Nature, God, and the Deception of Nature-Worshiping

After reading the chapter “The Marxist Sublime” in Terry Eagelton’s “The Ideology of The Aesthetic”, I wonder how naturalistic discourse, or the idea that sensuous body is the only origin of human experience, physical needs and sublime, can be misleading and ends up to the atrophy of soul and nihilism.  When I was an atheist, for me nature had become a causal machine without the spirt of God within it, and it drained my soul, as I have lived that naturalism most of my life.  Marx’s discourse is deceptive.  He knows how to use language to paradoxically and despite his “dialectic materialism” and naturalism, to create a god out of human being.  What is “human being” without God?  A developed monkey.  What is monkey without God?  An accidental and brute event of nature, disconnected from an indifferent, if not hostile, universe and the divine.  It doesn’t matter how much we fashion this monkey with intelligence, art, music, and politics of identity, nihilism looms at the door.  So, the verses below resonate fresh in my natural-divine ears, which were then numbed by secularism and naturalism:

 

“Say [Prophet], ‘Praise be to God and peace on the servants He has chosen.  Who is better: God, or those they set up as partners with Him?  Who created the heavens and earth? Who sends down water from the sky for you– with which We cause gardens of delight to grow: you have no power to make the trees grow in them– is it another god beside God? No! But they are people who take others to be equal with God.  Who is it that made the earth a stable place to live? Who made rivers flow through it? Who set immovable mountains on it and created a barrier between the fresh and salt water? Is it another god beside God?  No! But most of them do not know.  Who is it that answers the distressed when they call upon Him? Who removes their suffering? Who makes you successors in the earth? Is it another god beside God? Little notice you take!  Who is it that guides you through the darkness on land and sea? Who sends the winds as heralds of good news before His mercy?  Is it another god beside God? God is far above the partners they put beside him!  Who is it that creates life and reproduces it? Who is it that gives you provision from the heavens and earth? Is it another god beside God?’ Say, ‘Show me your evidence then, if what you say is true.’  Say, ‘No one in the heavens or on earth knows the unseen except God.’ They do not know when they will be raised from the dead: their knowledge cannot comprehend the Hereafter; they are in doubt about it; they are blind to it.  So, the disbelievers say, ‘What! When we and our forefathers have become dust, shall we be brought back to life again?  We have heard such promises before, and so did our forefathers. These are just ancient fables.’  [Prophet], say, ‘Travel through the earth and see how the evildoers ended up.’  [Prophet], do not grieve over them; do not be distressed by their schemes.  They also say, ‘When will this promise be fulfilled if what you say is true?’  Say, ‘Maybe some of what you seek to hasten is near at hand.’  Your Lord is bountiful to people, though most of them are ungrateful.  He knows everything their hearts conceal and everything they reveal: there is nothing hidden in the heavens or on earth that is not in a clear Record.” (27:59-75)