A Reflection on the Intrinsic Value of Prayer As the Meaning of Life

How can they care about life?  Those who knew You,

انکس که تورا شناخت جان را چه کند؟

How can they care about spouse, children, and tribe?

فرزند و عیال و خانمان را چه کند؟

You make them mad, bestow them both worlds

دیوانه کنی هر دو جهانش بخشی.

How can they care for both worlds, those who are crazy for You?

دیوانه تو هر دو جهان را کند؟

Munajat Khajeh Abdullah Ansari

مناجات خواجه عبدالله انصاری

In The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley rightfully considers four functions for prayer:

“The word 'prayer’ is applied to at least four distinct procedures petition, intercession, adoration, contemplation. Petition is the asking of something for ourselves. Intercession is the asking of something for other people. Adoration is the use of intellect, feeling, will and imagination in making acts of devotion directed towards God in his personal aspect or as incarnated in human form. Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.”

And he concludes the chapter in this way:

“Adoration is an activity of the loving, but still separate, individuality. Contemplation is the state of union with the divine Ground of all being. The highest prayer is the most passive. Inevitably; for the less there is of self, the more there is of God. That is why the path to passive or infused contemplation is so hard and, for many, so painful a passage through successive or simultaneous Dark Nights, in which the pilgrim must die to the life of sense as an end in itself, to the life of private and even of traditionally hallowed thinking and believing, and finally to the deep source of all ignorance and evil, the life of the separate, individualized will.” (The Perennial Philosophy, p.259)

Huxley captures the essence of prayer in contemplation. Contemplation, in terms of dying to the delusion of a separate self, at the same time I wish to emphasize, is an acknowledgment of love. In another word, the dissolution of the separate individualized will, being in complete state of receptivity, is not complete identity. And as a state of love, prayer still indicates a relation. Prayer by definition is a relation of belonging between ‘identity’ and ‘difference’. Union with God in prayer is love and this is the purpose of life for all diversity of existence. So, I wish to add an important item to Huxley’s list: prayer is the fundamental ontological key to the puzzle of existence. Correctly understood, prayer is the meaning of existence for everything existing, but God. 

Categories of existence and essence are not applicable to the One who is Samad (surah Purity, 112:2): Eternally sufficient unto Godhood and, the second meaning, sought by all. God is the central light of the golden spiral who gives rise to all beings in their ever contracting-expanding to the nearest and the farthest. God begets not, nor was begotten (112:3). God is completely the Other (Difference, Transcendence): “None is like unto God.” (112:4) And God is also everywhere (Immanent). God is with you, wherever you are (57:4; 58:7; 9:40; 20:46; 26:62). And God has power over all things (2:20). Nothing existing neither is completely different, nor completely identical with God. Everything existing is neither completely different, nor completely identical with its conditions of existence (I am not equal to air, food, affections, etc.). Union with God in contemplation of prayer is not complete identity with God, nor complete dissolution of difference. Prayer is fulfilling the purpose of my existence. It is arrival at the joy of no-thingness and overcoming the shackles of ego and the delusion of complete autonomy and false gods.

Only God is Samad (Sufficiently Eternal unto Godhood). Everything else exists in and for loving-praying God. This is the meaning of existence and the intrinsic value of prayer. We need prayer for its own sake not only for some results or consequences. Paradoxically, the prayer that is a characteristic of believers to achieve Paradise, at the same time is Paradise: praying in nearness to Beloved. We experience the love of God and the erasure of ego in prayer. We channel into the light and let go of false thoughts in prayer. I am eternally a Need, a Longing, a Yearning for God, my Source and Root, and can’t feel satisfaction or happiness in anything worldly, in any god of pleasure, wealth, fame, or honor, independent of God: there is no god, but God: لا اله الالله. The erasure of ego in complete understanding the poverty of our existence is the meaning of existence in prayer. Indeed, prayer is this erasure of ego and a prayer which is not aimed at this contemplation still is incomplete. In this context, Bullah Shah’s mantra (kalaam) makes sense:

“Going to Mecca will not solve our problems and we won’t know the truth

Even if we offer hundreds of prayers.

Going to River Ganges will also not solve anything either,

No matter if we bathe for hundred times.

Going to Gaya will also not help us to know the ultimate truth

Even if we worship 100 of times.

Oh Bulleh Shah, this search will only end, when we will remove ego from our hearts, when we will stop thinking about 'I' and start thinking ourselves as one with this universe.

