ATHEIST'S ARGUMENT (THE LAW OF CAUSALITY)

Atheist : You say that God exists. the chief among your proofs is the law of causation which stipulates that every artifact, creature or existent must have been brought into being by a maker, creator or efficient cause :  a piece of fabric points to the weaver(A craftsman who weaves cloth) a painting to the painter, an engraving to the engraver. The universe, according to this logic is the most cogent (Powerfully persuasive) proof of a Puissant (Powerful) God who created it. Granted that we believe in this creator, arent we entitled , according to the same logic, to ask, “Who created the Creator? who created the GOD?” Doesnt your own reasoning and in keeping with same law of causation lead you to this question?

Answer :

The question is meaningless. There is no dilemma or anything of that sort. you grant that God is a Creator and then you ask about who created Him, making Him both creator and created in the same sentence which is a contradiction.

The other side of your question’s meaningless is that you imagine the creator as being subject to the laws which governs his creatures. Causation is a law for us who live in space and time. God, who created space and time, is necessarily transcendent (Beyond and outside the ordinary range of human experience or understanding) in relation to both and it is an error on our part to think that he is bound either by them or, their laws. It is God who created the law of causation and we cannot consider Him as subject to the law He created.

In this sophistry of yours, you are like those dolls that, seeing they move by springs, imagine that the human who made them must also derive his motion from the action of springs. If they were told that he is self-moved, they would retort (counter) that is impossible for anything to move spontaneously since everything in their world is moved by a spring. Just like them, you cannot imagine that God exists in His own Essence with no need of an efficient cause : and this is because you see everything around you in need of such a cause. it is as if you thought that God needs a parachute to descend among men or a fast car to reach His prophets. God is infinitely exalted above such conceptions.

The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant realized, in his Critique of Pure Reason, that the mind cannot comprehend infinite realities and that it is by nature fitted only to apprehend(Get the meaning of something) particulars. It is incapable of apprehending such a universal or total existence as that of the divinity. God was known by conscience (Motivation deriving logically from ethical or moral principles that govern a person’s thoughts and actions) not by reason. Just as our thirst for water is a proof that it exists, our yearning for justice is proof to us that a just Being exists.

God is the proof which is in no need of another proof. He is the self-evident Truth. And He is the evidence that substantiates everything. He is manifest in order, precision, beauty and regularity: in tree leaves, in the feathers of a fawn, in the wings of the butterfly, in the fragrance of flowers, in the chanting of the nightingale, in the harmony of planets and stars which makes up that symphonic poem we call the universe.

The Quran spares us all these arguments with a few, expressive words. It says without sophistry and in a decisive clarity.

Source; Muslim Philosophy