Inner Voice

Is God Dead?

“Creation of God, the pattern on which He has made mankind; there is no change in the work of God. That is the standard religion, but most among mankind do not understand”.(Qur’an, 30:30)

They claim that ‘God’ is dead. They should have said that ‘gods’ are dead. The confusion arises when false ‘gods’ are identified as ‘God’.

An atheist astronaut once glee fully joked that he went high above in the space but could not see the god. So, here is the confusion: the poor soul did not know that God is not ‘body’ to be seen or found in a ‘place’. His joke just confirmed the belief of those who had emphasized from the very beginning that God could not be seen.

Belief in a God is as much natural as any natural instinct can be. This eternal truth has been explained in the verse of the Holy Qur’an mentioned above. An atheist asked Imam Ja’far as-Sadiq how could be convince him about the existence of God. Coming to know that the man had gone several times on sea voyages, Imam asked him: “Have you ever been caught in a fierce storm in middle of nowhere, your rudder gone, your sails torn away, trying desperately to keep your boat afloat”. The answer was ‘Yes’. Then Imam asked: “And sometimes, perhaps, even that leaking boat went down leaving you exhausted and helpless on the mercy of raging waves?” The answer was again ‘Yes’. Then Imam asked:

“Was not there, in all that black despair, a faint glimmer of hope in your heart that some unnamed and unknown power could still save you” When he agreed, Imam said: “That power is God”.

That atheist was intelligent. He knew the truth when he saw it. Today’s atheists give that place to ‘Nature’. The only snag is that poor ‘Nature’ is senseless and lifeless. How a senseless and lifeless ‘idea’ (because nature is no more than an abstract idea) could create a universe of such magnitude with such a systematic perfection, uniting millions and millions of galaxies in a well-knit system? How could nature give life and sense to creatures when itself it has none?