There is nothing plainer and, at the same time, more powerful than the truth. The truth about life is readily available everywhere and in everything. It easily proves itself because it is the only reality. It is the only thing that actually exists. Everything else is illusory and is, in actual fact, non-existent.
There is no falsehood, no skepticism, no agnosticism, no polytheism, no atheism, no myths and no fiction. There are only some people’s hollow and vain explanations for rejecting the obvious and for failing to conform to its high and noble standards. At best, there is a nonrealization, or a malfunctioning, of the truth at the hands of some people. There are also various misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the same.
The greatest, absolute and the only everlasting reality is Almighty God, the Creator, Master and Sustainer of the universe. Things exist because He created and sustains them. They are real only because He, the ultimate Reality, conceived and fashioned them in order to serve a real and consequential ontological purpose. They constitute the truth only inasmuch as they originated from Him as the absolute Truth, serve His aims, and intensely resonate, as well as unambiguously manifest, His magnificent Names and Attributes.
In their capacity as His work, things, both physical and metaphysical wonders, speak of Almighty God as their Designer and Maker. They are unmistaken signs of His existence, power and glory. They easily instill in willing human minds and hearts serene certitudes concerning that absolute and infinite Reality.
This verity led a poet to proclaim:
“Oh, what an oddity…
How is it that Allah is disobeyed,
How can a disbeliever deny Him,
When in every single thing there is a sign,
Revealing that He is the One!”
By virtue of being one of those created and conditionally real and true things, containing elements of both the physical and metaphysical poles of existence, man’s task, via his multidimensional being, is not only to reveal and demonstrate the greatness of God, and stand for some of His most irresistible signs, but also to rationalize those signs and operationalize their worth at various planes of his cultural and civilizational drive.
Based on the results of such processes, man is invited to realize, both spiritually and rationally, and accept willingly that God is his Creator and Master, according to Whose Will and Word he is bidden to live, work and produce components of civilization.
Through the lens of such a realization, man is to “witness” and come to terms with God’s omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience. Man is thus to understand God and unmistakably see and read all the portents that lead to Him and attest to His encircling providential care for His creation.
With that, man, furthermore, will unmistakably see and comprehend his very self, for he who knows himself, knows God, and he who is at peace with himself, is at peace with God. This will qualify man, and, at the same time, connote a prelude to seeing God in all His divine majesty and glory in the Hereafter in Paradise.
In his capacity as God’s vicegerent on earth, man, therefore, stands at the center of the whole of existence, and everything in the universe has been subjected to him to be part of his existential purpose and mission.
Man, it follows, stands at the core of the whole truth, too. He himself is the truth’s microcosm. As integral part of it, man exists due to the truth, for the truth, with the truth and by means of the truth. His terrestrial task is to recognize himself as part of it, and through his self and the other both revealed and created signs, find and unreservedly submit himself to God as the Embodiment of all truth and as the only Truly Existing One.
It stands to reason that man is one of the principal and most obvious proofs of the truth and God. While perennially hankering and searching for the truth, as his insatiable primordial nature demands, man thus should go no further than his own intricate physical, spiritual and intellectual realms in his endless quest for the nature and relations of being.
Man should not be obsessed with exploring the unexplorable, finding the unfindable and doing the undoable, just to attempt to find, or learn more about, that which is fundamentally identifiable with his own self, his existential disposition and his operational sphere, which is the truth.
Accordingly, the Holy Quran at once reminds and exhorts man as regards that essential principle, saying, for example:
In the earth are signs for those who have conviction, and in your own selves (as well). Will you not then perceive? (51: 20, 21).
We will show them Our signs in the universe, and in their own selves, until it becomes manifest to them that this is the truth (41: 53).
The following verse is perhaps most emphatic:
Do they not think deeply about themselves? Allah has created not the heavens and the earth, and all that is between them, except with truth and for an appointed term. And indeed many of mankind deny the meeting with their Lord (30: 8).
As if Almighty God divulges to man that by thinking, exploring and studying both deeply and sincerely about himself, he will be able to arrive at the greatest ontological truths not only about himself, but also about the whole universe and even God Himself. This is so due to man being a microcosm of the macrocosm and the epicenter in the created coherence and order. Man is the crown and climax of God’s divine act of creation.