs of raindrops, and splitting into separate colours as it passes through those raindrops. And a very convincing explanation it was, too. And suddenly, what was once a "miracle" now fits entirely within the realm of physics.

My point is, that for atheists to convert to Islam (or any other religion), they need to encounter a phenomenon that they believe is outside the scope or ability of science. This will prompt them to look for other world views. If they are blessed, they will chance across Islam, and be sufficiently motivated to learn more. The question for the atheist is "how great a miracle would you have to observe, to be convinced that some Divine Agency is responsible for it".

I understand that to post an answer here, I should be citing some kind of source. My source for this analysis is my own personal experience, as a recent convert from atheism. I had had enough conversations with other atheists to believe that I was typical of them. For me, the phenomenon that I eventually came to believe was outside the scope of science (and would forever be outside of that scope) was the miracle of human consciousness. I am also lucky to have a very kind and patient Muslim friend, who has indicated a willingness to help me on a journey towards Islam.

But there is no proof of God that you can show to an atheist. Verses 2:15 to 2:20 of The Qur'an indicate as much. But if you have a particular atheist in mind, and they are anything like I was, I beg you to be patient and understanding towards them.

Answer 3

وَمِنْهُم مَّن يَنظُرُ إِلَيْكَ ۚ أَفَأَنتَ تَهْدِي الْعُمْيَ وَلَوْ كَانُوا لَا يُبْصِرُونَ

And among them are those who look at you. But can you guide the blind although they will not see? (10:43)

The best thing you can do is to convey Allah's message and stay back.

Answer 4

As others have stated the Quran's perspective seems to be that even the Prophet himself (let alone an ordinary Muslim) cannot guide another person independent of how much effort he puts into it and this includes providing a "proof" (verse 28:56):

إِنَّكَ لَا تَهْدِي مَنْ أَحْبَبْتَ وَلَٰكِنَّ اللَّهَ يَهْدِي مَن يَشَاءُ ۚ وَهُوَ أَعْلَمُ بِالْمُهْتَدِينَ

It is true thou wilt not be able to guide every one whom thou lovest; but God guides those whom He will and it is He who best knows the guided ones.

Or in verses 2:6 2:7 it says:

إِنَّ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا سَوَاءٌ عَلَيْهِمْ أَأَنذَرْتَهُمْ أَمْ لَمْ تُنذِرْهُمْ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ * خَتَمَ اللَّهُ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبِهِمْ وَعَلَىٰ سَمْعِهِمْ ۖ وَعَلَىٰ أَبْصَارِهِمْ غِشَاوَةٌ ۖ وَلَهُمْ عَذَابٌ عَظِيمٌ

Regarding those who disbelieved, it is the same to them whether thou warn them or do not warn them; they will not believe. * God hath set a seal on their hearts and on their hearing, and on their eyes is a veil; great is the penalty they (incur).

(It is very interesting to me since this seems to be very similar to what you described in the question, i.e. "they can't hear, see or feel God" though Quran doesn't mean the usual senses by these.)

On the other hand, Quran says that there is no doubt that God exists, e.g. verse 14:10 says:

قَالَتْ رُسُلُهُمْ أَفِي اللَّهِ شَكٌّ فَاطِرِ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ يَدْعُوكُمْ لِيَغْفِرَ لَكُم مِّن ذُنُوبِكُمْ وَيُؤَخِّرَكُمْ إِلَىٰ أَجَلٍ مُّسَمًّى قَالُوا إِنْ أَنتُمْ إِلَّا بَشَرٌ مِّثْلُنَا تُرِيدُونَ أَن تَصُدُّونَا عَمَّا كَانَ يَعْبُدُ آبَاؤُنَا فَأْتُونَا بِسُلْطَانٍ مُّبِينٍ

Their messengers said: "Is there a doubt about God, the fissioner of the skies and the earth? He invites you to forgive you from your sins and give you respite till a named term." They said: "Are ye more than humans like ourselves?! Ye wish to turn us away from [what] our fathers used to worship! Bring us a clear proof!"

(The following verses contains the reply given by the prophets to them.)

So from Quran's perspective there is no doubt about the existence of the God who has created the earth and the skies.

