Knowing God before any argument

Belief in God is often defended with formal proofs: the universe needs a cause, the order of nature points to a designer. Yet most believers never study these arguments, and the Qur'an speaks of something more basic. It calls it fitrah, the natural disposition placed in every person: “the fitrah of Allah upon which He has created [all] people” (30:30). The paper asks whether this inborn awareness can count, on its own, as a reasonable ground for faith.

The authors begin with scripture: the primordial covenant in which the children of Adam answer “Yes, we testify” to their Lord (7:172), and the hadith in Bukhari and Muslim that every child is born upon fitrah and is then made a Jew, a Christian or a Magian by their parents. They then turn to classical scholars. Ibn Taymiyya held that knowledge of the Creator is innate and necessary, not reached by syllogism, and that without this readiness in the heart no argument could work at all. Al-Ghazali treated fitrah as one faculty alongside the senses and reason; al-Taftazani said children are born with sound natures that would choose knowledge over denial; Shah Waliullah described it as a divine imprint guiding people to God and to moral truth.

The paper compares fitrah with the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga's sensus divinitatis, a God-given faculty that produces belief in God. Plantinga argues that such belief can be “properly basic”: rational without argument, as trust in memory or in other minds is, unless something defeats it. The authors also draw on cognitive science: Deborah Kelemen's studies of children who see purpose in nature, a study in which Finnish atheists fell back on design explanations when their minds were under load, Olivera Petrovich's work with preschoolers, and an Oxford project led by Justin Barrett. They answer the objections that the instinct is cultural, an evolutionary by-product or circular, arguing that explaining how a faculty arose does not show that it is unreliable.

The authors conclude that fitrah yields rational, warranted belief when it is working properly and nothing undermines it. Arguments still matter: they defend and deepen faith, and they help people whose fitrah has been clouded by sin, neglect or upbringing. But on this view the first awareness of God comes from within, and arguments build on it rather than create it.