Islamic Studies

Assignment No.1

Topic:

Arguments For The Existence of God.

Submitted To:
Dr. Muhammad Zubair

Submitted By:
Farhan Anwer
SP17-BPH-007
BS Physics
4th Semester

COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus.

Question :

Name the various proofs for the existence of God. Which argument is the strongest
one in your opinion ?

Answer :

The subject existence of Almighty God is of fundamental importance especially in a religion. I

believe this is a topic which can foster interreligious amity and bring together the followers of
various religions.

Following are some proofs for the existence of God.

The Argument from Design

 There seems to be design in the universe.

 This design didn’t come about by chance; So we can say that
 The universe was intelligently designed.
 Whenever there are things that cohere only because of a purpose or function (for
example, all the complicated parts of a watch that allow it to keep time), we know that
they had a designer who designed them with the function in mind; they are too
improbable to have arisen by random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a
hardware store could not assemble a watch.)
 Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere only because they have a
function for example, the eye has a lens, retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found
in the same organ only because together they make it possible for the animal to see.
 Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer.
 God is the non-human designer.
 God exists.

The Cosmological Argument

 God is the only thing that is outside of the universe.

 Everything has a cause;
 Causes can’t go backward indefinitely;
 Thus There is a first cause, the gods.
God as a Necessary Being 

 God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”;

 The greatest thing, to be the greatest thing, must exist;
 Thus God exists.

Scientific Proofs

 We are at the right distance from our Sun so that temperatures are conducive to life.
 We have the right atmospheric pressure for liquid water at our surface.
 We have the right ingredients the right balance of heavy elements and organic molecules 
for life to arise.
 We have the right amount of water so that our world has both oceans and continents.
 And life started on our world very early, sustained itself for our planet’s entire history,
and gave rise to us: sentient, self-aware creatures.

The Quran presents the universe as an evidence of the existence of God. It says: ‘In the creation
of the heavens and the earth and in the alterations of the night and the day, there are indeed signs
for men of understanding’. ‘And among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and
the diversity of your tongues and colours. In that surely are signs for those who possess
knowledge’.

These verses of the Quran clearly indicates that the study of the creation of the heavens and the
earth leads to Almighty God. So, I now present some aspects of science on the existence of God.

In the 21st century, astronomy has developed to such an extent that the age of the universe has
been determined. No doubt, in the light of new observations, the estimated age may be revised in
future. Nevertheless, the determination of the age of the universe on the basis of observations
and the laws of nature is one of the greatest achievements. According to our present knowledge,
the age of our universe is about fifteen billion years. It is obvious that if an object’s age can be
found, it means that the object did not exist from eternity. Hence, our universe did not exist from
eternity. Our inference of the age of the universe is based on observations. We have learnt that
our universe is composed of innumerable galaxies, each galaxy consisting of billion of stars like
our sun. In 1929, the remarkable discovery was made by Professor Edwin Hubble from a study
of the spectra of galaxies, that galaxies are varing away from each other with speeds proportional
to their separation from each other. Hence, in the remote past, the galaxies were very close to one
another. According to the generally accepted view, all the matter that comprises the galaxies was
confined to a space some 15 billion years ago. It was exceedingly hot and dense. Then a big bang
occurred and the matter got broken up into many parts, which receded from one another. From
these parts the galaxies and the stars were formed.

It has been inferred from an important principle of physics, namely the law of entropy that states
that our universe did not exist from eternity. According to this principle, if hot and cold bodies
are in contact with each other, energy would flow from the hotter bodies to the colder bodies
until, at last, the temperature would be universally uniform and there would be no more useful
energy; hence life itself would cease to exist.

It draws the attention very effectively to the existence of God by referring to the creation as
follows: ‘Do not the disbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were a close-up (mass) and
we opened them out? And we made from water every living thing. Will they not then believe ?

Chemistry discloses that matter is ceasing to exist, same varieties exceedingly slowly, others
exceedingly swiftly. Therefore, the existence of matter is not eternal. Consequently, matter must
have a beginning’.The presence of radioactive elements in the universe also indicates that the
universe is not eternal. Dr Donald Robert Carr writes: ‘In a universe which had no beginning but
had always existed, no radioactive elements would remain.’

