God’s existence came to bug me the last but bugged me the most as it’s the most complex one and needs to be addressed first! But why deal with it first if it came as a serious issue only at the last of all the five issues that wrecked my head?!!? That’s because Revelation, Prophethood, and theistic religions would make sense only after God’s existence gets established. You cannot have a Book of God, a Messenger of God, or a Religion of God, unless you have God first, isn’t it? So logic demands that we first investigate and ascertain whether God exists before diving into the debate whether Islam is from God. This is as far as the logic goes, and the chronology for you folks here would be accordingly. In my personal journey though, God came in at the last because initially, from 2004 to 2015, I considered the existence of God to be a given! Only the relevance and truth of Islam was a matter of concern to me. I have already elaborated this in my long bio.
Looking at the issue purely through the lens of philosophy and science, I reached the conclusion that the issue of God hangs in balance, i.e.; both theism and atheism are logically valid positions but we cannot know with certainty as to which one is definitely correct, and thus agnosticism is the most intellectually honest stance that an earnest seeker of truth can take. From the year 2016 up until today, I hold the same position! But if this is the case, then how did I come back to follow the religion of Islam?!? Now, that’s what this website is all about! Sit tight with me as it would be a long and intricate mental journey. So get ready for a good exercise of your reasoning muscles!
The next paragraph might toss your head as the terms ‘valid’, ‘sound’, ‘premises’ might seem unfamiliar or unrelatable, and if that’s the case then please read this article first to familiarize yourself with the basics of ‘philosophy of reasoning’ or ‘logic’ (as it’s normally called). It would help you to crack the difference between a ‘valid’/‘rational’ and a ‘sound’/‘true’ argument. Yes they are not the same! So please introduce yourself to these concepts before you move on.
Now, I’ve already stated that both atheism and theism are logically valid positions but we cannot know with certainty as to which one is definitely correct. The common way leading to this conclusion is to weigh in detail all the arguments for and against God, from all possible domains of knowledge. This was my approach in God Examined. Work on the second and vastly enlarged edition of the book is still incomplete and slowly underway. This in depth approach actually needs a multi volume work of several thousand pages, so I’ve kept that aside as of now!
The more fundamental or high level technique for the same approach as above is to look at the fundamental assumptions or premises upon which the arguments for theism and atheism are based. We will start off with this technique in this article here and get to see that the premises of theism and atheism are unverifiable by our tools of observation; hence we cannot be sure about their soundness; thus the Truth of atheism and theism remains deadlocked as of now. Consequently, agnosticism seems to be the most correct position until this impasse is resolved!
And the most fundamental, and in my opinion the easiest and most comprehensive way leading up to agnosticism is to analyse the disagreements amongst experts. My academia article elucidates this approach. I’ve reposted the same article on this website too.
So, confused that if I still consider agnosticism to be logically the most correct position on God then how do I follow Islam?!!? Given that belief in The One God is the cornerstone of the Islamic creed! Go ahead and clarify this!
When I say that agnosticism is logically the most correct position on God, I take God as one single entity, as an isolated issue. As long as I was taking the issue of God in isolation, I was stuck upon agnosticism and didn’t find any logical reason to intellectually affirm Islam. But then, as I developed my epistemic narrative regarding theories and commenced looking at Islam as a theory, I found that Islam satisfies all the seven criteria for truth of a theory, thus I had no reason to not accept it. It was as much about running out of reasons to reject Islam as it was about finding reasons to accept it! The key turnaround was to consider Islam as a large framework of knowledge, a theory, and then judging it as we judge other theories, I am convinced of my finding that Islam qualifies as the most correct theory of human origin, existence, purpose, and end; and I’ll elaborate this further in the next article!