True Religion

Let's look at few examples which can logically prove existence of God.

Example 1: Can a building come into existence by itself?



The answer is definitely, No. Because we all know there is a long process of engineering design, followed by construction process to build a building. If we assume that the building came into existence randomly by itself, then this is against the law of identity. We can apply same logic to the creation of the universe. Just like a building can't come into existence without an engineering design and construction process, the universe can't come into existence with out its creator and that creator is God. I tried to show this in the process flow chart above so that we can follow this simple logic.

Example 2: Machine Elements?



Another very simple example is of different elements in a machine such as mechanical parts and gears etc. Can we assume that mechanical parts and gears come into existence and in order by themselves? The answer is obviously, No. Because we know there is a designer behind the design of any machine. We also see that in the universe, stars and galaxies are linked by gravity and relativity. Are relativity and gravity made by themselves? No, just like gear and mechanical parts needed a designer; there is a designer behind the gravity and relativity. Again I tried to show that in a flow chart, so that we can follow this logic more easily.

There are countless examples you can find around yourself and this is where you use your intellect to come to certain conclusions such as there is God. There should be no doubt about that. Unlike man, God creates things from nothing. Look at the creation of human being, animals, trees around us and you can find one unique feature in all of these creations. They are created from nothing which shows that God is behind these creations.



May be I should have asked what is purpose of our existence? I know there are many small goals in our life such as education, career, marriage life, raising kids etc. but those are not the purpose of our creation.

The answer to this question is very important because it connects with answer to other questions we all ask ourselves at different stages of life. I believe that the purpose of our existence is the test to see who will do the best of actions. Just like we are accountable for our actions in this world, we are also accountable for our actions in life hereafter. I know you don't believe in life hereafter but I will provide logical proof for existence of life after death in this post as well.

Why we don't see God
But before I provide logical proof for life after death, let me address another important question which is often asked by many non believers that why we don't see God.

As I mentioned previously that purpose of our life is test. Now let's look into a logical example. If a student is taking a particular course, would it be fair to give that student answers to test questions? If the student is given the answers to all the questions during the exam then what is the purpose of that exam? He/she is already given answer to all the questions. You see that in this case, the test is pointless and everyone taking that test shall pass without any problem. The whole point of test is to give answers to the questions after the test and judge students based on their own answers to test questions. Similarly, if God shows Himself to His creation then everyone would believe in God. Where is the test? Therefore it makes more sense to see God after death when our exam is over. As I explained earlier that anyone who uses his/her intellect and consciousness given by God should come to this conclusion that God exists and our purpose of life is the test.

Why we need Divine Guidance

You mentioned in your post that if God exists and there is day of Judgement then it makes sense for Him to have his own laws for His Kingdom. I could not agree more on that.

But there is also another purpose for the Divine guidance. It is to reveal knowledge of unseen things. No one has seen God and if we want to know anything about God, that knowledge has to be revealed to us by God. We can't comprehend this through our intellect alone as we have our limitations. We know that our bodies have limitations, our eyes can only see up to a certain distance or can't see across a solid wall, we know we can only hear certain things. So if everything in our bodies has limitations, why we think we have no limitations when it comes to our intellect?
We can use our consiousness and intellect to start believing in God for the logical reason I mentioned above but we can't understand who God is with our intellect. Large portion of Quran is dedicated to beautiful attributes of God so that we can understand who God is. You will also find many chapters in Quran specifically discussing the life after death, heaven and hell etc because the knowledge of that is unknown to us and is only revealed by God. Why we need to know all that? Because it helps to prepare us for our journey to life after death.

I think my post is getting longer, I will post separate post to address logical proofs for the existance of life hereafter. TBC......

Logical reasoning to prove Day of Judgement

1. Human cells and spiritual soul


If we look in our life, we can see resurrection of our physical body in our own lifetime. Human body consists of approximately 37 trillion cells. These cells die and are replaced in a period of 7-15 years. In every 7-15 years our cells are changes, means our entire physical body changes. So it is recreation of our physical body but does this change our soul? The answer is no because we still have the same knowledge, same ideas, same concepts, same feelings and we feel we are the same person and not been changed even though our body has been changed.

This shows resurrection of our physical body is possible in hereafter because it is just happening right in front of our eyes. Also as our spiritual soul does not change even when our body cells are being changed, the soul will live after death of our physical body to see the consequences of our actions in the grave after death and hell or heaven after the day of Judgement. The flow chart above illustrates this reasoning in a logical way.

You may find link below informative, at least for me it was.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/cellular-microscopic/does-body-really-replace-seven-years.htm

2. Justice system in this world

This is probably the most unarguable proof as far as I am concerned. I have put together a flow chart for this argument below and will discuss briefly to make my case.



