God Arises

God Arises

1986 11 November 4-10 God Arises (2502) The title of this book was inspired by a verse form the Bible:

Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered.

Let them also that hate Him flee before Him.

As smoke is driven away, so drive them away;

As wax melteth before the fire, so let the

Wicked perish at the presence of God.

But let the righteous be glad; let them rejoice

before God: yea let them exceedingly rejoice.

Psalms 68: 1-3.

The new discoveries in the world of science in the 18th and 19th centuries came to be interpreted by and large as if they contradicted time honoured belief in God. This atheistic approach having very rapidly dominated the thinking of the educated classes all over the world, it seemed as if religious truths had outlived their usefulness.

But, with the advent of the 20th century, attitudes began to change: such discoveries have come to light as have rendered an atheistic interpretation of the universe meaningless, and in large measure have restored religious thinking to its central position in moral philosophy. As Lord Kelvin, one of the world’s greatest physicists, asserted: ‘If you think strongly enough, you will be forced by science to believe in God.’ The ‘enemies’ of God, who had gathered on different fronts to oppose Him, have been definitively ‘scattered’.

This book is an attempt to present an account of this act of God.

Beginning with this issue, we start serialising the English translation of Maulana Wahiduddin Khan’s famous book, Mazhab our Jadeed Challenge (Modern Challenges to Religion). The book entitled in English ‘God Arises’, has been translated earlier into a number of languages including Arabic. Turkish and Indonesian.

Religion Accepts the Challenge

With the splitting of the atom, all of man’s conceptions of matter have been drastically altered. In fact, the advance of science in the past century has culminated in a knowledge explosion the like of which has never before been experienced in human history, and in the wake of which all ancient ideas about God and religion have had to be re-examined. This – as Julian Huxley puts it – is the challenge of modern knowledge. In the following pages, I propose to answer this challenge, for I am convinced that, far from having a damaging effect on religion, modern knowledge has served to clarify and consolidate its truths. Many modern discoveries support Islamic claims made 1400 years ago that what is laid down in the Quran is the ultimate truth, and that this will be borne out by all future knowledge.

‘We will show them Our signs in all the regions of the earth and in their own souls, until they clearly see that this is the truth.’ (Quran 41:53).

Modern atheistic thinkers dismiss religion as being unfounded in fact. They maintain that it springs from man’s desire to find meaning in the universe. While the urge to find an explanation is not in itself wrong, they hold that the inadequacy of our predecessors’ knowledge led them to wrong conclusions, namely, the existence of a God, or gods, the notions that creation and destruction were a function of the godhead, that man’s fate was of concern to God, that there was a life after death, in heaven or hell, as warranted by the morality of man’s life on earth, and that all thinking on these matters must necessarily be regulated by religion. They feel that, in the light of advanced learning, man is now in a position to make a re-appraisal of traditional ways of thinking and to rectify errors of interpretation, just as in secular matters he has already exploded myths and overturned false hypotheses whenever facts and experience have forced the truth upon him.

According to Auguste Comte, a well-known French philosopher of the first half of the nineteenth century, the history of man’s intellectual development can be divided into three stages the theological stage, when events of the universe are explained in terms of divine powers, the metaphysical stage, in which we find no mention of specific gods (although external factors are still referred to in order to explain events) and the stage of positivism, where events are explained in terms of common laws deducted from observation and calculation without having recourse to spirit, God or absolute power. We are now passing through the third intellectual stage which, in philosophical terms, is known as Logical Positivism.

Logical Positivism

Scientific empiricism, or logical positivism, became a regular movement in the second quarter of the 20th century, but as a trend of thought, it had already long before – taken hold of people’s minds. From Hume and Mill up to the time of Bertrand Russell, many philosophers have been its proponents, and it has now become the most important contemporary trend of thought, buttressed as it is by numerous centres of research and propagation all over the world. A dictionary of philosophy published in New York gives the following definition of logical positivism:

‘All knowledge that is factual is connected with experiences, in such a way that verification or direct or indirect confirmation is possible’ (p. 285).

