Knowledge of God’s existence is often taken for granted by believers. The authentic religious experience—affirmed again and again in a Muslim’s daily life—makes faith in God feel so natural as to be assumed. But belief in God and the quest for existential truth is not an easy prospect for many people, especially in a social environment in which faith is derided as superstition, wishful thinking, or even as a dangerous fantasy.
In the Islamic tradition, the case for God’s existence is solid in terms of its rational foundations as well as the purpose, meaning, comfort, and guidance that it gives to our lives.
The Quran inspires conviction by appealing to the aspects of the inner life of human beings, namely, to the heart and the mind. Intuition and experience work in tandem with logic and reason to arrive at a state of certainty in faith.
This understanding of conviction is reinforced by modern scientific conceptions. Cognitive scientist Justin Barrett, for example, demonstrates that belief in God—and beliefs more generally—are formed and attained in two ways: 1) non-reflective,
intuitive beliefs that result from experience; and 2) reflective, conscious beliefs that result from thought.The human being naturally forms beliefs from these two sources.
Similarly, the case for God’s existence in the Quran and Sunnah involves both sources of beliefs: heart-based appeals based on intuition and mind-based appeals based on rational reflection.
Human beings sense the existence of God—or what they perceive as a higher power—by pure instinct, with or without a prophetic revelation to guide them. Expressions of this sensus divinitatishave appeared in cultures and religions all over the world,
despite them being widely separated by time, geography, and language. In Islamic spiritual terms, this is because God took a primordial covenant with every person before the world was created that they would recognize their Creator.