When we start thinking in terms of 'I', we separate ourselves from others. but to become one with that ultimate truth, we need to chuck that 'I', that Ego, that's when the doors to ultimate peace and happiness start opening up.”

Prayer is this medium through which I learn to unlearn and unravel the entanglement in the webs of desires, ideas, and ideologies.  Nothing should stand between me and God, nothing even rituals.  Religious laws and rituals are for closeness to God, not the reverse.  Excess and obsession in anything but the love of God opens the door of temptation, and excess in anything, even phobia of temptation is the opening through which Satan enters. 

When I am in the grip of an image, for example improper anger and resentment, I find myself separate from that light which releases me from the agony of futility of ego reactions—that resentment becomes my god momentarily.  As well, when I lose myself in remorse and being preoccupied by those feelings and desires, whether it is lust, greed, hatred, resentment, or wealth, fame, or honor, in which vainly I lost myself and now regret my downfall, if this self-evaluation exceeds a healthy dose of shame and guilt and turns into bad faith and toxic guilt and shame, or scrupulosity, still I find myself separate from that light that releases me from the agony of futility of ego reactions.  I need to let go of everything that becomes the center of my attention, my job, prestige, or the boundaries of affections that define my moods, in positive and negative senses, and my thoughts, to attend the light of prayer.  Not easy to do, but at least I know now the direction.

In prayer, I finally find myself.  It took a long time, unfortunately, I understand this.  But I am glad that now I pray with understanding “there is no god, but Allah: لا اله الالله.  I have no doubt now that the locus of genuine selfhood resides in this connection to God.  When I pray beyond petition and intercession, in adoration and contemplation I am finally at home: لا اله الالله.  I find tranquility and joy, because I let go of all the gods: the god of autonomous self, the delusion of self-sufficiency— لا اله الالله, the god of pleasures of the world, the god of name, fame, wealth, and identification with anything in the world— لا اله الالله, the delusion of power and fear of death— لا اله الالله.  I let go of the domination of instrumental reason, while reason can potentially provide a springboard for this leap: لا اله الالله.  I let go also of constant preoccupation with the tasks, while pledges and duties ought to be fulfilled to stand clear in front of God— لا اله الالله.  But there ought to be no god occupying my thoughts and heart, when I meditate on and pray The God (Allah): لا اله الالله 

The major quest and the only solution for the new age of post-post-modernism is with complete understanding acknowledging that only God is the Real.  This goes back to thousands of years of history of religion and theology (pendulum swing in excess) to the emergence of modernity and Western Enlightenment (pendulum swing in excess) to postmodernism (Frankfurt School and Foucault) (pendulum swing in excess) and the balancing out of the pendulum to the stand still of overcoming excesses and to come to the full circle with a higher understanding (supersession) of the fact that not only God is not dead (undoing Nietzsche) but is the most Real.  The Reality of God can be experienced by erudition and education, meditation and prayer, and always with the grace of God—heeding God, tending towards God, walking to that Direction. 

Similarly, ontologically, Being for Heidegger is different from every phenomenon, it is the most Real for him, as the horizon of existential possibility and cognition.  But Heidegger can’t see prayer as the fundamental ontological-existential meaning of everything existing, and especially for human beings, because he turns a blind eye to scriptures and the Quran.  In prayer, we finally arrive at home, because, again, heaven too is this pure prayer of arriving to the beloved.  The whole journey is to arrive at understandingly loving the beloved in prayer: لا اله الالله

Lord, I, a beggar, ask of Thee more than a thousand kings may ask of Thee. Each one has something he needs to ask of Thee; I have come to ask Thee to give me Thyself.

Ansari of Herat

I understand it now.  I have trodden the path of atheistic philosophies.  I have entertained reductionism of scientism and logical hubris.  I have gone down the rabbit hole of ‘no entity without identity’ and ‘only the quantifiable is real’, defining myself with cells, genes, atoms, particles, my biology.  I have been lost in praying fictitious gods of party politics or politics of identity: my nation, tribe, ideology, or humanism.  I declared and lived “I have no essence but existence” in despair.  I fell in the pitfall of hedonism and nihilism.  Disenchanted with self-made spiritualities, now I understand why God in the surah “Believers” (23) declares that believers are those who pray humbly, who shun idle talk, who pay the prescribed alms, who master their (sexual) desires and don’t exceed limits, who are faithful to their trusts and pledges, and again ends with: and “keep up their prayers” (23:1-11).

