The chasm of ‘Atheism’ may have been avoided were Christians loyal to the true message of Christ; that he is God’s servant and messenger, not God in human form. Without doubt, Incarnationist Christians have a lot to answer for.
None save Allāh is worthy of being worshipped. As such, He is far greater than to resemble His creatures or to take a partner or son. Many of today’s fallacious ideologies have emerged due to humans distorting the Truth in this matter. They begin by claiming that God is in some way human, consumed in creation or that something in creation is in itself divine.
Christians call Jesus who is God’s Messenger, the ‘Son of God’. They allege that as Jesus had no father, God must be his father. One may validly ask if this allegation foreshadowed the end of religiosity altogether in Christian dominated lands. Do those who claim they are ‘Atheists’, meaning ‘not Theists’, for instance, actually deny the presence of an Omnipotent Creator, or are they instead denying the fantasy of that ‘man-God’? Are they rejecters of God’s laws and directives, or rejecters of the anthropomorphised man-God’s directives?
Today’s militant strains of ‘Atheism’, the ‘New Atheists’ whose narrative is angry and resentful are not simply bitter at God, but at their inability to reconcile God with their own preconceptions and distorted and trivial conceptual visualisations of God. They belie inward and outward signs of His Majesty and implicitly muse that God ought to be like man since that is what our ancestors pummelled into our minds for centuries. Ultimately, that was the worldview manufactured and inculcated by trinitarian and Incarnationist Christians since the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325. By erroneously agreeing to ascribe a divine nature to ‘God the Son’, man like us, he naturally becomes subject to other men’s scrutiny.
No doubt, anthropomorphising God has bred many such zealots. Reducing God to ‘man’, therefore, cannot be seen as a mere ‘mistake’, but a decimation of the very foundations of belief as we know it. Maybe, with this perspective we better understand the Qur’ānic verses:
“They say, ‘The Most Compassionate has taken a son.’ You have certainly made an outrageous claim. by which the heavens are about to burst, the earth to split apart, and the mountains to crumble to pieces…”[1]
Anthropomorphising the Creator is to ascribe to Him the characteristics of creation. It is to reject what is beyond and to affirm what is within. What is created cannot have created itself. And the Creator cannot be, at once created. To give the Creator the diminished characteristics of His creatures by ascribing to Him a son is therefore to negate all of creation itself. As such, creation almost bursts into non-existence at only the ominous claim of such a thing.
Some leading atheists pin their ‘Atheism’ on this false doctrine of Incarnation, arguing (correctly in this case) that anthropomorphising God is more authentically Godless since it abolishes the external and brings it down into earthly constraints.[2]
The arrogance of Atheists may have occurred, at least in some instances, due to their grievance that a man-God, (fundamentally: a man), can bear the same human deficiencies as they see in themselves but still be assigned divinity. The chasm of ‘Atheism’ may have been avoided were Christians loyal to the true message of Christ; that he is God’s servant and messenger, not God in human form. Without doubt, Incarnationist Christians have a lot to answer for.
If Jesus’ creation is miraculous and unfathomable because he had no father, then this is precisely the point. His creation is of the miraculous doings of an Omnipotent Creator Whose actions cannot be wholly grasped in human terms. To ascribe God as ‘father’ imposes a restriction on His Omnipotence – that He cannot create unless He fathers. But more obviously, if Jesus’ creation is startling, Adam’s is even more so, for Adam was created without father nor mother (peace be upon them both)! Allah says:
“The likeness of Jesus in Allāh’s sight is the same as Adam. He created him from earth and then He said to him, ‘Be!’ and he was.”[3] [4]
References:
[1] Al-Qur’ān 19:88-90
[2] Fiennes, Sophie (dir.). (2012). The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. London: P Guide Productions.
[3] Al-Qur’ān 3:59
[4] The names Adam and Jesus are each mentioned 25 times in the Qur’an. In a book of nearly 80,000 words, revealed over 23 years, the two likened Prophets are mentioned by name exactly the same number of times.
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