Can We Know God Exists?
One may ask, which god? The statement in Quran is that the gods that people worship are just some names our ancestors made up, there is no evidence for their existence, and they can not create anything. While the real God is described as the creator and owner of everything, the one who doesn’t have a beginning and will always exist, the one who doesn’t need anything or anyone, who was not born and would never give birth, who has no partner, the one that there is nothing similar to It, the one who is giving us all the blessings, the pure, perfect, merciful, one god…
So, this God, can we know if It exists?
Quran says yes. But how? We hear nowadays many people claiming that we can not know based on the obvious fact that we can not see such being anywhere. Perhaps what is more difficult for our minds is we can not even imagine how such being can actually, seriously exist.
We are invited in Quran to think about so many different things to witness the signs of God. One example is how we are shaped from a tiny drop into flesh and bones and how we grow and learn things later on. Open minded people who follow science will think that we now know how exactly this process happens, which tissue, which cell type, which protein, which enzyme, which part of the DNA, when, where… So it may seem that these things are creating us in a cause and effect cycle, while in Quran the claim is that it is God who is creating us.
Science made two things clear in this respect: One, there is no god that creates things magically in a way that is not possible to understand how things are happening, except perhaps the initial creation of our Universe. Two, the way things are happening is extremely complicated and intelligent. In fact, this is already the concept presented in Quran, where we are invited to look closer at several things to see the “touch” of the Creator from behind the curtain, where it is also claimed that the gods people worship can not even create a single fly.
Which gods do people worship nowadays, apart from some idols and characters in religious books? Uncontrolled and random events changing a finely tuned molecular machinery, which is in reality more jaw-breaking than any nanotechnology humans have ever developed. That is the common god of our time, can it create a fly, really? Let’s say that we can never know for sure how exactly things first came into being in the past, so let’s focus on what we can observe today. Can the atoms, molecules, DNA, amino acids, organelles, cells… that are not even aware of their own existence and therefore have no will or power or reason to do, or to decide to do, anything at all, work together in such precise harmony and wonder and create a fly themselves? Or does this whole thing require some source of intelligence and control, no matter how exactly, but somehow? It may be not easy to get a definitive answer at first glance, but which possibility is the more rational and realistic one? These things can also have some sort of supernatural awareness, too, one may think, but that would already be in support of the latter case.
Back to the mystery about our Universe; a strange piece in Quran seems to be blinking an eye at our time, when more and more people rest assured that there is no need for God thanks to the belief that we could have come into being through natural processes. It says that the creation of the heavens and the earth is something greater than creating humans, declaring that the majority of mankind do not know that. Sounds quite familiar today, doesn’t it?