With absolute certainty through understanding, experience, and divine grace, I experience my essential dependence to the divine in my prayers.

The Desperate Condition of Nihilism and Contradiction in Which Disbelievers Live

The surah Believers (23) starts with a description of actions and characteristics of those who are believers.  “Belief” is not a mental activity but a state of being.  These characteristics, as I mentioned, start with: “praying humbly” and end with “keeping up their prayers”.  I tried to spell out above why prayer is the kernel of existence—if one understands what dependent origination and poverty of existence are.  The surah Believers continues to elaborate more on the qualities of believers:

“Messengers, eat good things and do good deeds: I am well aware of what you do.  This community of yours is one– and I am your Lord: be mindful of Me–but they have split their community into sects, each rejoicing in their own.  So [Muhammad] leave them for a while steeped [in their ignorance].  Do they reckon that, by giving them wealth and sons, We race to give them good things? They really have no idea! Those who stand in awe of their Lord, who believe in His messages, who do not ascribe partners to Him, who always give with hearts that tremble at the thought that they must return to Him, are the ones who race toward good things, and they will be the first to get them.  We do not burden any soul with more than it can bear– We have a Record that tells the truth– they will not be wronged.” (23:51-62)

Atheists obviously can’t stand in awe of God, can’t believe in scriptures and the Quran, and take their own reason, dead matter, or delusions of power as their god.  Atheists are basically lost and disconnected from their source.  They live in despair though try to keep their face with pleasures of the world, while dreading death in each moment.  Everyone wants to die courageously, but no matter how brave we encounter our death destiny, an atheist sees life futile and accidental and at best will encounter death with the Nietzschean laughter of despair.  I found this piece written by an atheist-nihilist eye opening:

Nihilism is not a pathological exacerbation of subjectivism, which annuls the world and reduces reality to a correlate of the absolute ego, but on the contrary, the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the 'values' and 'meanings' which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable. Nature is not our or anyone's 'home', nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity. Thinking has interests which do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter.
~ Ray Brassier

Nihilism is complete disconnect from reality and the world (that the world is "indifferent" to our being); it is not only a belief, it is a way of being and perception of the world, alienation from the world, in constant desperation.  As Kierkegaard shows well in his "Sickness unto Death", it is a denial of having a self, a divine guiding principle within and dependent origination to without, to trust and to hold onto, and to value one's existence and self.

“But the deeds of those who disbelieve are like a mirage in a desert: the thirsty person thinks there will be water but, when he gets there, he finds only God, who pays him his account in full– God is swift in reckoning.  Or like shadows in a deep sea covered by wave upon wave, with clouds above– layer upon layer of darkness– if he holds out his hand, he is scarcely able to see it. The one to whom God gives no light has no light at all.” (24:39-40)

The assumption of a materialistic self or lack of a divine self is indeed this mirage in a desert or shadow in a deep sea, layer upon layer of darkness, in which the material person lives.  In Swendenborg and Esoteric Islam, Henry Corbin explicates the insight of esoteric Islam and Swedenborg's hermeneutics of the decline of 'celestial person' (divine love-self) to 'material person' in this way:

"The fall, the decline, and the disappearance of its [celestial person whose constitution and mode of perception is divine love] posterity will be caused by an increasing attachment to what Swedenborg designates as the human proprium [the principle of individuation in personality: selfhood.]

What connection is there, then, between these two representations of Homo and his proprium?  In Swedenborg's vocabulary this latter word designates what belongs personally to an individual, his selfhood, his ipseity (Selbstheit). But this personal ipseity can be conscious of itself as inseparable from its [Divine] Principle; it is then transparent to It; the life and light that are within it are the life and light of its Principle (this is the state that is expressed in Islamic spirituality by the saying “He who knows himself knows his Lord”). Or else, on the contrary, it can regard itself as though it existed independently of its Principle; it encloses itself within its fictitious autonomy, and at the same time it envelops itself with darkness and succumbs to annihilation and death. This is the key to the states of a person's proprium, of his ipseity, according to which he acts—in conformity with the schema of the anthropology that we already know—from the celestial person, the spiritual person, or the material person. For the last, his own self, his proprium, is absolutely everything; he does not imagine that he can continue to be if he loses it. For the second, the spiritual person, the feeling and the conviction that his Principle (the Lord) is “itself” the power of thinking and acting within him constitute, in a way, theoretical knowledge. Only the first, the celestial person, has the actual perception of it. In addition, although he has no desire for it, a proprium, a self is truly given to him. It is a self like that of an angel, who, in supreme serenity, tastes the joy of governing himself by a self, a proprium, “where there are all things that are of the Lord Himself.” This is the true proprium, the celestial Self, whereas that of the material person is the infernal self, hell itself." (p.22)   

