Inner Voice

Can ‘Nature’ Replace God?

“Nature designed this’; Nature adapted that’. These are the phrases frequently seen nowadays in the text-books and articles.

What is this ‘Nature’, anyway? It is nothing but an abstract idea formed in human brain after careful study of the behavior of the things. It may be found (if it is ‘found’ at all) within the things; it has no independent existence. And, in any case, there is no record of any conference of the ‘natures’ of various things, held to decide how to co-ordinate their functions. Flowers never conferred with the bees to seek the bees’ co-operation in their pollination, offering them, in exchange, their nectar. But we know that bees could not live a single day without flowers; and thousands of flowers would long have been extinct but for the bees.

More puzzling are those phenomena which can not be explained by ‘nature’s planning’. When Moses fled from Pharaoh, the Red Sea parted, allowing him and his followers to cross to the promised land. Scientists nowadays try to explain it by natural causes; an earthquake must have made the water shift at that time. All right. But why did that supposed earthquake occur at a time when Moses and his followers desperately wanted to cross the Sea, and why it remained parted till Pharaoh entered into it? And why the movement of water was reversed at that very moment when the enemy of God with his people was in midst of the Sea? Was it all a coincidence?

And was it a coincidence which prompted a spider to weave its cobweb at the mouth of the cave in which the Holy Prophet Muhammad was hiding from the pagans of Mecca who wanted to murder him? And more than that, was it also a coincidence which brought a pair of pigeons to build their nest at the mouth of that very cave at thick of night and lay the eggs before morning? It was that cobweb and nest with eggs which led the blood-thirsty enemies to believe that Muhammad could not be in that cave, otherwise the cobweb would have been destroyed and the nest and the eggs broken!

Can that speed and timing of the pigeons and spider be explained by ‘natural causes’?