Why does God send people to hell If they don’t worship Him?…
If God is self-sufficient, and not needy, why does he care who believes or disbelieves in him?…
Why would a loving God torture people? …
Rational answers to these common questions from an Islamic perspective.
Islam – together with the other great Abrahamic faiths- teaches that justice will be served in an eternal afterlife.
The wicked will be consigned to the depths of hell, whilst the righteous will spend an eternity in Paradise.
In previous ages, the concept of God punishing people with hell for rejecting his worship was not seen as controversial.
Coming from a God-centric view of reality, surely treason against the King of Kings is a sufficient reason to be punished?
However more recently, a liberal-humanist concept of justice has come to dominate the current worldview.
Many people don’t understand why God would torture people simply because, they are not convinced about his existence?
They also question, why God needs our worship and praise? Surely if he is self-sufficient and all powerful, he should not be at all bothered by this?
The Christian worldview emphasises that God is a loving Father. As such torturing one’s children, doesn’t seem very loving or very fatherly, does it?
In Islam too, we find endless references to God’s mercy, some to his love, and many more to his self-sufficiency.
Does such a God need to burn people forever in hell, if they refuse consent to worship him?
A lot of people growing up in a secular era, would argue that it makes sense that God should punish paedophiles or serial killers.
They have, after all, offended against the vulnerable and abused the rights of other people.
However God is all-powerful. Nobody can hurt him, or abuse him, or otherwise take anything from him.
Surely it cannot be morally justified that he should torture people singly for the thought-crime of disbelief? Especially if, it is genuinely held disbelief?
This article will seek to tackle these questions honestly and candidly.
I will aspire to demonstrate that it is perfectly just for God to send to hell, those who refuse to worship him.
Objection to Hell for non-worship of God 1:
God must be needy and insecure. Why else would he be so offended by people not believing in, or worshipping him, that he would punish them in hell, as a result?
If God craved unconditional human worship and praise, and was indeed insecure about rejection; he would have created a very different world.
We must remember that we are talking of an Omnipotent Being.
Such a being could do the following, easily:
- Take away human free will to disobey/disbelieve. Everyone would then spend their entire lives worshipping and praising God. The Qur’an makes clear that God has freely chosen not to compel people to believe in him, and thus believers too, should not force others to accept faith: “Say, ‘Now the truth has come from your Lord: let those who wish to believe in it do so, and let those who wish to reject it do so” (18:29).
- Destroy all disobedient humans and replace them with righteous ones. The Qur’an stresses that God is easily able to do this, indeed to replace mankind altogether with a new creation (4:133) yet he chooses not to, so that we may freely choose good or evil, as a test of our deeds (67:2).
- Not give free will to any beings at all. When Allah created Adam (peace be upon him) the angels asked why God would create a being that could abuse it’s free will, and create disorder and bloodshed when they do nothing but worship and glorify God? He replied ‘I know what you do not know’ . Later when presented with the names of the greatest humans and informed of their freely chosen acts of goodness, they came to understand the value and purpose of God creating a species that could freely choose goodness over evil (Qur’an 2:30 – 2:31) The point is that God greatly values free acts of goodness, when the potential for disobedience exists , over his own praise and glorification.
A ‘needy’ God would not allow people to revile him, reject him, hate him, oppose him as millions of people do everyday.
I will explore why God might actually want to punish those who reject him, further on.
However the hypothesis that God is needy and insecure, being in need of worship and praise, clearly stands refuted.
Objection to Hell for non-worship of God 2:
If God doesn’t need our worship, why threaten us with hellfire? Surely the whole point is to scare us into obeying him? Surely this is what dictators do, torture people into doing what they want?
If the point of hell-fire is to threaten people into worshipping God, surely this would be better achieved by instantly punishing people for non-worship of God?
Certainly, the deterrent value of such immediate punishment would be considerably greater.
Just think about all the millions of atheist keyboard warriors, ranting and raving against God at this very moment.
Would they dare do so, if they knew that God would instantly punish them as a result?
