III. The Idea of GodBelief in God is the life-blood of religion. Questions relating to
God have naturally engaged the attention of the advocates and
opponents of religion. What is God, and how do we know Him, are
questions which no serious student of religion can brush aside.
Adequate and satisfactory answers to these basic questions will
enable us to understand the nature of God and assess the value of
religion. In fact, we find that these questions too have received
different and conflicting answers. It may be of interest to note that
even the questions themselves have been phrased according to the
point of view of each writer. Those who employ the positivist
approach have put the question in the form of “How did the idea of
God take its rise in the human mind?” Grant Allen and J. G. Frazer
are fair representatives of this group of writers. Their answer may
be summarised thus.
Primitive man lived in constant dread of the violent forces of
nature which threatened him with physical injury and even death.
Storms, thunderbolts, earthquakes and other cataclysms of nature
frightened and overawed him, and as animistic tendencies
dominated his mind, he personified the forces of nature and sought
to placate them by offering them worship and sacrifice. He thus
peopled the world with gods. Later on, as man’s mind developed, he
found it necessary to rationalise his old attachment to them. The
urge for unification led him to reduce the multiplicity of gods to one
supreme deity. He formed an abstract idea of the Absolute and
then, driven by unconscious emotional urges, objectified that idea.
The God thus evolved is a subjective God. In the words of Sheen,
“the only God attained by a purely affective approach is a subjective
God born of one’s own feelings.(12)”
This, in brief, is the evolutionary theory, which purports to give
an account of the origin and development of the idea of one God.
It is presumed that the idea of God is found only in the higher
religions of modern man and that it was alien to the mind of
primitive people. Recently, however, factual evidence has been
brought to light which proves that this presumption is erroneous.
On the basis of these facts, some scholars have advocated the view
that primitive man’s mind too was gifted with the awareness of God.
Islam: A Challenge to Religion 40