When I was atheist prayer for me was an expression of need and supplication.  It looked beautiful to me because it showed one’s genuine wish or desire.  I couldn’t connect and understand its foundational role in the being of a believer or more accurately its foundational role in existence as such.  I couldn’t understand why genuine prayer has intrinsic value.  We do it for its own sake.  It is not only a mode of petition or supplication.  It is the connection, the umbilical cord, the air and food upon which life as such sustains itself and the spirit keeps going on.  When I was enchanted with scientism, I thought prayer has only placebo effect and believed this is a self-hypnotizing practice.  Because I didn’t believe that it is real.  I didn’t believe that there is something there.  It seemed to me we prostrate to a delusion, to a hope, or as Marx used to say, to “the soul of a soulless world”. 

From personal experience, historical investigation on philosophies and religions, and divine grace, I came to see with clarity that the divine light within and without us is the most real and deviation from it the source of destruction.  I lived fifty-seven years (1960-2017) to awaken to a fact, yes, the fact that the universe is sustained by God, every galaxy and solar system, every manifestation of life, every jinn and angel, every tree and insect, every animal and human being, every cell and every particle is insufficient and dependent to God and prostates to God, rotates around God, exists due to God and praises God in the depth of one’s daily and existential needs.  And this is a fact, with absolute certainty that even science will come to admit it at some point, but not without the aid of religions and mysticism, that the invisible core, God, is more real than the visible world, our biosphere, and universe.  And all that is visible and tractable is held by this invincible hub, power, love, and wisdom.

I experience prayer in Huxley’s four definitions of prayer: petition, intercession, adoration, and contemplation—and in the fifth as the “meaning of existence”.  I ask God healing and guidance for myself, to give me back my fitrat (divine innocence) and purity; I intercede for my children, wife, family members, and depending on occasions for different friends.  Muslims start their prayers with expression of “intention” (neeyat) by saying: I pray for God’s satisfaction (rezayat).  Asking for satisfaction of beloved is a sign of love, as we do things for the satisfaction of our spouse and children, family and friends.  However, I am coming closer and closer to understanding the love of God in prayers.  So, first shyly and hesitantly, but then with a harmonious inner calling, I added “I pray for the love (Eshgh) of God” (مثلا: دو رکعت نماز صبح میخوانم برای رضای خدا، برای عشق به خدا) We have a small dinner table ritual.  Each one of us say what he or she is grateful to God for.  Recently, a couple of times I said: I am grateful to God for God.  My seven years old son, Justus, said, “well it is good you don’t repeat yourself, because the first time you said: ‘I am grateful to God for God,’ and in the second time you said: ‘I am grateful to God for God.’”

I like his perceptiveness.  It is difficult for him and for most of us, and definitely for myself when I was an atheist, to understand fully why we should be grateful to God for God.   I told my son in my spiritual memoir I would explain it.  And I tried briefly to explain it in the first part of this reflection.

The savior of wandering in the ocean of deathless life has rid me of all my asking; As the tree is in the seed, so all diseases are in this asking.

Kabir

Lord, I, a beggar, ask of Thee more than a thousand kings may ask of Thee. Each one has something he needs to ask of Thee; I have come to ask Thee to give me Thyself.