Dictators and despots don’t allow years, decades and lifetimes of defiance to happen. They punish at the first sign of disobedience or disloyalty.
The ‘dictator’ analogy is clearly faulty as applied to God.
Objection to Hell for non-worship of God 3:
So why would a loving God create Hell at all?
God is indeed loving. He is compassionate, merciful, forgiving and generous.
Nevertheless, his mercy and love is not any barrier to his attribute of justice.
He is absolutely just, and absolute justice requires punishing those who deserve punishment.
A good teacher rewards effort and good behaviour in the classroom. She penalises those who misbehave and are disinterested in learning. This might range from after-school detention to permanant exclusion, for the most serious misbehaviour.
A reasonable parent wouldn’t desist from grounding a child, taking away their treats or stopping them from meeting certain people if their behaviour is bad enough to merit these sanctions.
A fair-minded judge would give someone life imprisonment or the death penalty at a moment’s notice, for any number of serious crimes such as terrorism, genocide or sexual abuse of children.
What if the offender was the judge’s own child? Surely their parental love shouldn’t stop them from sending a mass murderer to the gallows?
God’s love is not blind, however his justice is.
Why is hell necessary? Because this world can never ensure true justice. Here money, power, incompetence and corruption often lead the innocent to prison. The powerful, meanwhile, can literally get away with murder.
Jimmy Savile, raped hundreds of children and escaped justice. Jack the ‘ripper’, was never caught. The world’s prisons are full of innocent people.
God has created the world as a place of trial, and this means injustice and justice will both happen here.
However, he has also created an eternal world where full and complete justice will be served.
Our actions in the world cannot go unrewarded or unpunished, thus heaven and hell must both exist:
On that Day no soul shall suffer the least injustice. You shall be rewarded only according to your deeds
Al – Qur’an 36:54
Will hell be eternal? More on related questions here.
Objection to Hell for non-worship of God 4:
If free-will results in some people doing evil, and going to hell, why did God even give humans the choice to sin or not worship him?
With our limited knowledge it is logically problematic to be second-guessing the decisions of an Omniscient Being.
That said, one potential answer does occur to me.
God by his nature is the creator of all possibilities. He has already created a world of perfect obedience i.e. the world of the angels.
However, the inability to do wrong means many forms of goodness would go unrealised in that world.
For instance, the loving sacrifices parents make for their children.
Or when a poor person shares their meagre meal with another hungry person.
Or when a teacher, stays after school giving extra help to their pupils to get them through exams.
Without choice, all acts of extraordinary goodness cannot exist and so something really valuable, would be missing from God’s creation.
Humans, without free will, would be not only be unable to choose bad actions, but also be unable to do any exemplary acts of goodness.
Equally, without pain, pleasure would be meaningless. All the heroic, courageous acts of resistance and bravery in history would have never happened.
The world would be a dull, robotic one without the joys of friendship, the heartbreak of love, the laughter of children.
Objection to Hell for non-worship of God 5:
How can it fair for God to burn me in hell, when he hasn’t given me convincing proof he exists? Why doesn’t he make his existence obvious? Why is he hiding?
Firstly, it is untrue that God has not provided us with sufficient evidence to believe in him.
I would assert, that belief in God is overwhelming supported by a whole variety of evidence.
Indeed, belief in God has been ingrained in human nature. Thus, repeated studies have shown children naturally adhere to the concept of God regardless of their parents beliefs, showing belief in him is in fact innate and natural.
This is what we call the fitrah in Islam. Even in non-theistic cultures like Japan, children naturally believe in God as the Creator (see research by Dr Olivera Petrovich and Justin L. Barett from the University of Birmingham.
The Qur’an teaches us that there are clear signs of God’s existence both within ourselves, and in the Universe around us. Such that, they provide sufficient insight for anyone willing to turn to God (50:8).
However, those who are too proud to obey God, turn away from these signs out of a deliberate choice to disbelieve (6:93).
