Judge the arguments
Three arguments, one question.
For centuries, philosophers have tried to prove God’s existence through reason alone. Choose an argument and decide for yourself.
The core
For over two thousand years, philosophers have attempted to establish God’s existence through reason alone — without relying on revelation, faith, or personal experience. The three classical arguments represent the most sustained effort in the history of thought to answer the most consequential question human beings can ask: is the universe the product of mind or of mindless process?
The ontological argument
First formulated by Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), the ontological argument proceeds entirely from the concept of God. God is defined as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” But a being that exists in reality is greater than one that exists only in the mind. Therefore, if God exists only in the mind, we can conceive of something greater — a God who also exists in reality — which contradicts the definition. Therefore God must exist in reality. The argument is a marvel of philosophical audacity: it attempts to derive the existence of the most important thing in the universe from the analysis of a concept.
The cosmological argument
The cosmological argument starts not from concepts but from the observable fact that things exist. Everything that exists has a cause. But the chain of causes cannot extend infinitely backward — an actual infinite regress is impossible. Therefore there must be a first cause, itself uncaused, that initiated everything else. This argument has roots in Aristotle’s unmoved mover and was developed with particular rigour in the Islamic Kalam tradition by al-Kindi and al-Ghazali, whose version — the Kalam cosmological argument — remains one of the most discussed in contemporary philosophy of religion.
The teleological argument
The teleological (or design) argument observes that the universe displays order, regularity, and apparent purpose. William Paley (1743–1805) gave its most famous formulation: if you found a watch on a heath, you would infer a watchmaker; the universe is far more complex than a watch; therefore it too must have a maker. Darwin’s theory of natural selection undermined the biological version of this argument by showing how complexity can arise without a designer. But the cosmic version — the fine-tuning of physical constants that permits life — has given the argument renewed force. If the gravitational constant were slightly different, no stars; if the strong nuclear force were slightly weaker, no atoms. Coincidence or design?
In the Islamic tradition
The Islamic intellectual tradition engaged with these arguments with extraordinary sophistication — and with a distinctive emphasis. The ontological argument never gained traction in Islamic philosophy. Muslim thinkers generally found it suspect: you cannot reason God into existence from a definition. The cosmological and teleological arguments, by contrast, were central.
Al-Kindi (d. c. 873), the first major Muslim philosopher, developed a cosmological argument grounded in the impossibility of an actual infinite. Al-Ghazali refined this into the Kalam cosmological argument that William Lane Craig has brought back into contemporary Western debate. The falāsifah — Ibn Sina in particular — developed a different version: the argument from contingency. Everything in the world is contingent (it could have been otherwise); but the totality of contingent things cannot explain its own existence; therefore there must be a Necessary Being whose existence is self-grounding.
The Qur’an itself uses teleological reasoning pervasively — inviting readers to observe the heavens, the alternation of night and day, the growth of plants, the formation of the human body — as signs (āyāt) pointing to their Creator. But the Qur’anic approach is not strictly an argument in the philosophical sense. It does not construct a formal proof; it invites an act of recognition. The signs are there for “those who reflect” — the assumption is that an attentive mind, confronted with the evidence, will see what is there to be seen.
Iqbal’s position was radical. He argued that all three classical arguments fail as proofs — but not because their conclusions are wrong. They fail because the enterprise of proving God through abstract reasoning is misconceived. God’s existence is not a hypothesis to be established by logical argument but a reality to be encountered in experience. The arguments are useful as intellectual exercises that sharpen the mind, but they cannot substitute for the direct encounter with the divine that religious experience provides. This is not fideism — Iqbal took reason seriously — but it is the insistence that reason, by itself, cannot deliver what only experience can.
Why this matters
In Pakistan, the existence of God is treated as so obvious that the arguments for it are rarely examined — and when they are examined, it is usually in a defensive mode, as ammunition against atheism rather than as genuine philosophical inquiry. This produces a paradox: a society that is deeply religious but philosophically incurious about the foundations of its own belief.
The cost of this incuriosity is real. When a young Pakistani encounters the new atheism — Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens — they are typically unprepared, not because the arguments against God are overwhelming but because they have never seriously engaged with the arguments for God. They discover, with shock, that the cosmological argument has objections, that the design argument was undermined by Darwin, that the ontological argument is rejected by most philosophers — and they have no intellectual resources with which to respond, because their education never taught them that these arguments existed, let alone that they have been debated for a thousand years with enormous rigour.
What Tadreej offers is not apologetics but literacy: the capacity to understand the arguments, their strengths, their limitations, and the alternatives. Iqbal’s own position — that the real evidence for God comes through experience rather than argument — is not a retreat from reason but a sophistication beyond it. Understanding why the arguments matter, even when they fail as proofs, is part of the intellectual equipment a serious person needs.
Connections
Appears in
Lecture II (Sections 1–5) · Lecture III (Sections 1–2)
Further reading
- William Lane Craig, The Kalām Cosmological Argument (Wipf and Stock)
- Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Discussions 1–4
- Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Lecture II