When atheists attack a belief system, they naturally assail it at its weakest points, namely where it makes concrete claims or prescribes or permits particular acts. The naïve devotee may feel flustered or angry that his faith has been so rudely and yet cogently derided. A wise believer, however, does not engage in hand-to-hand combat on the narrow fields chosen by her antagonist. She remembers that the disputable details of a religion, where God comes down, as it were, to interact with individual characters and cultures, are like baited fishing lines by which the Truth ‘catches’ up the souls of believing individuals and communities. The lines to GOD are straight, but the hooks are barbed and bent. As I have pointed out before, AL-LAH describes Himself in ways that are literally anthropomorphic and intentionally poetic, even as He asserts that nothing is like unto Him. The first iterations of a faith are powerful insofar as they are symbolic and expansive, capable of being understood at multiple levels.
Then He attended to the firmament, arranging it as seven heavens. He, with everything, is One Who Knows. (Q2:29)
ثُمَّ اسْتَوَى إِلَى السَّمَاءِ فَسَوَّاهُنَّ سَبْعَ سَمَاوَاتٍ وَهُوَ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ عَلِيمٌ
Only later do literal, materialistic readers, both dogmatic proponents and atheist opponents, agree on a debased level of straitened specificity that ends up ripping the faith into incoherent shreds.
Worshippers go astray into idolatry when they take their symbols to be realities, and channel the devotion due to GOD Alone into whatever vehicles, such as icons, relics, rituals, and statues, they thought would help promote that worship. Science, the study of the natural world, likewise degenerates into scientism when its adherents take its field of study to be the entirety of knowledge and the arbiter of all truth. Religious literalism and physicalist scientism feed off each other’s narrowness; each must bear a certain amount of blame for the existence of the other.
Given the unpoetical, empiricist tendencies in contemporary culture, our present-day readings of scriptures have the unfortunate result of literally taking God to be something or someone else. This conception presents a big fat target for those who wield the Occam’s razor of eliminating unnecessary additional explanations for phenomena. If a meteorological account of precipitation suffices, why do we need God to send down rain from heaven? If a quantum vacuum state can account for the emergence of particles out of virtual nothingness, why should we postulate a Creator at all? If we can make our world relatively safe for human life, our minds content with scientific facts, and our hearts cheerfully resigned to ultimate extinction, why bother with a Saviour?
Fallacious assumptions always lead to fallacious conclusions. The fallacy in all these meanderings, by both believers and unbelievers, is that GOD is somehow external to His creation. Otherness of any sort implies countability and parity. But when we say something is good, we refer to the Good, however unintentionally, as implicit or subtly present in our valuation. It is not something else; rather it is invoked inseparably and concomitantly with our conscious reference to a specific good.
Meaning is the ideational relationship of a part to a whole and, consequently, to connoted parts within that whole. In examining meaning, we usually skip past the assumed or invisible whole right to the part that ‘matters’. So if I point to an empty glass next to my plate, the waiter knows mediately that I want it filled. The waiter and I are operating within a generally understood protocol of restaurant service, of assumed mental states, and of various beliefs that constitute our faith in a stable, predictable order of physical and social norms. But if I were to point to a glass of water standing on the pavement under an eavestrough spout in a rainstorm, the whole context of which that glass is a part utterly changes the meaning. That same waiter and I would probably have a good laugh at the irony of how an appropriate gesture within the restaurant becomes absurdly humorous outside in the rain. He would not bother to fill that glass, except perhaps in jest.
Just as an implicit whole informs each meaning, so does GOD wholly inform each lesser whole. Every context has GOD as its context. And if critics were to counter with their usual rejoinder about an infinite regress, as if GOD were just an item in a series of items, my reply is simply that GOD is the Infinite, all the way back (or ahead) to forever. GOD is ultimately meant in all that we mean. An infinite regress of meaning only signifies that GOD is meant infinitely.
For the scientific materialist, the problem with meanings is that they are physically nowhere to be found. Perceived by the mind, affirmed by the spirit, and essential to any type of communication, they are nonetheless intangible, immeasurable, and unprovable. No brain scan will show us one, and no amount of data can confirm one. The whole world might agree on a meaning, and yet the whole world could still be wrong. However much the scientist might disdain meanings for these reasons, he cannot dispense with them for even a second of his existence. All of his facts are useless without their significance, and lesser meanings, such as mass and evidence and humanity, are equally useless to us if they do not evoke a sense of precision, reliability, relevance, truth, or even beauty. Observations depend on what they mean, meanings depend on their greater meanings, namely the absolutes by which we guide our lives, and those absolutes, in turn, depend for their ultimate value on the One Absolute Who is the Source of all meaning . . . regardless of what lesser meanings the physicalists might agree upon despite themselves.
The GOD You Already Know 