GORAP — The Basic Dawah Conversation · Common Contentions

“I have never seen God, so He does not exist”

Handle with care. Do not spend ten minutes here. Contentions are detours; the manual's whole point is to keep control of the conversation.

In short

• 1.**Your great-great-great-grandmother.** No grave, no photograph, no DNA — and yet you do not doubt she existed.
• 2.**We infer from effects everywhere:** gravity, magnetism, other people's minds.
• 3.**The standard is consistency.** They accept inference in every other domain.
• 4.**Then point back to G:** the effect in question here is the universe itself.

The claim being examined

The demand is for direct sensory evidence, on the assumption that anything real can be seen.

The Islamic position

We accept countless unseen realities on the basis of their effects. Absence of sight is not absence of existence.

Analysis

The objection quietly assumes verificationism — that only the empirically observable is real — a position philosophy of science abandoned largely because it cannot satisfy its own criterion. The manual's ancestor illustration works because it is impossible to dismiss without also dismissing the person's own family history.

From the Qur'an

Sources

iERA, Pocket Dawah Manual — Common Contentions · iERA / Mission Dawah, Pocket Dawah Manual, p. 26

More in Common Contentions

• “But Jesus is the Son of God”
• “Doesn't evolution disprove God?”
• “There is so much evil and suffering — how can God exist?”