Allah

Is there a Creator and who is Allah?

Who is Allah?

Allah is the per­son­al name of God in Ara­bic. Some of the biggest mis­con­cep­tions that many non-Mus­lims have about Islam have to do with the word “Allah”. Let there be no doubt — Mus­lims wor­ship the God of Noah, Abra­ham, Moses, David and Jesus — peace be upon them all. How­ev­er, it is cer­tain­ly true that Jews, Chris­tians, and Mus­lims all have dif­fer­ent con­cepts of Almighty God. For exam­ple, Mus­lims — like Jews — reject the Chris­t­ian beliefs of the Trin­i­ty and the Divine Incar­na­tion. Judaism, Chris­tian­i­ty, and Islam all claim to be “Abra­ham­ic Faiths” and all of them are also clas­si­fied as “monothe­is­tic”. How­ev­er, Islam teach­es that oth­er reli­gions have, in one way or anoth­er, dis­tort­ed and nul­li­fied a pure and prop­er belief in Almighty God by neglect­ing His true teach­ings and mix­ing them with man-made ideas.

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3 Reasons for God

There are many ratio­nal rea­sons for believ­ing in God. This arti­cle will briefly explain three sim­ple rea­sons for God’s existence.

Order in the Universe

When we reflect upon the nature of our world, we see order every­where from the water cycle to the move­ment of the earth around the sun. Com­ment­ing on the order found in the uni­verse, the physi­cist Stephen Hawk­ing explains that the over­whelm­ing impres­sion ‘is one of order, the more we dis­cov­er about the uni­verse, the more we find that it is gov­erned by ratio­nal laws.”¹. This obser­va­tion is shared by the vast major­i­ty of scientists.

Since the uni­verse has order and is gov­erned by the ‘laws of sci­ence’, we should ques­tion how this order came about. The most effec­tive way to answer this ques­tion is to rea­son to the best con­clu­sion. Take your mobile phone for exam­ple, your phone is made of glass, plas­tic and met­al. Glass comes from sand, plas­tic comes from oil and met­al is extract­ed from the ground. Imag­ine you were walk­ing in a desert (where there is lots of oil, sand and met­als in the ground), and you found a mobile phone lying around. Would you believe that it came togeth­er by itself? That the Sun shone, the wind blew, light­ning struck, the oil bub­bled to the sur­face and mixed with the sand and met­al, and over mil­lions of years the mobile came togeth­er by chance?

No one would believe such an expla­na­tion. A mobile phone is clear­ly some­thing that was put togeth­er in an organ­ised way, so it would be ratio­nal to believe that it must have an organ­is­er. In the same way, when we see the order in the uni­verse, isn’t it ratio­nal to say that the uni­verse has an organiser?

This ‘organ­is­er’ is best explained by the exis­tence of God. God is the one who bought about the order in the universe.

Beginning of the Universe

If some­thing has always exist­ed it does­n’t need a cre­ator. In the first part of the 20th cen­tu­ry some physi­cists held the view that the uni­verse had always exist­ed. If the uni­verse had always exist­ed it would­n’t need a creator.

How­ev­er, accord­ing to Cos­mol­o­gy the uni­verse had a begin­ning some 14 bil­lion years ago with a cos­mic event com­mon­ly known as the ‘Big Bang’ ².

Imag­ine you heard a loud bang, and you asked ‘where did that sound come from?’ Would you be sat­is­fied with the answer that it came from ‘noth­ing’ and it ‘just hap­pened?’ Of course not. You would say ‘what was the cause of that loud bang?’ In the same way, ratio­nal­ly the ‘Big Bang’ must also have a cause that bought it about. Now we can ask since the ‘Big Bang’ has a cause, what was the cause of that cause? Then we can ask, what was the cause of that cause? And so on and so on. But this can’t go on for­ev­er and must end with a first cause, because of the fol­low­ing example:

Imag­ine a sniper who has just found his tar­get and calls back to base to get per­mis­sion to shoot. The per­son at the base tells the sniper to hold on while they seek per­mis­sion from some­one else high­er up. So the guy high­er up seeks per­mis­sion from the guy even high­er up and so on and so on. If this goes on for­ev­er, will the sniper ever get to shoot the target?

The obvi­ous answer is that he would­n’t be able to shoot. The only way the sniper can shoot is if some­one gives per­mis­sion with­out ask­ing for any­one else’s per­mis­sion. That per­son would be the first cause of the sniper shoot­ing. In the same way, the Big Bang must have a first cause.

We can con­clude that this first cause must be pow­er­ful as it bought the whole uni­verse into exis­tence, and it must be intel­li­gent as it caused the ‘laws of sci­ence’ which gov­ern the uni­verse. Also, this first cause must be time­less, space­less and imma­te­r­i­al, because time, space and mat­ter began at the ‘Big Bang’. Final­ly, since it is uncaused it must have always existed.

All of these attrib­ut­es of the first cause make up the basic con­cept of God. God is the uncre­at­ed first cause of the universe.

Human Nature

Through­out the his­to­ry of the world, the major­i­ty of peo­ple have believed in God. There seems to be some­thing built in the human mind that makes us want to believe.

Over the last decade some real­ly star­tling facts have been found that show that chil­dren have an innate belief in God. Dr Justin Bar­rett, a senior researcher at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford Cen­tre for Anthro­pol­o­gy and Mind, states ‘œThe pre­pon­der­ance of sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence for the past 10 years or so has shown that a lot more seems to be built into the nat­ur­al devel­op­ment of chil­dren’s minds than we once thought, includ­ing a pre­dis­po­si­tion to see the nat­ur­al world as designed and pur­pose­ful and that some kind of intel­li­gent being is behind that pur­pose…’ He adds that ‘œIf we threw a hand­ful [of chil­dren] on an island and they raised themselves…they would believe in God’.³. To put it sim­ply, his answer as to why any­one would believe in God is that, our minds are designed to do so ⁴. Dis­be­lief in God is some­thing which is unnat­ur­al to the human being. Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty devel­op­ment psy­chol­o­gist Dr Oliv­era Petro­vich, who is an expert in the Psy­chol­o­gy of Reli­gion states that, belief in God devel­ops nat­u­ral­ly and that ‘athe­ism is def­i­nite­ly an acquired posi­tion’ ⁵.

So where did this nat­ur­al belief in a cre­ator come from? We can’t say it is taught by soci­ety as this belief is innate, and stud­ies show that it is inde­pen­dent of soci­etal pres­sures and is cross-cul­tur­al ⁶.

The best expla­na­tion for this belief is that God has put this into humanity.You have just read three inde­pen­dent rea­sons why it makes sense to believe in God. Belief in God is not only ratio­nal but it’s also part of human nature. There are many ques­tions raised by the exis­tence of God, such as why is there evil and suf­fer­ing in the world? Does­n’t evo­lu­tion dis­prove God? Do we have a pur­pose in life? For answers to these and oth­er such ques­tions please click on the oth­er arti­cles in this section.

References