IV Religion and the Life Hereafter

Religion and the Life Hereafte As Shibli himself observes: The existence of the soul is a matter of intuition. After pondering over it, we come to know that the faculty of reason is not merely a property of matter. Matter is a lifeless thing. Without reason, you cannot find sublime ideas, arts and sciences and scientific disciplines in matter. These are delicate substances, quite other than matter, which account for creativity in the fields of the arts and the sciences. Matter cannot have a creative faculty. This is an attribute of the soul ... After proving the existence of soul as something separate, the second stage is to prove its survival, that is, its capacity to survive after the death of the body. (pp. 171-72) As a corollary to this he adds: ‘Though Avicenna has presented lengthy arguments about the existence of the soul, these are nothing but word games—or tautology—just like other Greek philosophic thoughts. If an atheist bent on denying its existence says, “What you have said is just a kind of repetition of your claim. It has nothing to do with the argument but is a reiteration of your initial statement and may be matter is itself responsible for its kaleidoscopic manifestations after combining in a particular way; the working of a machine and the music of a musical instrument are similar things, but without having any kind of spirit. There is no logic by which he can be reduced to silence. That is why Imam Ghazzali did not produce any logical argument about the soul.”’ (p.175) Shibli Nomani ends the discussion at this point. And of a work dating back to 1901, we could hardly expect more. Modern research, however, has opened up new vistas of events and realities, so that we can now assert to a certain extent that the permanent existence of the soul, independently of the body, or the survival of the soul after the death of the body is no more a thing which involves blind faith; rather it has become a reality which can be empirically proved. Science has discovered that the body is composed of innumerable