(Usually people don't have much problem with accepting some force that has caused the universe to exist as long as it is something abstract. I should add that the recent forms of atheism might be a little bit different from the old ones since the new atheists feel they have reasonable ways of explaining how universe become to exist without anything before it but this will go beyond what is asked in the question.)

Answer 5

I was thinking about this today, and wanted to write down my thoughts here.

(This is my personal view)

I think it is nonsensical to try to prove existence of a being such as god. Because, searching for proof is act of the mind. And, mind's area of interest is material world and it finds it hard to accept what is unseen. For example, consider a person wants you to prove you love it. Can you really prove such unseen phenomena in a way that is acceptable for mind? You can obviosly treat that person in a good way, you can write that person poems etc. But whatever you do, you are not really proving your love, you are just showing things that point to your love. However, those pointers can easily be interpreted as other things. For example, you may be interested in that person's wealth and that is why you seem to love that person, or that person is about to die, and you want that person to be happy etc. In this regard, whenever a person say this is the evidence of god, any person can interpret said evidence in another way. Allah says (translation of meaning)

This is the Book about which there is no doubt, a guidance for those conscious of Allah Who believe in the unseen, establish prayer, and spend out of what We have provided for them

Al-Baqara 2-3 (Sahih International)

So Allah says that one of the feature of those conscious of Allah is their belief in unseen. Therefore, we believe (act of hearth) not know (act of mind).

Answer 6

Firstly all who reject existence of God do not know what is God. God is not a man in sky. God is not material at all. using "he" for God does not mean he is a man. but it is only to we can communicate and talk about God. maybe reading sermon 1 here is a good start to know what is God.

Here is a wonderful debate Imam Sadiq S.A. taught to Mufaddal to he can argue with Atheists.

this article containing interesting debates about God with some of who reject God is also useful for atheists:

Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq's [a] contribution to the sciences

There are many different methods for finding God. some find God by philosophy. but the better way is seeing and meeting God which in by Irfan method (here and here). this method is very hard but you can spritual things like angels and meet God. such people have power of miracle and controlling the universe. in fact by this method a human becomes like God and dissolves in God like a drop of water fallen in ocean. they can die whenever they want and go (by their soul) and see what they want like paradise, hell, angels, future, God ,.. then back to their body in this world. they have servants from Jinn who work for them. Jinns are not limited in time and place and can quickly go from one side of earth to other side and bring news or deliver a letter or do other works. they can go from one place to other place in one moment (by their physical body) using Tay al-Arz power granted by God. Nature is under their control. they can convert a stone to gold only by looking it.

when you meet God then you will not need proof for its existence.

Method of Irfan is very difficult and in fact few can practice it to final steps. although many claim to practices this method successfully to collect some followers like most of sufi people.

Mulla Sadra is the great scholar who combined Islamic Philosophy and Islamic Irfan to find and know and meet God. his method is known as "the four travels" which is the name of his book in this subject. most of current twelver shia scholars use this method to meet God. also many of scholars can not understand what he says and accuse him and who teach his works to apostasy because who finds powers of Intuition in Irfan can see spiritual things like angels, other universes, can see future or other things never seen in our physical universe and so who have not seen such things think he is saying nonsense.

Greater than Mulla Sadra is Mir Damad who rare people can understand his books. when Imam Khomeini wanted to teach works of him in Hawzeh for scholars and who study in Hawzeh of Qum saw Mir Damad in dram (maybe Intuition because they usually keep their Intuition power secret and call it only dream) that said: "do not teach my works". Imam Khomeini said I think it was because no one could understand what he says and they will call him and me apostate and will lead in insulting Mir Damad. so I decided teach the "the four travels" (Asfar Arba'e) of Mulla Sadra instead.

In Islamic philosophy only logic and reasoning is used.

These translated book are useful for who is interested:

Our Philosophy

The Revealer, The Messenger, The Message

A History of Muslim Philosophy

however God has promised in Quran:

وَالَّذِينَ جَاهَدُوا فِينَا لَنَهْدِيَنَّهُمْ سُبُلَنَا ۚ وَإِنَّ اللَّـهَ لَمَعَ الْمُحْسِنِينَ

[29:69] Sahih International

And those who strive for Us - We will surely guide them to Our ways. And indeed, Allah is with the doers of good.

