The material in this blog is now available at amazon.com under the title: Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an.
وَاعْلَمُوا أَنَّ اللَّهَ يَحُولُ بَيْنَ الْمَرْءِ وَقَلْبِهِ وَأَنَّهُ إِلَيْهِ تُحْشَرُونَ
We know GOD better than we know ourselves.
Yes, that is exactly what I mean. Now let me explain.
We experience our world in two main ways – the sensory and the supersensory. (For the latter term we could say mental, psychical, or spiritual instead; each has its own problems and qualifications.)
Sensory things are objects of sense, perceived either directly through the five human senses or indirectly through a numerical value or instrument that represents them, as we require for the most distant galaxies and the tiniest particles. Anything in the physical realm must ‘prove’ itself by a reproducible, ‘objective’ experience or a definite quantity; many consider this to be all that reality is.
But our experience of the supersensory is just as compelling, and immeasurably so. Our subjective experiences might also be termed objects, and may be shared with others in various ways, mainly through language, but we do not sense them nor can we measure them. When we think or feel ‘love’, for example, a brain scan may reveal the activation of certain regions or pathways of the brain, but a snapshot of that moment is not ‘love’ in any way or form. We know nonetheless what love is, or at least what it should be, and it is certainly not just an image from a machine. There is, moreover, broad agreement on what it refers to, and we can talk meaningfully about it with those whose experience of it may vary in detail from ours.*
* You and I could disagree, for example, about what ‘justice’ comprises. You may say that a just society should strive for equal outcomes, while I might emphasize the justice of each keeping what he/she earns, regardless of social differences. With the help of a translator, we might even carry on this discussion in different languages, using various terms for ‘justice’. But the core concept, the referent we are both aiming at, can be defined in such a way that we can agree on its denotation even as we dispute its connotation.
The same is true of other non-sensory items in our experience, all of which rely on language for their communication. Communicating something and knowing something are different, however. Even an illiterate deaf mute with no words at his disposal can feel and identify what we would call poverty, power, anger, trust, and so on.
Among these supersensory objects is a class of ideals and excellences, which I will call absolutes, that constitute our highest standards in all realms. We use some of these standards, such as equality and precision, to appraise objects in the physical realm. Indeed, our knowledge (another absolute) of the physical world would not be possible without them. Concepts such as justice, perfection, peace, and beauty are members of a formidable group of values that we use to appraise not only objects but also other concepts; we may even call these absolutes the ‘gods’ of our mental being. We will never encounter them directly in the physical world, but only mysteriously, through their effects on our minds and hearts. Although we may devise for them theories from psychology or anthropology, we truly cannot account for them in purely scientific terms. These are the deities, all of them demanding the highest respect and recognition by the vast majority of mankind, on which debaters rely to dispute the existence of the Supreme Deity.
Debaters appeal to truth, logic, rationality, sanity, progress, justice, morality, charity, and decency in dismissing the idea of God. I admire and agree with them, up to a point. A supreme being lacking those qualities would fall below the beautiful standards enshrined in our minds; it would be an idol, not Absolute Divinity. Only by what we regard as reasonable or fair can we convincingly condemn this or that religion. In other words, a truer, lovelier, more comprehensive supersensory absolute always defeats a baser, narrower one. We rely on superior gods to eliminate the false ones.
Viewed individually, however, each of these absolutes is incomplete. If we go on too long about ‘justice’, for example, someone might get up and exclaim, ‘But what about compassion?’ Another might object to our having ignored ‘knowledge’, or having sacrificed ‘life’ for mere concepts. We have no choice, then, but to seek an even higher synthesis of all our standards in one Supreme Standard. Furthermore, if we take them as a whole, we realize that the culmination, harmonization, and integration of all these absolutes in One would also have to possess perfect power, intelligence, and compassion to implement comprehensive justice, for example, and be infinite and eternal to ensure those values’ consistency for all times and places. Each absolute demands another, and ultimately all the rest at once, if our loyalty is to be complete and lasting. These separate standards or values can only cohere in One Personal-Suprapersonal Absolute – our ideal true GOD.**
** Throughout this book, I refer to GOD, the One Absolute Deity Who comprehends (and transcends) all absolutes, God, the monotheistic Deity that represents the traditional object of worship in various religions, and a god, any idol that haunts and drives us even when we think we are not remotely motivated by religion.
Not the sectarian God of this or that religion, as people generally understand the word, but the Authority Who legitimizes the valid criticism of all lesser gods and speaks to each of us, even today, through our limitless passion for truth and morality.
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The GOD You Already Know 
A very insightful read that helps one to better understand the nature of God. Thank you for sharing.
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