According to any standard of comparison, and with regard to any known physical system, natural
or artificial, the physical human being is by far the most highly ordered and complex. In the
following, unless otherwise noted, whenever we speak of the human being, we will mean the
physical human being and not the human being in any metaphorical, cultural, or spiritual sense.
We can already draw a first conclusion: Since the human being is the most highly ordered
structure in the known observable universe, the human being is the most improbable of all
physical systems and thus the least likely to have been produced by a random process. So, let us
take a look at the process that did produce the human being the process we call evolution.
First, we need to establish the facts of the process of evolution. The observables of the
phenomenon of evolution are primarily the fossil record, found in the layers of sediment in
various locations all over the earth. If there were contradictions or ambiguities in this record, we
would have a major problem in interpreting these data. However, such is not the case. All these
sedimentary layers show the same basic configuration, namely, that higher, more complex forms
of life followed simpler, less complex forms. In other words, the process of evolution was a
process of complexification, of moving from relative simplicity and disorder towards relative
complexity and order. It was therefore a process of moving from more probable configurations
towards less probable configurations. Although we can easily become involved in intricate
discussions about exactly how long the physical universe, the solar system, or the earth have
existed, or how long conditions for life existed on earth before life actually appeared, the basic
pattern is unequivocally clear.

The first, and most rudimentary, life forms are thought to have been blue-green algae, which may
have appeared as early as 2 billion years ago. In any case, following the initial appearance of the
algae, there was a long period (perhaps a billion years) during which they remained the only life
forms. After the algae became abundant, other early forms of plant life appeared. Through
radioactive dating and other methods, it has been established with a high degree of certainty that
the first crude forms of invertebrate animal life could not have appeared earlier than about 600
million years ago. Thus, the process of evolution, from one-celled animals to the emergence of
the mature human being (about 50,000 years ago), took no longer than 600 million years, which,
from the geological perspective, is a fairly short time-span. This shows that there was no time for
anything like an “unlimited” or “open-ended” experimentation in evolution. Moreover, it is
estimated that roughly a thousand species intervened between the appearance of one-celled
organisms and the mature human being. In each case, the transition from one species to another
was a process leading from a lower (and therefore more probable) to a higher (and thus less
probable) configuration. Finally, the evidence from the fossil record consistently shows that
evolution was not a smooth, gradual process. Rather, there were long periods of stasis and
stability (the so-called plateaus), punctuated by much shorter periods of rapid change(towards
complexification). Thus, evolution is clearly an example of a process that exhibits a significant,
persistent deviation from randomness. Within a specified and limited time-frame, there was a
persistent and recurrent movement from more probable to less probable configurations. It is
therefore unscientific and irrational to attribute this process to chance. Indeed, just the transition
from one species to the next could, if left to chance, take about as long as the lifespan of the earth
itself, and to account for the whole evolutionary process we would have to multiply this figure
by a thousand, yielding a figure much greater than the estimated lifespan of the entire universe.
In the light of these considerations, we have a scientific right indeed we are compelled by the
logic of scientific methodology to conclude that the process of evolution is the result of the
action of some unobservable force. In particular, we human beings are the “end product” of
evolution and thus owe our existence to this force. It seems reasonable to call this force “God,”
but anyone uncomfortable with that name can simply call it “the evolutionary force” Moreover,
it is most reasonable to suppose that the force of evolution is different from all other forces that
science has so far discovered or hypothesized, because according to our present knowledge, no
other force could have produced the phenomenon of evolution. Now, just as in the case of
gravity, a skeptic can refuse to accept the existence of the evolutionary force by choosing to
believe that evolution was a random process, a series of highly unlikely coincidences; but in
making such a choice the skeptic relinquishes any claim to be acting scientifically or rationally.
From the point of view of scientific methodology, one must always choose the most likely
among all known, logically possible alternatives. Although it is logically possible that evolution
was a random process, it is clearly not the most likely possibility. Such a skeptic, especially a
practicing scientist, needs to explain why he or she accepts and follows this basic principle of
scientific methodology elsewhere but makes an exception in the case of evolution. If one has no
trouble believing in gravity or the strong nuclear force, based on evidence of a kind similar to
that for the evolutionary force, then why irrationally resist belief in the force of evolution or
God?

In short, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and geology are all unanimous in rejecting the
view that the universe had no beginning. There is something behind all the evolution and that is
not any kind of force that is God.