It is true. Nature brings us closer to God. We know, as human beings, that we did not create the sky, the dirt, the moon or the trees. It is difficult not to acknowledge that there is a “higher being,” “higher consciousness” or “mastermind” involved in the creation of nature —of those things that exist without us, have existed before fo us, and may exist after us. Occupied in offices, before computer screens, engulfed in social media, etc. we —in our modern way of being, are trapped in creations of the human mind. The concrete road, the car we drive-in and the shoes our feet are covered in as we pushed the pedal, are all created by men.
So how do we acknowledge God as the self-sufficient Doer, when we are so seldom surrounded by His (direct) creation? We must, of course, go into nature. Must we strip ourselves of modernity as much as humanly possible? As the philosopher, Descartes remarked during his walk in nature, “Exalted by these sublime meditations my soul soared towards Divinity—,” we too must remove ourselves from modernity to regain our connection with God. Yet, even while this feels accurate, it also feels too inadequate. Try as we may, we cannot —and more accurately, won’t, turn back the hands of time. We can lessen our possessions, spend more time in nature, reflect on the stars in the sky and the birds in the trees but soon enough we’ll end up back in our manmade beds in our manmade houses —rooms within rooms all created by the human imagination.
If we cannot find God here, we are doomed. Time is not ticking backward. As one commentator insultingly retorted after reading Descartes’s work —would you like us to walk on all fours? I gave a talk at RIS last year entitled ‘Alienation and Return to God’ and in it, I touched on similar points, nature as a revelation. It is near impossible to deny God, His presence and absolute power, “out there”. Yet God says to us, “We will soon show them Our signs in the horizons and in themselves until it is evident to them that it is the Truth.” The signs aren’t just “out there” but in here. Technology increasingly isolates us from nature and thus from those signs, “in the horizons”. This is a blow to our ability to acquire a deepened faith through the witnessing of natural phenomena… “…a high degree of conviction that emerges from witnessing a phenomenon. The overwhelming majority of sensory input is visual. Witnessing phenomena facilitates conviction in their validity or reality.” (1)
But it does not remove our ability to deepen our conviction through signs within ourselves and our creations. It is not as apparent or as undeniable, but it is still possible with only a small effort to acknowledge God through our manmade creations. An hour or so before writing this, I found myself staring at my coffee cup. Plain, white, not marked by any apparent name brand, undoubtedly manmade… and yet, there was a beauty I found in it that gave me pause and made me say, “Alhumdulilah”. What are the signs within ourselves? As a writer, I know that writing is not simply pounding a keyboard with the tips of my fingers. Writing can indeed be painful at times, as I’ve known too well in the past few days (weeks)*. Trying to force myself to write after simply thinking a topic over, doing sufficient research, having sufficient tools, etc. isn’t enough. I need inspiration, where does that inspiration come from? Certainly not from me. Few things are done —whether a blog post or designing a coffee cup, without a combination of human effort and divine inspiration. And even this is only part of the whole. Someone could be unable to write because they’re sick or their computer doesn’t work. Or, to be slightly more extreme, one could not be literate, uneducated, not have a computer, not have hands, or be blind, and that makes it impossible for them to write. While all human inventions take human effort, it is not solely human effort. Much of the factors needed to create human inventions are completely outside of human control. We have to see that. God’s doing is not as obvious in a coffee cup as it is in a tree, but it is still there. And with just a small effort, maybe a tilt of the head, we can see it just as clearly.
To note: This was written a few weeks ago, Alhumdulilah my ‘writer’s block’ has ended.
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Further Reading/ Sources:
- Islam and the Secular Age: Between Certainty & Uncertainty, 9 (Sourced for direct quote in 3rd paragraph, (Link: http://bit.ly/secular_yaqeen)
- Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander, 53-112
- Technopoly by Neil Postman
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Photo by Varun Gaba on Unsplash
Consider picking up a copy of my book, 40 Hadith of ‘Aisha, An English collection of 40 Hadith narrated by the beloved wife, scholar, and sage ‘Aisha bint Abu Bakr, available here. Also, consider signing up for our monthly newsletter here: bythefigandtheolive.com/newsletter. For speaking engagements visit Nuriddeenknight.com
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