Ansari of Herat

The problem for an atheist is that they are blind to the miserable condition in which they live: despair and/or hedonism.  At best, where one does not ruin one’s life by excess and self-indulgence, an atheist sees one’s life as an accident.  An atheist, as I showed above, is very likely to see the universe as disinterested or worse, hostile to our existence (all discussions on “the problem of evil” come from this perspective).  For a physicalist and materialist, life is a subclass of death.  We are the production of evolutionary changes of dead particles.  Life is the result of chance events, a conglomeration of probabilities[1].   All the cries of commitment and devotion to community and values, on behalf of atheists such as Marx and Chomsky, is a diversion from the truth.  And the truth is that we are wounded in our disconnection from our divine source and our cry for love and justice is rooted in our divine essence (fitrat), not in a biological struggle for survival.  If you ask a Marxist or Chosmkyean, why do you want to devote your life to the underprivileged?   He or she might bring up all sort of theoretical and practical reasons (limbic connection in our amygdala, or socially class based, or innate linguistic-genetic moral codes), but it really doesn’t justify the sense of devotion that one experiences within one’s chest and soul.  I asked my ailing Marxist philosophy teacher a week before his death, “why did you devote all your life to the poor and powerless?”  He answered, “I have this urgent need to do something for our species-being.”  I asked, “is the justification of this ‘urgent need’ by evolutionary biology or class solidarity satisfactory to you?  If I can create a wedge and distinguish between these two states: selfishness for my survival only and self-sacrifice or devotion for the survival of my species or life in general, why should I take the second route, as the amygdala and evolutionary urge don’t take so many to go that way?”  Indeed, Marxism and humanism, take divine longing for doing good hostage for their own little religion.  If I reduce my being to only being animal (based on our biology) and reject the cultivation of the soul to perfection, a process oriented endeavor, as a divine impetus, survival or worse, Nietzschean will-to-power per se can’t justify and motivate me to take the path of perfection and possibly self-sacrifice.  All humanistic atheism falls into variations of hedonism and nihilism due to this contradiction between the beautiful urge to do good and the materialistic fear that these beautiful sentiments aren’t worth our suffering and death.  This friction within the soul of the atheist is the miserable condition in which they live.

The brilliant chemist Sir Humphry Davy puts it best:

“I envy no quality of mind or intellects in others—not genius, power, wit, or fancy; but if I could choose what would be most delightful, and I believe most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to any other blessing; for it makes life a discipline of goodness, creates new hopes when all earthly hopes vanish, … awakens life even in death, and from corruption and decay calls up beauty and divinity; makes an instrument of torture and shame [the cross] the ladder of ascent to Paradise; and far above all combinations of earthly hopes, calls up the most delightful visions of palms and amaranths, the gardens of the blest, the security of everlasting joys, where the sensualist and the skeptic view only gloom, decay, annihilation, and despair.” (Quoted in Light in My Darkness by Helen Keller)

A humanist materialist atheist won’t pray, though might meditate for its psychosomatic benefits.  An atheist bleedingly suffers from existential disconnection from the Source and can’t believe such a connection is real or possible, because he is enchanted with mundane phenomenological perception of the world, which reaches not farther than electromagnetic force-fields, atoms, and particles, whatever can be observed or inferred by observation.  An atheist doesn’t pray because the visible is dead and there is nothing to pray to.  An atheist doesn’t bow down and prostate because they are ensnared with the illusion of knowledge and cling to the tip of iceberg, ignoring the deep longing within their very body/soul and thousands of years of spiritual practices and scriptures.  They don’t pray because they are preyed by death.

Three thousand years ago, Nachiketas seeks wisdom of life from the King of Death (Yama), narrated in Katha Upanishads.

Death says: Take horses and gold and cattle and elephants; choose sons and grandsons that shall live a hundred years. Have vast expanses of land, and live as many years as you desire. Or choose another gift that you think equal to this, and enjoy it with wealth and long life. Be a ruler of this vast earth. I will grant you all your desires. Ask for any wishes in the world of mortals, however hard to obtain. To attend on you I will give you fair maidens with chariots and musical instruments. But ask me not, Nachiketas, the secrets of death.

Nachiketas: All these pleasures pass away, O End of all! They weaken the power of life. And indeed how short is all life! Keep thy horses and dancing and singing. Human cannot be satisfied with wealth. Shall we enjoy wealth with you in sight? Shall we live whilst you are in power? I can only ask for boon I have asked. When a mortal here on earth has felt one’s immortality, could he wish for a long life of pleasures, for the lust of deceitful beauty? Solve then the doubt as to the great beyond. Grant me the gift that unveils the mystery. This is the only gift Nachiketas can ask….

Death: There is the path of joy, and there is the path of pleasure. Both attract the soul. Who follows the first comes to good; who follows pleasure reaches not the End… There is the path of wisdom and the path of ignorance. They are far apart and ends to different ends. You are, Nachiketas, a follower of the path of wisdom: many pleasures tempt you not. Abiding in the midst of ignorance, thinking themselves wise and learned, fools go aimlessly hither and thither, like blind led by the blind…. Not even through deep knowledge can the Atman [the divine self within] be reached, unless evil ways are abandoned, and there is rest in the senses, concentration in the mind and peace in one’s heart.”