It is not that they don’t think God exists, but rather they would prefer to think he doesn’t and so will ‘explain away’ any argument or evidence for his existence.
Even the poster-boy of New Atheism, Richard Dawkins admits that pondering on the beauty and vastness of the Universe, leads naturally to a desire to worship God:
… when you consider the beauty of the world and you wonder how it came to be what it is, you are naturally overwhelmed with a feeling of awe, a feeling of admiration and you almost feel a desire to worship something.
I feel this, I recognise that other scientists such as Carl Sagan feel this, Einstein felt it. We, all of us, share a kind of religious reverence for the beauties of the universe, for the complexity of life. For the sheer magnitude of the cosmos, the sheer magnitude of geological time. And it’s tempting to translate that feeling of awe and worship into a desire to worship some particular thing, a person, an agent. You want to attribute it to a maker, to a creator
FIxed-Point Debate with Dr John C. Lennox University of Alabama, 2007
The Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel makes a most candid admission regarding his desire to disbelieve in God. He defines it as the ‘cosmic authority problem’:
I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.
It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.
One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind …. This is a somewhat ridiculous situation …. [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist.
The Qur’an states that rejectors such as these would ask for miraculous signs and still reject God after receiving them (6:111).
Having said this, it is true that God’s existence could have been made even more obvious, than it is.
For instance, the world could have be run via miraculous events directly, rather than controlled natural regularities.
Or, God could be seen or heard in some way or form.
However this would totally defeat the purpose of our test!
If the existence of God is this obvious, most of us would be utterly petrified of offending him, and constantly on our ‘best behaviour’.
God’s ability to punish ‘there and then’ would terrify most people into submitting out of fear.
Do we act different when we have a gun to a head? Would such behaviour better reflect our true nature, or would our conduct be more authentic, when faced with a distant and probable (but not certain) promise of future punishment? Clearly, it is the latter.
God wants us to turn to him willingly, out of a sense of awe, love, hope and longing not just out of fear ( Qur’an 32:16)
The test we are placed in, is the test of remaining conscious of our Creator and seeking to obey him (which is instilled into us by him, Qur’an 7:172) while he is ghayb i.e. not detectable directly or obvious to our senses:
Thou canst [truly] warn only him who is willing to take the reminder to heart, and who stands in awe of the Most Gracious although He is beyond the reach of human perception: unto such, then, give the glad tiding of [God’s] forgiveness and of a most excellent reward
Qur’an 36:11
Objection to Hell for non-worship of God 6:
Which of the 4000 faiths, to believe in? Which of the millions of gods, to worship? What if I dedicate my life to a religion, and end up still burning in hell?
Actually, a step-by-step elimination process leads to a choice between just two religions, Christianity and Islam, that one might choose to avoid eternal damnation ( vis a vis, Pascal’s Wager).
There are strong reasons to believe in Islam as explained, in the articles linked.
Not withstanding, there is force in the contention that somebody born into a different religion, might find it much harder to come to the right conclusion.
Will God punish a devout person who genuinely believes in the ‘wrong’ religion?
There are several good reasons why we can answer ‘no’ to this question.
Firstly, it offends our God-given sense of justice. Our morals are almost certainly divinely ordained (see William Lane Craig’s ‘moral argument for God’).
God himself has instilled into us, the insight that unintentional mistakes, made sincerely and with good intentions, should never be punished like malicious crimes.
There is no question of God acting contrary to this principle himself. The Qur’an assures on the day of judgement, no soul shall be wronged in the least (21:47).
Secondly, there is strong scriptural evidence to the contrary, for instance the Bible states that everyone who seeks God will find him, all those who knock the door of God will have it opened to them (Matthew 7:7-8 ).
The Qur’an states that human beings will be judged by their intentions, the soundness of their heart and by what reaches them of the truth (24:64, 26:89, 5:84) .
What if a person strives to find and serve God, but falls short of attaining the truth? The Qur’an reassures us , that ‘…a human will get only what they strive for’ (53:39).