This means if an atheist is a real truth seeker and do his strive for finding truth then God will show him some miracles and proofs and evidences to he be guided. but most of atheists I have talked do not have to do ENOUGH research and strive. Internet is full of anti Islam and anti shia websites full of propaganda and claims of refuting everything Islam says. but claim of refute is different of really refuting. all of such so called refute are answered by Islamic scholars but they jump to Google and search and believe the first site they find. unfortunately websites refuting such refutes have not good SEO!

Anyway finding truth is not easy and needs real strive for it. in fact they are mostly lazy in research and prefer having an enjoyable life and when see a truth do not accept it and find a justification to avoid accepting it and continue their enjoying life.

Answer 7

Actually there are some proofs for the existence of God, Allah. But as anything to be proved should first be defined so let me define Allah as follows: God is the perfect existence. Note that although it's right that we can never fully understand Allah but we can always judge if something/someone else can be God or not, and such judgments implicitly imply we have a definition for God based on which we can study who can and who cannot be a God, can He have a body or be incarnated in flesh or not, can he begotten or be a father or not, and many other judgments that we have committed before and would commit here after. The definition is so easy, but also very functional, it can be used to prove both His existence and uniqueness.

Existence. A requirement of being perfect is being independent, such that nothing can affect its being, no other existence can give it the existence (birth) or draw for it an end (death). Thus from perfectness one can easily conclude God not having a cause for His existence (although we should first prove that He exists!). Now let return to our own universe. We have the causality principle, it is more intellectual than observational and is founded more on logic behind this universe than our epistemic knowledge of the universe (it is logically wrong that some happening be thought as not having a cause), also it is one of the very few cornerstones of any science so that our discussion would remain scientific if we use it! Well, anything and any happening in this universe has its own cause, its cause on its own would be a thing or an event in the same universe, so it will have its own cause, and continue the trend this way. Now there are two possibilities, that the chain just produced would never end, or that it will have an end. Obviously the chain cannot have end in the same universe as everything and every event in this universe has a cause but it is possible that the chain ends out of this universe where the causality principle fails to exist, God can be an existence in that outer universe! But what about the other possibility, that the chain has no end? If the chain has no end, it would be continued to infinity, some state this by its own is impossible but let us assume it still valid, however, if I look at this whole infinite universe still it is universish, I mean in its intrinsic nature, and needs cause for its existence and that's contrary to the assumption that there would be no uppermost cause for the chains. Use something like the Zorn's lemma to put it more precisely and scientifically, if required.

Uniqueness. This Cosmological Argument proved the existence of God but not His uniqueness. For the sake of proving the God's uniqueness we should return to our definition of God, that he is perfect and, thus, independent. If there are Gods instead of one God, then according to the God's definition none of them can prevent the others from what they Will to do, remember that none of them can be affected by any other existence and preventing a will is not possible unless one would affect the other. Therefore, Gods would exist without any inter-relation between them. But then we come to this side and see there are universe(s) created (say, caused) by these Gods, their Wills are independent, so definitely there would arise a chaos and this reasoning is stated by Allah Himself:

لَوْ كَانَ فِيهِمَا آلِهَةٌ إِلَّا اللَّـهُ لَفَسَدَتَا ۚ فَسُبْحَانَ اللَّـهِ رَبِّ الْعَرْشِ عَمَّا يَصِفُونَ

If there were, in the heavens and the earth, other gods besides Allah, there would have been confusion in both! but glory to Allah, the Lord of the Throne: (High is He) above what they attribute to Him! [21:22]

Actually the collocation argument about God is more about to prove His uniqueness than His existence.

Note that God as an existence which will never be affected by any other existence would then be uncreated and immortal, so everlasting from both sides (how wouldn't be Him? the Creator, cause, of time). Also according to this He would be one single notion not having parts, as otherwise, He will need His parts to remain existed and this would be contrary to his perfectness. And etc.

Anyway, there is yet some other proofs for Existence of God that I strongly suggest you study them, one is called the "truthfuls argument" (one of the strongest proofs I have ever seen) and others are "the dispensable and dispensable beings argument" and "the poor being argument". Also see this. Sorry for these last references all being in Persian, maybe you can use some translators to be able to read them.

