FAITH IN THE UNSEEN

FAITH IN THE UNSEEN Receive Divine Guidance This is the Book; there is no doubt in it. It is a guide for those who are mindful of God, who believe in the unseen. (THE QURAN 2 : 3) F AITH in the unseen is not just a matter of belief. It is directly related to guidance. An unswerving belief in the unseen will help you receive God’s guidance. If you do not believe in the unseen, you will not receive this guidance. By ‘unseen’ is meant a reality that cannot be seen but still is present. God is apparently invisible, in reality He is more present than all existing things. The above Quranic verse conveys that faith in the unseen, actually refers to faith in God. It includes all those aspects of faith which a believer is required to believe in—prophethood, divine revelation, angels, hereafter etc. We recognize things in two ways—through observation and through inference. From the scientific point of view, both these methods are reliable. Today, science is considered a reliable means for analysis. Science has theoretical and technical aspects. Technical science looks only at the appearance of things. But everything that appears to be visible is, in the final analysis, invisible. For instance, you can see a flower, but you can’t see its fragrance, not even through the most powerful microscope. The flower’s fragrance has an existence of its own in the same way as the flower. Science says all things are collections of atoms, and ultimately all atoms are collections of electrons. Referring to this, a scientist commented that the entire universe is an invisible ‘mad dance’ of electrons! Another scientist describes it as a collection of ‘waves of probability’. In this sense, one can say that it is not only the apparently invisible Creator who is in the unseen but also the apparently visible creatures. The British scientist A.S. Eddington wrote a book on this topic titled Science and the Unseen World a little less than a century ago. The universe is so meaningful that it is simply impossible to explain it without accepting the existence of the Creator.