Shia Islamic Argument for the existence of God

[TheMuslim]

You can call it whatever you want. You can call it God (with a capital G) if you feel like it (the word "God" is, after all, pretty vague in its meaning). Personally, I just call it a deity. I like to say "the DOTV proves the existence of a deity with such and such qualities (the aforementioned qualities that were traced by Ibn Sina)." You can also call it Allah. The Arabic word "Allah" predates Islam, and it literally means "the awe-inspiring" (or, according to others, "the deity"). Since I find this entity to be the only deity known, and I also find it awe-inspiring, I can call it Allah (I do, after all, speak Urdu and Arabic and such vocabulary would come naturally to me).

But unless by deity you mean a person in a sense that entails, albeit equivocally, cognition and/or intentionality, then you're being disingenuous, and particularly so if you're arguing for something which you call Allah--knowing that your definition bears only a superficial resemblance to what has been traditionally associated with the name--which gives unwarranted cover to obviously false and even patently absurd ideas about the nature of this substance and its relation to human beings. I find the term Nature to be a far more honest and accurate representation of the qualities that, you have argued, must apply to our reality, and not this wholly distinct substance implied by the idea of God.

You cannot just say, "well, if you want to this phenomena a thunderstorm which is perfectly understandable and open to further inquiry, or simply "the wrath of the gods", it makes no difference. I mean the latter is pretty vague anyway." No, words have meaning.

Your idea of the word "Allah" is unfortunately tinged with qualities from Islamic literature, which is often filled with anthropomorphic descriptions of Allah according to Sunni Islam (the majority of Muslims, about 90%, follow Sunni Islam - which explains their larger share in Islamic literature).

I, however, think of "Allah" in a way more accurately confined to the word's linguistic and literal Arabic meaning.

The DOTV, coupled with some of Ibn Sina's attribute tracings that I found sound, proves the existence of an entity that is necessary, eternal, one-and-only, immaterial, omnipresent, self-subsisting, independent, primary, absolute/infinite, unrestricted, unique, formless, ineffable, uncaused, without rivals, and has all things else depending on it for their existence (the last attribute seems valid only if the principle of causality for contingents is taken as a premise). If you include my additional arguments regarding consciousness, this entity can be called conscious.

In light of the above description, I am satisfied in calling such an entity a deity. And the connotation that I get from the word "Allah" fits this description perfectly. Others may get a more anthropomorphic impression from that same word (e.g. Sunnis), others may harbor a more pantheistic impression (e.g. Imam Khomeini and Ibn Arabi), others may get an impersonal impression from it (e.g. Arabic deists), and yet others may even get a more polytheistic impression (e.g. pre-Islamic Arabs). It is simply a matter of perspective and semantics, not of being disingenuous.