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PS. About the trutfuls argument, honestly I din't find any source in English for further reading. But to say in short, it is much more philosophically and logically precise and detailed than any other argument I have seen for proving the existence of God. Actually it tries to prove the existence of God inspired by these three verses of Quran: "... Is it not sufficient as regards your Lord that He is a witness over all things?"[41:53] and "Allah bears witness that there is no god but He ..." [3:18] and "He is the First and the Last and the Appeared Outside and the Hidden Inside, and He is Cognizant of all things." [57:3]. Indeed, the argument is based on nothing from the sensed world, be it motion or its collocation and etc., but on the very notion of existence, the Being. It starts from the trivial statements that there exists something, that there exists many things, then generate a chain of existences of which the first ring is the one being not owing its being to any other being. To do so it has a rather long algorithm-alike set of logical statements, declared axiomatically. To read more about this I would rather suggest reading this, this and to download this booklet in pdf, again all in Persian. For Arabic sources you may like to study the leading books written by Avicenna, Mulla Sadra and some others.

Also I had been told about another kind of "truthfuls argument" which was totally different from the one cited above, maybe the name is wrong as I din't find anything about it now. It doesn't proof the existence of God on its own, to be honest, but rather proves why we should believe in God's existence! I have heard and read two different kind of proofs for this:

1. The former which is weaker, but still strong enough, asks about intellectual reaction of a reasonable person against a great risk! For example you are a reasonable healthy person, there is some food over the desk which you are going to eat, too delicious it should be you judge from its smelling, then all of a sudden a child or a mad person comes to you and say the dish is poisonous! Will you trust in that child or mad person and abandon eating the food, or you just want to eat and justify yourself with statements like "he is just a child, I doubt if he even knows what's poison!" or "he is just a mad guy, no one would trust in him, so why should I do?". On one side is a delicious food, and on the other side is the risk that I would die! The risk is bigger than you can bear it I guess, a delicious food doesn't worth dying, does it! Now look back through the history, there have come quite many men years apart from each other, all being the most honest, merciful, reasonable, truthful and ... among their people, they all came to say one thing: Do not pray gods but only one God. Is there any possibility that we could bear the risk that there exists a unique God but we don't care about it? After all praying this God or not the present life is full of both joy and suffer for both the believers and non-believers, a little more limitations but remaining safe for certain!
2. The latter which is stronger is an argument from Imam Sadiq --peace be upon him-- when an atheist was murmuring against the people turning around Kaaba (Tavaaf) in Mekka, calling them dumb. Imam asks him why do you think they are dumbs and God does not exist? He denied what he was murmuring about. Imam said if you are right and they are wrong --which it is not of course-- and there is no God and no after-death judgement then no one of these people would suffer as people will all be the same after death, but if they are right and you are wrong --which is really the case-- then they have prepared for that judgment and you have not, so you will suffer but not them.

So to conclude that "believing in God" irrespective of his real existence is an intellectual must, although be a weaker statement compared to the proof of existence of God.

Answer 8

I can break this down pretty simply:

When we refer to scientifically proven evidence, what we're actually talking about is collectively verified observation. e.g. if i make an observation about the acceleration of gravity at sea level, you can verify this observation if you have similar means.

Collectively verified knowledge is considered a superior form of knowledge because it's subjected to the objections of multiple observers.

Religions like Islam typically rely on subjective knowledge. Everything debated in this domain relies on the axiom that factual information was revealed to messenger and proofs have to contort around around that assumption.

You cannot collectively verify Islam unless someone has informed the observer what to believe. In the case of the acceleration of gravity at sea level, I can ask you to find a way to measure it before I give my observation in order to increase the weight of the observation. This cannot be done for religions since as far as I know, no one has come to the same conclusions that Islam comes to without some sort of cultural programming.

Some people talk about the misapplication of the scientific method but I think this is flawed logic. Collectively verified knowledge is on a higher order than subjective knowledge because you have multiple actors involved. There is no type of knowledge that is exempt from the rigor that comes with collective verification- least of all philosophical.

Answer 9

very simple http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAPqwOV8zn8 ..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................