Need for justice is a clear proof for existence of day of judgement. As we know in this life, there is no true justice. There are lot of criminal people who commit crimes, but are all criminals judged for their crimes and punished justly in this life? Of course not. A lot of criminals commit crimes and run away never to be captured and judges. Especially the criminals who have authority. The people who have authority commit crimes against people under them and are more often not judged because they have the ultimate authority. Crimes can also be committed by a country against another country. How do we judge these crimes which are committed by power countries against poor countries? We can all agree that when US use nuclear power against Japan, it was a crime against humanity but did we human beings came up with any just punishment for such crimes? True justice is not possible in this world.

How about the people who kill more than one people? There are people who kill millions in war. What maximum punishment we can give to such criminals? Possible a death penalty? But that's taking one life at the cost of millions life this war criminal took? How is that Just and Fair? Death penalty in this case is not equivalent to his/her crimes. If we think about hereafter and eternal life in hereafter then we know that justice will be done by punishing this criminal according to his/her crimes because there is no death in hell fire and such criminals will be punished forever. The level of punishment can be more or less depending on their crimes.

From this we can conclude that absolute justice is not possible in this world because this world is created to test us and absolute justice will be done on the day of judgement. There is a need for another place for a final judgement and this place can only be after death. One of the attribute of Allah is that He is Just and He will punish those who committed the crimes and never got the right punishment for their crimes in this world. We can get away from punishment of our crimes in this world but there is no escape after death.

I read some where on the internet a parable "Two babies talk in the Womb" which is being used by some of my Christian friends to prove the existence of God and life after death. I personally find some issues with this parable but I still think it is very good parable to relate our limitation in this world to that of mother womb and hereafter to the life after delivery. It does leave a person to think about several key concepts which we are discussing and for that reason I will end my post by quoting this parable.

I'm sorry, there's no proof, either way.

All you have are arguments, arguments you find compelling but others don't.

It's not proof, and it's not something that can be arrived at using logic.

People believe for many reasons, some of which may be very personal, it may feel perfectly logical for them but not for anyone else.

If there is proof, then why is faith so important?

Faith is to believe in unseen, I agree with that but that's where Islam is different. It does not ask us to believe in unseen blindly but it asks us to use our intelligence and logic to arrive to our conclusions.

May be what you should do is try to refute the arguments I have given? Anyone who is thinking on creation around him/her will come to the conclusions I have mentioned above.If they dont, they will see the answers for themselves after death but it will be too late since there will be no return back to this world.

Your first example says the hereafter is possible. There's nothing to refute, saying something is possible doesn't mean it's a fact, it means there's a chance it could happen.

That's agnosticism.

As for your second example I can't see that a desire for justice means there will be any.


I don't want to try disproving any of the others because I'm not into that, but I'm sure there's plenty of hard core atheists who'd like to give it a go.

Although Fresco seems to have disappeared in a puff of imperialist smoke.

There are many unseen things we believe in. For example if I have to ask you have you seen your grand grand grand father? You will say, no you have not. But you do believe he existed.

Similarly I believe with certainty that God exists when I look at His creation around me. How a tree grows from nothing is a clear sign that there is God. Only God creates things from nothing, we humans need material to make things and those things don't grow is size automatically. Even if all humans get together, they can't create wing of a fly at their own.

Similarly we know death is a reality. The fact that death is real shows that someone has power over us. Even if whole humanity comes together, they can't save a single person from death?

Anyways, God has told that there will be very few who will believe in God and majority of human kind will be non-believing. My goal is to convey the message and it is up to you and others to take it or reject it. There is no compulsion in the religion. You are free to choose and as I said after death we will all find out if there is any life after death or not.

For you, not for everyone. The rest of your post is founded on belief.

I'm not disputing that you follow some sort of logic, but in the end it's just belief.

Instead of trying to prove things which can't be proven you'd be better off saying why your particular belief system is the most appropriate for today.

I've actually 'disappeared' because this thread is a combination of Islamic apologetics and high school debate. My current philosophical interest is in neurophilosophy in which the status of words like 'religion' and 'belief' are comparable to 'the four elements' of antiquity. From that pov, atheists who attempt to 'prove' anything are merely playing a game of semantic football (or a a Wittgensteinian 'language game') in which an offside decision is being disputed. For an atheist all that matters is that 'truth' and 'religion' go together like kippers and custard !
But far be it for an 'imperialist' like me to stop the dancing ! What was that film in which competitors danced til they dropped...the last one standing getting the prize ? (Got it !..."They Shoot Horses Dont They")

I thought it was because your argument descended into simplistic neo colonialist bullshit, which it did.

Don't you think it's better to engage with Muslims than isolate and ridicule them?

You can't talk about the ME and Islam without looking at the shameful colonial legacy of the West which is still going on today.

Sorry but I think you are a nice guy barking up the wrong tree. The neocolonialism issue was raised by you and is not considered significant by Islamic laureates themselves !

This guy (typically) does not 'engage'. He is dogmatically promoting exactly the same pseudo-scientific twaddle which is being utilized to justify the aggressive fundamentalist positions of his more extreme brethren. (Read up the linkage to terrorism if you don't believe me.) He's made a conscious choice to live in the 'colonial' West thereby reaping the material benefits thereof, probably without a second thought to the historical origins of those benefits, which you think are significant.

