For me, therefore, GOD is the One Who creates, includes, and yet transcends all our conscious or unconscious acts of framing. He does this through a process experienced by certain chosen persons:
He [Muhammad] does not speak from inclination. / It is no less than an inspired revelation. (Q53:3-4)
وَمَا يَنْطِقُ عَنْ الْهَوَى
إِنْ هُوَ إِلاَّ وَحْيٌ يُوحَى
It may be that you do not accept the claims of inspired persons. But GOD also does this naturally, as the Creator: And GOD created you and what you do. (Q37:96) And, finally, He does this by simply being GOD. This will need some explanation, and so I return to the examples on the previous page.
1.1 For a large part of the world’s population, the traditional monotheistic God is the ideal frame for supplying our meanings, fulfilling our needs, and dispelling our fears. The prospect of a greater reality, yet unrevealed, enriches the meanings that we presently possess. The ever-increasing challenge of gratitude for what we have already received stills the urge to acquire more, and our dread of death and other adversities are likewise laid to rest amid our wonder at God’s amazing powers of healing and conjuring life out of the unlikeliest corners of the universe.
1.2 The omniscience and omnipotence of God provide a natural frame for humility and patience. By contemplating infinity and eternity, two aspects of Divine Transcendence, we find our pride and haste to be among the silliest of mankind’s many short-sighted mistakes.
1.3 Over time, the original expansiveness of the God-frame is constricted to serve particular worldly interests. In every religion, the clergy appropriate God’s Knowledge as their own, and the rulers title themselves the Shadow of God or dress themselves in the Divine Right of Kings to consolidate their hold on power. The wealthy, meanwhile, claim their riches to be the sign of their being blessed by God. In all such cases, the concept of God is imperceptibly shrink-wrapped to fit the corrupt and puny figures of people who pose as savants, saints, or heroes, exempt from questioning.
2.1 If all good comes from God, then how is it that atheists can also be good people and do obviously good deeds? The answer, of course, is that GOD works through all His creation, including atheists, whether they believe in Him or not. Faith in GOD, moreover, is but one of the ways we reveal ourselves to Him, and it too has many levels and dimensions, including the pseudo-atheism that nonetheless believes in moral good (one of GOD’s manifestations) and the wholesale atheism that dismisses the concepts of good and evil altogether. This last version, of course, is absurd at a practical level; even single-celled organisms are motivated to seek some form of survival (their ‘good’) and to avoid some form of destruction (harm, or ‘evil’).
People tend to conflate GOD with religion, and think that if they can denounce religion then they are done with GOD. But the alternate goods that they propose, such as freedom and reason, are divine qualities. In other words, they need GOD to debunk religion. They need GOD, period.
2.2 Intolerance is found in many forms, some of them mandated by established religions. Secularism can also be intolerant. Whatever the shape of the social space in which tolerance permits diversity and intolerance sets limits, the result is the ‘religion’ of that society. Because the balance between the freedom to differ and the need for conformity is constantly being tested and negotiated in society, absolutes such as justice, freedom, solidarity, and efficiency are continuously invoked and discussed. The clashes between these absolutes and their consequent compartmentalization disguise the reality of their having One Source Who manifests Himself in various aspects according to our desires and demands.
2.3 While secular frames start out proclaiming the welfare of all mankind, their adherents soon find that humanity is too diverse and changeable to provide any stable notion of an absolute good. They finally resort to what is clearest and most consistent in this fluid mass of wishes – themselves – and find there an urgency and immediacy that a theist would only grant to God. And what arbitrates among these disparate selves, once a transcendent absolute has been discarded? – the governing powers of the age. In this way, values are first atomized and then politicized, and ethics are transformed into yet another platform in the overarching struggle for power. Without GOD, the absolutes we thought we knew become playing cards in yet another version of the survival of the strongest and richest.
3.1 Atheist critics of religion tend to assume that religion can only be a tool for justifying oneself and excusing one’s domination of others. Such critiques ignore the obvious historical fact that most of the religious role models in all cultures exemplify the opposite traits of meekness, self-denial, and long-suffering. But then the critics get to work to show how such exemplars are used to instill passivity in believers, or that they do not measure up to our more exacting current standards. However one frames the matter, another frame can be adduced to make the initial frame look small and inadequate. Atheists might prefer an endless and fruitless squabble over which frame (i.e. god) is supreme. But the theist, faced with an infinite regression of ever-grander conceptual frames, calls a halt with some version of AL-LAHU Akbar – GOD is the Greatest (Frame of all).