Anti-religionists feel, therefore, that man’s recent mental evolution is the very antithesis of religious thinking. Modern, advanced knowledge has it that reality is only that which can stand up to the tests of observation and experience, whereas religion is based on a concept of reality which cannot in this way be subjected to analysis and scientifically proved: it follows then that it has no basis in actuality. In other words, religion gives an unrealistic account of real events. Since man’s knowledge was limited in ancient times, the correct explanations of natural phenomena were bound to elude him. This being so, the suppositions he made which hinged on religion were distinctly far-fetched and, at best, tangential. But, thanks to the universal law of evolution, man has at last emerged from the darkness in which he was engulfed, and now, in the light of modern knowledge, it is possible for him to discard old, conjectural beliefs and arrive at the true nature of things by purely empirical methods.

T.R. Miles writes:

It might be said that metaphysicians of the past have done something comparable to writing a cheque without adequate funds in the bank. They have used words without proper “cash” to back them; they have been unable to give their words “cash-value” in terms of states of affairs.

‘The Absolute is incapable of evolution and progress’ is a grammatically correct sentence; but the words are like a dud cheque, and cannot be “cashed”, (p. 20)

(Religion and the Scientific Outlook, George Allen &: Unwin Ltd.)

All those things which were formerly attributed to supernatural forces are now wholly explainable in terms of natural causes, modern thinking having it that the ‘discovery’ of God was a mere assumption arising from ignorance. With the spread of knowledge, this belief has automatically disappeared.

Julian Huxley writes:

‘Newton showed that God did not control the movements of the planets. Laplace in a famous aphorism affirmed that astronomy had no need of the god hypothesis: Darwin and Pasteur between them did the same for biology: and in our own century the rise of scientific psychology and the extension of historical knowledge have removed gods to a position where they are no longer of value in interpreting human behaviour and cannot be supposed to control human history or interfere with human affairs.’ (Religion without Revelation), New York, 1985, p. 58).

Physics, psychology and history have proved conclusively that all those events which man explained in terms of the existence of a God or gods, or some abstract Power had entirely different causes, but that man, steeped in ignorance, continued to speak of them in terms of religious mystery.

In the world of physics, Newton is the hero of this revolution. It was he who put forward the theory that the universe is bound by certain unchangeable principles, there being certain laws according to which all celestial bodies revolve. Later, many other scholars carried this research forward to the point where all events on earth and in the heaven allegedly took place according to the immutable ‘Law of Nature.’

After this discovery, it was but natural that the concept of an active and omnipotent God as the power which made things move appeared meaningless. At the most this discovery allowed for a God who had initially set the universe in motion. Therefore, Newton himself, along with other like minded scientists, believed in God as the Prime Mover. Voltaire for his part said that God had created the universe in just the same way as a watch-maker made a watch, assembling the parts, arranging them in a particular order, but afterwards having nothing to do with it. Hume subsequently abolished this ‘inactive and worthless God’ by advancing the argument that we had seen watches being made, but that since we had not seen the world in the process of creation, it was not possible for us to believe in God.

