The Eclipse of God: Man's Descent into Self-Worship

In Islam, true knowledge is inseparable from truth itself. It is the compass of salvation, the safeguard against existential confusion. The first transgressor, Iblis, erred not merely through disobedience and pride, but through a deeper ignorance-of himself, of humanity, of divine providence, and of Allah as the Sustainer of all existence. His rebellion became the archetype of spiritual malfunction: a delusion of knowing masking a profound epistemic void.

As the human story unfolded, Satan's legacy persisted. Granted permission to operate as man's deceiver, he sought to replicate his rebellion in the human image-promoting self-worship, noncompliance, and spiritual blindness. Prophets, beginning with Adam, were resisted by a toxic blend of arrogance and ignorance. Every vice in human history echoes this formula: saying "yes" to Satan and "no" to the Creator.

To counter this descent, Allah taught Adam the names of all things-a metaphysical act that established knowledge as humanity's safeguard. Revelation became man's permanent companion, anchoring the man-God and earth-heaven axis. Yet many chose to abandon these gifts, chasing Satan's hollow promises and falling into distorted perceptions of God and flawed earthly lifestyles. Thus, the vicious circle was sealed: man first disfigured the divine, then projected his distortion onto the architecture of both personal conscience and collective existence.

Despite his confusion, man never stopped looking up-but through fractured lenses, leading to broken consequences. Prophets were rejected, and pseudo-paradigms embraced. So called civilizations followed these faulty alignments, arriving nowhere in the sense of genuine history-making.

It was the Greeks who first grew weary of mythic and impotent divinities. Classical philosophers, disillusioned by the inefficacy of their gods, turned their gaze inward. Man ceased to look spiritually and intellectually toward heaven, redirecting his civilizational compass toward the self. Having exhausted all other avenues, he declared himself the final source of meaning and legitimacy.

Thus emerged humanism-a crusade to enthrone human reason, experience, and agency at the center of existence. Protagoras' declaration, "Man is the measure of all things," encapsulated the shift: reality became subjective, truth became human-centered, and divine standards were eclipsed by anthropocentric epistemology.

Such a human-centered worldview flourished through Classical Antiquity until the rise of Christianity as the Roman state religion. The Church reoriented thought toward divine revelation, interrupting the trajectory of secular humanism. Yet this interruption was not permanent-it merely delayed the resurgence of man-centered models.

With the gradual loosening of ecclesiastical authority, the revival of Classical Antiquity began. Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers responded to Christianity much like Greek philosophers had responded to their own religious institutions. Humanism returned to the fore, now fortified by centuries of philosophical refinement. The self was once again inaugurated, and the eclipse of God deepened.

Religion and God were not immediately discarded but gradually sidelined. Their relevance to human life was questioned, and an interregnum in divine-human relations was enforced. Once man discovered he could operate by his own devices, the idea of an organized religion and a sovereign God in heaven was increasingly pushed into the background of cultural amnesia. God became an unwelcome interruption-an obsolete authority in a world now governed by human autonomy.

To reconcile this exclusion with man's primordial nature as a dependent being, Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers rejected the God of institutional religion but not the concept of divinity itself. Instead, they fashioned a god from their own discoveries-a rational, abstract, and non-intervening deity. Man was ready to make a god-and eventually to become one.

As traditional notions of God faded, the divinity of man grew louder and more acceptable. Philosophers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment believed in a god, but not the one who sends prophets or commands obedience. Their god was passive, depersonalized, and governed by natural laws. Einstein's embrace of Spinoza's god-revealed in the harmony of existence but unconcerned with human fate-epitomized this change.

God was naturalized and humanized; religion was secularized and desacralized. In turn, human systems were consecrated. The Mona Lisa and Michelangelo's David became sacramentals of the new anthropocentric creed. Humanism morphed into a total way of life, with man as its deity and his achievements as its sanctuaries.

Despite the euphoria of abandoning traditional religion, the ultimate meaning of life continued to evade even the most promising philosophical and scientific heralds. Transcendence became abstract, vague, and detached. The failure of religion to deliver clarity was matched by the inability of humanism to offer salvation.

This led to a full severance from the idea of God and objective truth. Man, left with pressing concerns and no genuine guidance from above, chose to rely solely on himself. Thus emerged the formal doctrines of atheism and agnosticism-late but inevitable products of a civilizational trajectory that had long displaced the divine. Baron d'Holbach and Thomas Huxley became emblematic figures of this final rupture, marking the institutionalization of disbelief in the wake of Enlightenment humanism.

Baron d'Holbach, in "The System of Nature", championed atheism not as nihilism but as a rational liberation. He portrayed atheists as allies of reason, inquiry, nature, freedom, and experience-agents of human potential often misunderstood and misrepresented. His vision echoed Immanuel Kant's Enlightenment ideal: the emancipation of man from self-incurred tutelage, not due to lack of reason, but lack of courage to use it without external guidance.

Thomas H. Huxley, in his essay "Agnosticism", clarified that agnosticism is not a creed but a method-rooted in intellectual integrity and ancient philosophical tradition. He wrote: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you... do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable." This principle, he argued, was as old as Socrates and as foundational as the Reformation, Descartes, and modern science.

Having dismantled traditional religious frameworks and failed to replace them with demonstrable metaphysical alternatives, modern man continued turning inward. His own universe-its needs, aspirations, and sensory immediacy-became the only credible domain. Man became not only the measure but the end of all things.

In this new pattern, worship persisted-not of God, but of the self. The human body became the temple, adorned with sacred art in the form of tattoos, makeup, and surgical modification. Rituals of consumption replaced sacrificial offerings; food became a central obsession, not to sustain life but to celebrate it. Human achievements in culture and civilization were elevated to sanctified status-objects of reverence and existential pride.

The future remains uncertain. Humanity continues to agnosticize the spiritual and desacralize heaven, while exalting the self as both origin and destination. The divine is no longer sought above but fabricated below. The self becomes the locus of meaning, the apotheosis of existence, and the final arbiter of truth.

Whether this trajectory leads to renewal or collapse remains to be seen. But the civilizational shift is unmistakable: from revelation to reason, from transcendence to immanence, from God to man.