3.2 GOD comprehends not only Reason but also the reasons why rationalists adore Reason – its clarity, consistency, and universality, among other things. But Reason, too, has its limits; it cannot, by its very nature, prescribe the good or motivate the will. Ideal rationality is dispassionate, mathematical, and indefinitely repetitive – a conceptual machine, in other words. And for this reason, Reason would never be attractive if it did not offer yet another feature that modern man finds irresistible – power. The claims of modern science carry so much weight precisely because of something that irrationally motivates so many of its proponents, namely the power to build, change, and destroy things. In this world, as we have seen with Fire, no blessing or gift as great as Reason comes as an unalloyed good or evil. Its tool-like or machine-like properties are precisely why Reason can never be the Ultimate Frame.
3.3 By setting mathematical reasoning as the gold standard for all reason, today’s rationalists end up excluding not only much of the rough-and-ready calculation by which we navigate ethical dilemmas and social situations, among other things, but also the kind of thought that examines such matters as why Reason is itself an absolute, on the one hand, and why it does not suffice, on the other hand, for all the other absolutes by which human beings live their lives.*
* The truth of every formal system of meaning, such as arithmetic or logic, cannot be demonstrated within that system. Each language owes its ultimate validation to a higher metalanguage, according to Tarski’s undefinability theorem (from Wikipedia). Or in Qur’anic terms:
وَفَوْقَ كُلِّ ذِي عِلْمٍ عَلِيمٌ
Over every knower is [another] one who knows. (Q12:76)
Philosophy, especially logic and epistemology, and theology go much farther in exploring the limits of human reasoning, but critics of faith do not generally expound on how their own criticisms are faith-free (and they are not) or what the logical limits of reasoning are. And in seeking freedom from all principles except those of empirical science, they not only unchain and legitimize the powers that control them, namely their desires and the mores of the moment, but they also continue to unknowingly submit to the Absolute Freedom of the One Who includes their delusions in His Plan.
4.1 When one seeks the highest, the best, the truest, and so on beyond the bound of words, one is in engaged, knowingly or not, willingly or not, in a quest for GOD. This aim consumes the seeker, because in many ways the goal is greater than the erring aim of any one marksman. It has motivated and inspired the hearts of those who yearn for GOD throughout history, and long before history. There is nothing new or original about it, except that our origins are, in some sense, in it; striving for the ultimate is what makes us human. The seed of GOD, planted in the breast of every human being, will inevitably take root and grow, however parched and hard and hostile the soil may be. GOD is not to be denied.
4.2 You may claim to do all this, and do it better, without the ‘God’ concept. Fine; you owe Him the best you can do in any case. But when you have done your best, and fallen short as all of us must fall at last, cast your imagination past that box of thought you constructed for yourself out of nothing but your own experience and knowledge and consider what you could have done within a greater frame, drawing upon the mental, emotional, and spiritual resources of those who dreamed higher and reached farther than you. Consider the shape and force of what you do not know, compared to what you do. Then, perhaps, you may start to realize what the concept of ‘God’ does for those like you who aim, not for the stars, but for the Maker of stars and concepts alike. The greatest discipline is of those who transcend their own discipline, and confess their failings that they might be helped to go beyond them. For no one enters this world, or leaves it, alone. How foolish is it to refuse help when it was always and sincerely intended to help you!
And [consider] when We told the angels, “Prostrate yourselves to Adam;” so they did, except Iblis, who said, “Shall I prostrate myself to one whom You created out of clay?” (Q17:61)
وَإِذْ قُلْنَا لِلْمَلاَئِكَةِ اسْجُدُوا ِلأَدَمَ فَسَجَدُوا إِلاَّ إِبْلِيسَ قَالَ أَأَسْجُدُ لِمَنْ خَلَقْتَ طِينًا
4.3 The angels have been commissioned to devote themselves to our service, symbolized by their prostration. In serving us, they are serving GOD, and thus are they blessed. Their superiority to us not only does not exempt them from such service, but is paradoxically confirmed by it. Iblis, the original devil, cannot comprehend this point, and is thus condemned to a career of pride, contempt, and frustration. He cannot accept the holy irony in how GOD has ordered His creation, and so espouses evil as the logical response to a good that defies his sense of what is right. Knowing that he will fail, he fights nonetheless, almost as a point of honour and principle (though ego is his real motivation).
His failure to understand leads Satan to the disdain and disregard I mentioned as the final frame of those who seek the truth with what they think are the best of intentions, except that they are dragged down by pride. That is the downfall of the purist and fanatic – an inability to ‘let go and let God’. To serve GOD and accept His discipline, we must learn to serve in a world that defies our attempts to understand it and control it. It is a messy and confusing place, and identifying ourselves with it will certainly immerse us in its filth and falsehood. But to condemn it, to ignore it, and to work against it, let alone dismiss and scoff at its Creator, is to condemn, ignore, and destroy our own selves, for we are part of it, and have been imparted some spark of the Divine with which to transform it and give it a greater frame. This is a gift greater than ourselves. Rather, it is the gift that we become by giving of ourselves.
The GOD You Already Know 