Verifying
Cynic:-
How can you verify that Allah exists and that Islam is valid? Who says so?
Comment:-
We have been through this before, several times. I suggest you look up past articles.
To repeat:-
(a) Verification depends on looking in the right direction and having the motive to seek and accept and having the capacity to perceive and understand. You cannot prove Einstein's theory to a moron. Nor to a school child. But even when people are intelligent but have no aptitude for mathematics or have not learnt it, or refuses to see or has other priorities, then things requiring mathematical proof cannot be proved to them. So it is with religious matters.
A discipline must be undergone. A period of education or training with appropriate techniques is usually required before understanding develops. And then people benefit from it to different degrees according to inherent or circumstantial differences and the efforts they make.
(b) The people who say Allah or God exists are the more highly conscious individuals known as Messengers, Prophets or Saints in Islam, and they corroborate each other. They cannot be said to be deluded because delusions cause disability, and these people are highly able. Others accept their word for it as you accept those of the scientists, or also have corroborative experience or accept it on various kinds of rational grounds or on psychological grounds. The concept may be regarded as the origin or centre of a framework in which all experiences (all facts, meanings and values) can be unified, and a centre of integration, stability and control, a real "I", can be developed. It facilitates greater adjustment to, and harmony Reality, both inner and outer. It is a useful concept, but also true, good and beautiful.
(c) We define "Allah" as the fundamental self-existing reality from which all other things derive. The proof of His existence is in the fact that all these other things including matter, energy, order, life, intelligence and consciousness, do exist and we experience them. It is like knowing anything else from its effects. How do you know the force of gravity or electricity exists? By its effects. A force is defined as that which causes change. Particular kinds of forces cause particular kinds of changes. But it is also assumed that something constant exists which changes. The existence of this self-existing constant and the forces are mysteries, themselves unexplained, but have to be accepted as fundamental truths.
Scientists are looking for a Unified Field Theory such that all forces can be explained by it and the consistency of thought about the Universe can be maintained. Without it contradictions can exist which would annul any certainty or knowledge about the Universe. This single force must be integral to what is self-existing. We will then have only one single unexplained and inexplicable thing. Everything else will then be explainable in relation to that. It will be the Ultimate and the Absolute Irreducible.
Islam already has such an Ultimate Absolute Irreducible concept. But it is more than a thought and affects feelings, motives and action as well. Instead of leading an accidental, undirected, automatic life, the Muslim attempts or ought to attempt, to base his life consciously and deliberately in a self-consistent manner on this realization and that his own soul is derived from the Spirit of Allah. Surrender (Islam) means just this.
(d) The verification of Islam, for the person seeking verification, lies in the effectiveness with which all this is done by the person applying it.
But it is not the word which we are concerned with. It is the Reality to which it points. If you do not like the word, use another as long as it means what is being conveyed by Islam.
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