The foundations of religion are in the concepts of God, the world and the individual, and all its other phases arise from a consideration of the relationship obtaining among these three metaphysical principles. The Vedas, Upanishads , Epics, Puranas and Agamas establish themselves on the avowed acceptance of this threefold reality, whose existence is taken for granted as an article of unquestionable faith or direct intuition and experience. The history of humanity has, however, been showing indications of its drifting more and more through the process of time away from the ability to know things by direct insight or experience, and the observation has been that psychological history is moving towards a greater dependence on sense and reason as the only faculties available by which anything can be known at all.
Scriptural authority gives place to logical enquiry and philosophical investigation.
While the existence of the individual person is a matter of empirical experience in everyday life, and the perception of a world outside also follows as a necessary corollary of the fact of the individual having an environment around, the available faculties of knowledge segregated from the possibility of insight and immediate experience find themselves at a loss when confronting such a problem as the existence of God. Philosophers have mostly been rational expounders of the validity of religious values, though we have also among philosophers those who are atheists, agnostics, empiricists, sceptics and materialists. The major trend, however, of philosophical disquisitions has been along the line of a common acceptance of there being such a thing as a reality transcending the world, whose nature requires to be known and established on firm grounds. Plato, in the West, was constrained to land himself in a world of 'Ideas' ruled by the 'Idea of the Good,' above the empirical world of sense-perception, the latter being just a shadow cast by the arrangement of the eternal 'Ideas'. To Aristotle, God is the Unmoved Mover, towards whom everything gravitates as if pulled by a powerful magnet, and all the variety and the material shapes of things tend gradually to unfold an essential form which enlarges itself in an ascending series of the evolution of form, until Pure Form, which is God, is reached as the ultimate discovery of logical philosophy.