Posted on 01/10/2012 5:29:50 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Of course the sums, the shape of the earth and the number of moons are subject to direct verification.
Prove allah exists.
...or I keel you!
Yes, the only truly convincing argument for the validity of Islamic doctrine is that disagreeing in areas ruled by Islam can get you killed.
By no means is such an argument logically valid...but the body's desire for self preservation make it convincing to many.
Not as direct as the existence of the observer themselves. I can not be absolutely sure my body exists. I CAN be absolutely sure that I exist...which is the ONLY thing that can be know by direct verification.
Sums can be known only if you trust reason. If you do not trust reason, you can not know sums or know anything else except that you exist.
Observation and reason however, can show what is LIKELY to exist beyond your own soul. It seems LIKELY that your body exists and the natural world that you observe through it exist. However this is based on faith. A very reasonable faith...though not something you can be certain of.
All the things observed at that level of nature available for study with the senses show a pattern...the patterns can be studied and put together and inductions made and LIKELY conclusions drawn. Some of the ways to do this are called "science" some are not and some people argue about whether it is "science" or not.
An observed pattern that happens again and again and again everywhere we see is that all things in nature are not self existent. Hamburgers do not simply come into existence as if by magic. Nor do cars. Nor airplanes. Nor atoms. Nor molecules. Nor inorganic matter. Nor organic matter. The overwhelming pattern is that all the actual things subjected to nature must have causes outside themselves.
One could speculate, like Hume, that things must have always existed and are an infinite chain of temporal causes. But one familiar with mathematical limits or the calculus can reason that stretching the problem of dependency into the past can not solve the problem even if one presumes an infinite amount of time. For instance the limit of pi as n approaches infinity can not be zero. For pi does not care about the value of n. Nor does set of all the things operating in nature care about the value of time as it approaches infinity.
Put another way. As we all would not assume that a hamburger would simply exist by itself at a certain point of time for no reason outside itself. An intelligent person who considered it carefully would expect a universe with many hamburgers and much more to exist by itself for now reason outside of itself for all eternity.
And YET...we have a universe just like that. Thus, however hard it is to imagine though, no matter what your cosmology, reason demands that at least SOMETHING MUST be immune from needing an external cause. Intelligent people for centuries have speculated about what that thing might be like...but it seems silly not to recognize that such a cause is not transcendent of nature and God like.
Thus if you are to trust what seems most LIKELY you should be inclined to recognize nature exists and that it is dependent on something greater than it that transcends it to make it exist.
Sorry that I covered a lot of ground quickly in this response...but I was trying to keep it post size, so it is not exhaustive of the subject. Nor am I an authority on it, I am only presenting these arguments as an outline of one of the most obvious "proofs" of God (I put proof in quotes because, as I said above, nothing is certain except the existence of one's own soul...for the observer can be fooled by illusion...but if there is no observer no fooling can take place).
I love how atheists are so sure that G-d does not exist.
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