Does God Exist? Javed Ahmed Ghamidi Makes the Quran’s Case at the University of Delhiکیا خدا موجود ہے؟
Fielding students’ questions, the Pakistani scholar walked through how the Quran reasons toward a Creator: from what we can sense, to what we can infer, to what the Prophets report.
When a student at the University of Delhi opened with the oldest question in religion, how does Islam establish that God exists, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi did not begin with scripture. He began with method. Before asking what the Quran says about God, he said, one must ask how the Quran asks anyone to reason at all.
Three sources of knowledge
Ghamidi described three channels through which people know anything. The first is the senses, outer and inner: we see the sun and the moon, and we also observe our own grief, love and hatred directly. The second is observation and reasoning, where the mind takes those facts and draws out what follows from them. The third is news, reports from the past or from others, which count as knowledge once they have been verified.
“I am a creature”
From there, the argument is short. That a person is created is, in his words, an existential fact, as undeniable as death. We watch children come into being and can trace the process stage by stage. The mind then insists on a cause.
Your being a creature necessitates that you have a creator.Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, as rendered from the Urdu recording
He said only two answers have ever been offered. One is that the universe itself is the creator, which he called the standard conclusion of philosophy and atheism. The other is the testimony of the Prophets: that the universe and humanity were both made by a living, all-knowing, wise being beyond the universe. For the second answer he pointed to the final Prophet, Muhammad (peace be upon him), and to the Quran, which he argued meets standards of knowledge no human speech can, and therefore comes from outside the world it describes.
Describing the indescribable
Asked how God can be spoken of if He has neither body nor likeness, Ghamidi said human knowledge stops at what the senses meet or what can be explained by analogy. That is why, he said, the Quran offers no description of God’s essence, citing the verse that nothing is like Him (42:11). It offers instead two things people can grasp: His attributes, such as mercy and power, which have faint echoes in human experience, and His sunan, the patterns by which He deals with people.
A world built for a trial
On why the universe exists, Ghamidi separated two ideas. The universe, he said, is made to last forever, and so are humans, jinn and angels. Present life is the short stretch, a trial lasting decades, in which those who will live in that eternal world are chosen. At the Day of Judgement, he said, the heavens and earth are not destroyed but changed into a new form, referring to the verse on the earth being replaced (14:48).
Adam, evolution and imperfection
Does the Adam and Eve story clash with evolution?
Ghamidi said the Quran never describes a fall from a higher world. In his reading, humans were made here, from earth, through many stages. When the body was fully prepared, a conscious, moral, aesthetic self, which he called spiritual rather than material, was breathed in, a process he linked to Surah As-Sajdah.
If God is perfect, why is the world so flawed?
Perfection is delayed, not denied, he answered. A test needs imperfection, so the world was made defective on purpose. He cited the verse that both wrongdoing and piety were placed in the human soul (91:8). Those flaws, he said, persist until people cross into the perfect world.
What about divine justice and “free passes”?
A final student question on this topic comes at the end of the transcript used for this report. Listen to the full recording, or watch the video, for the discussion.
Editor’s note. This report is based on a machine-generated transcript of Ghamidi’s Urdu session, which contains errors. Statements are paraphrased in the interest of accuracy, and Quranic references are given for readers to check. FFN presents the views of speakers as their own. Original video: youtu.be/aSVzuXOl62c.