NATURE AND MAN
Acknowledging the blessings of the Benefactor alone is the price one must pay to get the right to use these blessings for oneself.
In this world, man finds himself amidst nature: the sun and the moon, the stars, and the planets, the mountains and the seas, the trees and the desert, the birds, and the animals, etc. When man sees this vast world around him, he is utterly amazed.
History tells us that ancient man began to regard nature as sacred. This led to nature worship. Taking various natural phenomena to be deities, people began to worship them. As a result, man could not use nature to progress beyond a point for thousands of years. He could not engage in research into nature and thereby employ the powers that lay hidden in it. Living amidst nature, he could not make nature useful for himself beyond a fundamental level. Regarding the various natural phenomena as powerful and sacred, people sought to worship them rather than study and investigate them.
Over the centuries, man gradually developed a new understanding of nature. He realised that nature is not a god. Instead, it is a creature, in the same way as man is a creature. With this understanding, nature became an object of study and investigation for man rather than something to be feared, propitiated, and worshipped.
Gradually, a new process began, a process of control over nature. Man’s search led him to discover different hidden forces inside nature. Then man started efforts to discover these forces and use them for his benefit.
In this way, a new revolution began. Gradually, it transformed the pattern of human life in the 20th century. The world that had hitherto been hidden in nature appeared ultimately before man. In this way, humankind arrived in the modern civilised world.
On the face of it, there is a big difference between these two worlds. If the first was characterised by nature worship; in the second, man regarded himself as the controller of nature. However, no essential difference exists between the ancient age and the modern age that succeeded it as regards the relationship between man and nature. In both these ages, man failed to discover the proper relationship between nature and himself. In both ancient and contemporary times, man remained unaware and ignorant of this vital matter.
The fundamental error of ancient man was that he took nature as his deity, although nature is, in reality, a creature of God in the same way as man is. As a result of this error, humankind fell prey to debilitating superstitious beliefs and practices. Man fell so deeply into the pit of these falsehoods that his religion and culture were thoroughly imbued with crass superstition.
In this matter, the case of modern man is just the same as that of ancient man. The difference between the two is only at the superficial level or at the level of mere appearances. In actual reality, there is no difference between them at all. Ancient man’s fundamental error was that he had come to regard nature as God. Modern man’s mistake is that he believes nature is everything. When he investigated nature, modern man discovered that many powers are hidden: the steam engine is hidden in nature, like the motor car, the airplane, the telephone, the mobile phone, the internet, etc. Inside nature, an entire civilisation is hidden, a civilisation that can make man’s life amazingly attractive and alluring.
Modern man’s error was not that he began studying nature and establishing a civilisation. Instead, the error lay in a massive blunder that he made—he took full advantage of the blessings of nature, but he completely ignored or forgot the Benefactor, the Giver of all these blessings— that is, God. These blessings were the creation of God, the Creator. When modern man discovered the blessings of nature, he fell upon them hungrily. Breaking all barriers and restraints, man took full advantage of the bounties of nature that modern science led him to.
This was man’s primary mistake. The truth is that to partake of the blessings of God is not legitimate until and unless man acknowledges God, the Benefactor, and the Giver of all these blessings. Acknowledging the blessings of the Benefactor alone is the price one must pay to get the right to use these blessings for oneself.
It is no minor matter to separate the blessings and the Benefactor, make full use of the former and forget the latter altogether. It is nothing but a heinous crime. Moreover, this crime destroys man’s life. As a result of this, man becomes rebellious. Instead of discipline, he adopts unlimited freedom as his way. Instead of being duty-conscious, he becomes rights-conscious. Abandoning all responsibility, he hurtles off on the path of anarchy. In other words, instead of accepting God as God, he seeks to put himself in God’s place. In this way, the philosophy of Humanism emerges, based on the concept of the transfer of seat from God to man.
In the ancient past, man had superstitious beliefs and customs about nature. It undoubtedly was something very wrong, but it was minor in comparison. The ideology about nature in modern times is even more dangerous in its damaging effects. Its damage was not just that it led to devastating wars such as the two World Wars, which had never happened before, or that in this age, nuclear bombs were invented, which was unthinkable to ancient man. A deadly ill emerged in line with the modern ideology that was much more dangerous than all previous ills—the idea of unlimited or unbridled freedom. Despite all the superstitions he was drowned in, ancient man considered himself restrained by certain limits and rules. However, modern man thinks of himself as utterly free from all limitations. As a result, an entire civilisation has emerged based on crass exploitation and immorality, which has made man completely rights-conscious.
