Conative Fitriyyat

Conative fitriyyat include the following instances:

·        Inclination towards immortality

·        Inclination to seek the truth

·        Inclination towards virtue and righteous deeds

·        Inclination towards perfection and the perfect being

·        Inclination towards felicity

·        Inclination towards beauty, whether it is manifested in such physical phenomena as flowers and mountains or in aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual truths:

·        Inclination towards creativity

·        Inclination towards adoration of the sublime

What Scholars Have to Say Concerning Fitrah

It would be absurd to expect psychologists to fully endorse the concept of fitrah. For, on the one hand, psychological studies and experiments arc generally focused on empirical and sensory data, whereas filrah is an entirely spiritual and immaterial reality. And, on the other hand, many of the fitriyyat. as has already been pointed out, remain dormant and in a stale of potentiality until the appropriate circumstances for their emergence present themselves. As such, it is difficult for psychologists to delect the physical and behavioral effects of these dormant inclinations and intuitions. Nevertheless, one can occasionally find intimations of the concept of fitrah in the works of psychologists.

Paul Edwards (1923-2004), the renowned moral philosopher, describes what prominent psychologists and philosophers think in relation to God being essential to human nature, as follows:

There are philosophers and psychologists of influence who either do not believe in God at all or who, all any rate, do not favor the enterprise of buttressing belief in God by means of proofs but are nevertheless concerned to maintain that human beings arc by nature religious-that they are, in Max Scheler’s phrase. “God-seekers.” They would point out that it is this question of  “philosophical anthropology,” and not any question about the validity of the Common Consent Argument, which is of real interest and human importance.

Though perhaps invalid as a proof of the existence of God. the Common Consent Argument does embody an important insight about the nature of man. 

These writers arc a great deal more sophisticated than most of the traditional defenders of the argument, whose views we considered in preceding sections. They do not at all deny that, in the most obvious sense, the world is full of unbelievers, but they would add that a great many of these unbelievers feel a strong urge to worship something or somebody and therefore invent all kinds of surrogate deities. Man's “gods and demons.” writes Car! Jung, “have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names.” Those, in the words of Miguel de Unamuno, “who do not believe in God or who believe that they do not believe in Him, believe nevertheless in some little pocket god or even devil of their own.”  Max Scheler writes, “Religious agnosticism is not a psychological fact, but a self-deception ... it is an essential law ... that every finite spirit believes either in God or in an idol. These idols may vary greatly. So-called unbelievers may treat the state or a woman or art or knowledge or any number of other things as if they were God.” Scheler adds that what needs explanation is not belief in God, which is original and natural, but unbelief or, rather, belief in an idol. The situation is not infrequently compared with the sexual instinct and what we know about the consequences of its suppression. If the sexual instinct does not find natural gratification, it does not cease to be operative but becomes diverted into other and less wholesome channels. The worship of institutions and human deities is said to be a similarly pathological phenomenon. (Common Consent Arguments for the Existence of God, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 1)