Atheists maintain that the progress of science and the expansion of knowledge has enabled man to observe that which was beyond his observation in the past. In the dark about chains of events, we had not been in a position to understand isolated events, now, equipped with knowledge, we no longer stood in awe of natural phenomena. For instance, the rising and setting of the sun are now understood as matters of common knowledge. But in early times these events seemed inexplicable, and man supposed that there must be a God who was responsible far them. This led to the acceptance of there being a supernatural power: whatever was beyond man’s knowledge was described by him as a miracle wrought by that power. But now that we know the rising and setting of the sun is the result of the earth’s revolving upon its axis, where is the need to believe that there is a God who makes the sun rise and set? Similarly, the functioning of all other things, which had been attributed to some invisible power, purported, according to modern studies, to result from the action and interaction of the natural forces now known to us. That is, after the revelation of natural causes, the need to posit, and to believe in the existence of God, or a supernatural force, vanished of itself. If the rainbow is merely a colour effect produced by the refraction and internal reflection of sunlight in minute droplets of water in the air, it is not in anyway a sign placed in the sky by God. If the plague is inevitably generated by the Bacillus Pestis and spread by rat-fleas, an outbreak of this disease can no longer be looked on as a sign of divine wrath. If animals and plants have slowly evolved over hundreds of millions of years, there is no room for a ‘creator’ of animals and plants, except in a metaphorical sense quite different from that in which the word was originally and is now normally used. If hysteria and insanity are external symptoms of disordered minds, there is no place left: in them for possession by devils.

Citing such events in support of his argument, Julian Huxley observes with great conviction:

‘If events are due to natural causes, they are not due to supernatural causes.’ (Religion Without Revelation, p. 18-19).

He holds that their ascription to Supernatural Beings is merely due to man’s ignorance combined with his passion for some sort of explanation. Subsequent research carried out in the field of psychology further strengthened this point of view, as it revealed that religion is the creation of man’s subconscious self rather than the discovery of some external reality. In the words of a scholar; ‘God is nothing but a projection of man on a cosmic screen.’

The concept of another world was nothing but ‘a beautiful idealisation of human wishes’. Divine inspiration and revelation were merely an ‘extraordinary expression of the childhood repressions.’

All these ideas are based on the premise that there is something called the subconscious. Modern research has revealed that the human mind is divided into two major parts, one being termed the conscious mind, the centre of those of our ideas which take shape in a state of consciousness; the other part is the subconscious. In this part of the mind, ideas are not usually alive in the memory, but exist below the surface and find expression either in abnormal circumstance, or in sleep, in the form of dreams. Most human thoughts are buried in this subconscious cell, the conscious part of the mind being the smaller part. The subconscious is like the eight-ninths of the iceberg, which remain below water, while only one ninth, the conscious part is visible.

After extensive research in psychology, Freud discovered that during childhood, certain happenings and ideas are repressed in our unconscious minds which can later result in the irrational behaviour of adults. The same applies to the religious concepts of the hereafter, heaven, hell, etc., which are but echoes of those very wishes which were born in the child’s mind but never fulfilled, circumstances being unfavourable, and consequently, repressed in the subconscious. Later, the subconscious for its own satisfaction, supposed the existence of a dream world in which its unfulfilled wishes would be realized, just as, deep in sleep, one dreams of wishes coming miraculously true. When childhood fancies, which had been thoroughly repressed, suddenly burst through to the surface, producing a state of frenzy or hysteria, or other abnormal behaviour, people mistakenly attributed this to supernatural forces which had found expression in human language. Similarly, the generation gap and the Father complex in a family gave rise to the concept of God and slave. Thus what was simply a social malaise was carried to the cosmic scale in order to forge a theory. In the words of Ralph Linton:

‘The Hebrew picture of an all-powerful deity who could only be placated by complete submission and protestations of devotion, no matter how unjust his acts might appear, was a direct outgrowth of this general Semitic family situation. Another product of the exaggerated superego to which it gave rise was the elaborate system of taboos relating to every aspect of behaviour. One system of this sort has been recorded and codified in the laws of Moses. All Semitic tribes had similar series of regulations differing only in content. Such codes provided those who kept them with a sense of security, comparable to that of the good child who is able to remember everything that his father ever told him not to do and carefully abstains from doing it. The Hebrew Yahveh was a portrait of the Semitic father with his patriarchal authoritarian qualities abstracted and exaggerated. Such a judicial concept which believes in God being a political authority has occupied a central place not only in Judaism, but is also incorporated in the religious concepts of Christianity and Islam as well.’

Ralph Linton, The Tree of Culture, (1956, p. 288).

(To be continued)