To end this reflection, I wish to highlight one point: in our daily prayers Muslims are instructed by God to repeatedly ask God to guide them to the straight path.  The Japanese scholar Dr. Kamal Okuda, who converted to Islam, finds the straight path as the most impressive point in the Quran.

The straight path mentioned in Islam echoes in all religions but not as a hallmark as it is the case in Islam.  I used to think that this is simple minded as life is not straight; it can be a curve.  What is 'straight' after all, if we are living in a curved space?  I had to zigzag so much in my life to get a sense of 'straight path' in the Quran: a blind and drunken man seek the straight path.  Look at the swerving path of humanity from one extreme to another as the mark of devils teeth: Religious atrocity in the name of God (pendulum swing in excess), to human atrocity in the name of reason (pendulum swing in excess), to nihilism and moral relativism as a semblance of critique of excesses of reason and religion; to now (2017) the re-emergence of populism, racism, and nationalism.  The straight path is praying to God (Allah) and only God: لا اله الا الله , there is no god but God.  It took years, unfortunately for me, to understand the truth about the poverty of my existence and my love-longing for God in prayers as the straight path to the meaning of existence.

Lord, teach me to seek Thee and reveal Thyself to me when I seek Thee. For I cannot seek Thee except Thou teach me, nor find Thee except Thou reveal Thyself. Let me seek Thee in longing, let me long for Thee in seeking: let me find Thee in love and love Thee in finding. Lord, I acknowledge and I thank Thee that Thou hast created me in this Thine image, in order that I may be mindful of Thee, may conceive of Thee and love Thee: but that image has been so consumed and wasted away by vices and obscured by the smoke of wrong-doing that it cannot achieve that for which it was made, except Thou renew it and create it anew. Is the eye of the soul darkened by its infirmity, or dazzled by Thy glory ? Surely, it is both darkened in itself and dazzled by Thee. Lord, this is the unapproachable light in which Thou dwellest. Truly I see it not, because it is too bright for me ; and yet whatever I see, I see through it, as the weak eye sees what it sees through the light of the sun, which in the sun itself it cannot look upon. Oh supreme and unapproachable light, oh holy and blessed truth, how far art Thou from me who am so near to Thee, how far art Thou removed from my vision, though I am so near to Thine! Everywhere Thou art wholly present, and I see Thee not. In Thee I move and in Thee I have my being, and cannot come to Thee, Thou art within me and about me, and I feel Thee not.

St. Anselm

(A dervish was tempted by the devil to cease calling upon Allah, on the ground that Allah never answered, 'Here am I.' The Prophet Khadir appeared to him in a vision with a message from God.)

Was it not I who summoned thee to my service?

Was it not I who made thee busy with my name?

Thy calling 'Allah!' was my 'Here am I.'

Jalal-uddin Rumi

I pray God the Omnipotent to place us in the ranks of his chosen, among the number of those whom He directs to the path of safety; in whom He inspires fervor lest they forget Him; whom He cleanses from all defilement, that nothing may remain in them except Himself; yea, of those whom He indwells completely, that they may adore none beside Him. 

Al-Ghazzali

---

[1] I have nothing against evolution but as Nagel and Plantinga in different ways argue, evolution either is not in contradiction with divine plan and actually can be grounded better in such a design (Plantinga) or evolution is incapable of grounding consciousness that can understand laws of nature and evolution as such (Nagel).  In a review of Plantinga’s book, Where the Conflict Really Lies, Nagel wrote:

“[E]ven those who cannot accept the theist alternative should admit that Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism are directed at the deepest problem with that view—how it can account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves, capable of discovering those laws and understanding the universe that they govern. Defenders of naturalism have not ignored this problem, but I believe that so far, even with the aid of evolutionary theory, they have not proposed a credible solution.”

And in a summery on his own book, Mind & Cosmos, from Oxford University Press and subtitled Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False,  Nagel expresses:

The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time. We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything. However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio­temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all. So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. Further, since the mental arises through the development of animal organisms, the nature of those organisms cannot be fully understood through the physical sciences alone. Finally, since the long process of biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious organisms, and since a purely physical process cannot explain their existence, it follows that biological evolution must be more than just a physical process, and the theory of evolution, if it is to explain the existence of conscious life, must become more than just a physical theory. This means that the scientific outlook, if it aspires to a more complete understanding of nature, must expand to include theories capable of explaining the appearance in the universe of mental phenomena and the subjective points of view in which they occur – theories of a different type from any we have seen so far.”

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-core-of-mind-and-cosmos/