In the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful

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.

Appealing to the Heart, Intuition, and Experience
Natural Instinct – Fit rat ̣ Allāh

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 divinitatis have 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.

Allah said:

[Prophet], when your Lord took out the of spring from the loins of the Children of Adam and made them bear witness about themselves, He said, ‘Am I not your Lord?’ and they replied, ‘Yes, we bear witness.’ So you
cannot say on the Day of Resurrection, ‘We were not aware of this.’

Al-Suddī (d. 745) commented on this verse, saying, “For this reason, there is no one on the face of the earth but that he knows his Lord is Allah, and no one associates idols with Him except that he will say ‘I found my forefathers following another religion.’” The primordial covenant results in the innate impulse within people to seek out the higher power that they can sense, as they have done in some form or another throughout all of recorded history, to the point that some scientists today argue that belief in God or a higher power is hardwired into our genes.

All true and revealed religion confirms and conforms to the human nature that the Creator instilled within us. The Quran refers to human religious nature as fitṛat Allāh, the instinctive and inherent disposition with which God created people.

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