Take my advice. Don't waste your time !

You made a very blunt assessment of the contribution Muslims make to society by looking at Nobel prize alumni and nothing else.

I have not seen the OP promote terrorism or fundamentalism at all, and maybe some of the arguments he uses are the same as those who promote terrorism.

If you look at many of the recruits to IS and Al Qaida you'll find they know very little about Islam. That ignorance is exploited by the leaders of such groups who give their own interpretations devoid of context.

The ones who do know are less likely to be fooled, and I'd rather some young angry man with an axe to grind came across one of the OP's posts than some of the other stuff on the internet.

BTW, Islamic theistic claims to be more 'pior' to the OT they plagarized, should be taken no more seriously that OT claims that its stories had nothing to do with The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Where did you see hate & terrorism in my posts? I like to engage in peaceful and respectful dialogue but if someone has nothing but hate for Islam then I prefer not to engage in any discussion. My message over all has been very simple which is to call people towards the worship of one God. If you like to discuss you are very welcome.

I have explained in my first post that Judaism and Christianity is remnants of what was original revelations from God for people Israel. You can find some similarities but there is no plagiarism. For both OT & NT God is the father and believers are sons of God. Quran has many attributes of God but it has never used father as an attribute for God and never used son for those who worship God. There are many other examples I can give to prove that nothing is plagiarized from OT in Quran. You need to read more about Islam before passing your judgements which are purely based on google search.

Don't worry on my account, I'm not in any danger of becoming a convert.

From my point of view this was a conversation about belief that started out alright and then strayed into neo-colonialism.

Despite what you're saying this is still a huge problem in the ME. The carving up of the Ottoman Empire with all straight lines and no consideration of ethnic groups has lead to the situation with the Kurds right now.

The establishment of Israel put an expansionist American colony in the heart of the area. Mineral resources which should have benefitted the whole population was instead concentrated in the hands of tiny kingdoms with autocratic rule. Western values are preached but when push comes to shove interests trump values every day which is why dictators like Sisi get American money.

With all this **** going on the only voice that has stayed constant in its opposition to Western hegemony is that of the jihadist. Is it any wonder young disaffected people are being drawn towards them?

And I agree that Islam's harsh patriarchal nature has contributed to the ME falling behind the West, but I'd argue that the West's actions have been far more significant, and more importantly they've given the jihadis something to rail against.

It's like stacking a load of newspapers and wooden pallets on top of each other, soaking it in paraffin, giving a kid a box of matches and then attributing 100% of the blame to the kid when the lot goes up in flames.

According to Wikipedia it's Gunderson, Gil Gunderson, not Gamesh.

Of course you haven't preached violence. Nobody said you did. But you are quoting from the same pseudo-scientific sources cited by aggressive fundamentalists who use it to fuel their own agenda based on the ridiculous claims to the superiority of 'truth' that you preach.
Sam Harrris has pointed out that all believers in 'an afterlife' give succour to terrorism which might demote the value of 'this life'. From that pov, you go one stage further in the 'succour club'. (Phonetic pun intended !)

I am not referring to any websites, that's the reason my posts are normally longer. I have given arguments for the existence of life hereafter. You can read and comment on those instead of rejecting the idea all together with no evidence.

The problem exists in supposition. Your arguments were well structured, but not well evidenced - with key points relying on supposition.

Your strongest argument related to the big bang to where we are now. It ignored complex interactions over an unfathomably long period of time - which is possible, but it is also a reason so many believe in God.

Human cells weren't proof of the afterlife. It was a good argument, but dementia shows otherwise - as the spirit (if you believe in such) is present but the person is still forgetful. The only logical conclusion is that memory is not retained by the spirit but by the body, with the memory passing on to the new born cells. There are other arguments against your stance as well, though more complicated to explain.

You argued that justice was the strongest proof of an afterlife - I viewed that as the weakest argument you had. You appear to have started with an end point in mind, again (That justice must exist). The end point appears to be tied to your belief in God (more specifically, that God must be just). So your 'logic' only supports the end point, rather than looking at what is, and coming to a conclusion.

Your understanding of the word 'evidence' is as naive as your understanding of 'truth', logic', 'causality' and 'science'. All are paradigmatic and paradigms shift. That is why paradigms like 'Big Bang' are already questioned as it fails to account for all cosmological data.... and why 'logics'/'rationalities' transcendent of static Boolean set theory abound in frontier science.....and why 'causality' has no status in physics.
Your naivity stems from your conditioned first axiom of 'a Prime Mover', but that axiom is not required by most 'scientists'.
Your religion is inextricable from your psychological integrity. You don't need reasons to reinforce that....indeed your futile attempts to appeal to what you think science is about in order to reinforce that integrity does exactly the opposite, because it exposes your naivity !
So with the demoliton of your pseudo science, the only way to socially promote your particular religion versus others is to appeal to its relative social advantages, and that of course is an uphill struggle.