This understanding is by no means a ‘fringe’ view in either Islam or Christianity. The doctrine of ‘invincible ignorance‘ in Roman Catholicism and similar beliefs in Orthodox denominations mean the majority of Christians accept the possible salvation of well-meaning non-christians.
In Islam, this view is most identified with the traditional ‘Ashari view. It’s most well know exponent is Imam Al-Ghazali who opined that not just those, who do not hear of Islam but also those who do not hear or learn of an authentic version of islam, may be excused for their ignorance:
The extremely prominent 12th century Ash‘arite theologian, al-Ghazali (d. 1111)—famously hailed by some as “the greatest Muslim after Muhammad”—asserted that God, out of his overwhelming mercy, would save most of humanity. This would include non-Muslims who never encountered Islamic revelation in its “true form” as well as those who at least actively investigated it after becoming “reached.”
https://blog.bakerinstitute.org/2019/08/22/non-muslims-in-heaven/
Objection to Hell for non-worship of God 7:
I didn’t consent to be tested at the risk of Eternal Hell, so how is this fair?
In fact, you did!
The Qur’an clearly implies that we human beings CHOSE to take the amanah or trust of free will, knowingly and intentionally (33:72).
We did so knowing that we would be rewarded or punished accordingly.
In other words, we were given the choice.
Secondly, would anybody say that Hitler should not be punished for his freely committed crimes because he didn’t chose to be tested, or born?
Would anyone say that Abdus Sattar Edhi deserves no reward for his goodness, if he was born without choice?
Even IF we were born without choice (and we did have choice) we are still responsible for our good and bad actions, since these are freely chosen.
To this the Atheist might object that such consent that cannot be recalled is meaningless. How can a person be held liable for a promise, he has no memory of even making?
This argument is rather like objecting that a teacher should jog their students memories, whilst they are writing their exam!
The memory of our meeting with God where we testified to his existence ( Qur’an 7:172) and the agreement to be tested (33:72) could ONLY be valid if one could not consciously remember it.
If we did remember these events, it would make it pointless to be tested in this world, since we would undoubtedly act differently (having directly perceived God) and not reveal our true nature to the same extent.
So if you claim that ‘we should have been only tested after asking us’, equally you should accept that the memory of this should be erased or else the whole exercise of testing becomes moot.
It’s just like saying a double-blind placebo medical trial should reveal which medicine is real and which is the placebo! Of course this would be absurd.
Secondly, the memory of these pre-birth events has not been totally erased. It exists in our subconscious minds, and affects all aspects of our lives.
Thus, repeated studies have shown children naturally adhere to the concept of God regardless of their parents beliefs, showing belief in him is in fact innate and natural. This is what we call the fitrah in Islam.
Objection to Hell for non-worship of God 8:
If God doesn’t need our worship, then why punish us for not doing so? He should only punish those who hurt others….since he is all-powerful he cannot be harmed by anybody, so why subject people to torture if they haven’t actually harmed anybody?
This objection, ostensibly makes sense.
However, a little reflection reveals the deep flaws within it.
What makes you think that other people, or animals, even the planet, should be treated in a particular way?
What determines the rights and duties, that we have towards each other?
Let us question everything. Why should we be ‘kind’ to others? At the base of it, we instinctively and intuitively feel that we should.
But not everybody does.
A footballer was recently fined for beating up a cat for fun.
Some people get pleasure from torturing other humans.
Our subjective feelings, cannot provide us with universal morals. Atheism fails to ground Morality on any real basis.
There must an objective source of morality, that we are bound to obey at the cost of serious consequences.
This is why obeying God is necessary, not just following our own subjective and fuzzy notions of ‘being a good person’.
If you don’t consider God as being someone you owe complete obedience to, you are in fact worshipping your own desires and whims. You have taken your desire as your god (Qur’an 45:23)
You might also be simply deluding yourself by mindlessly imbibing your cultural norms, or following blindly, trends from rich countries. These ‘morals’ are fickle and change every few decades.
The cultural norms of the “woke era” differ from the morality of most previous periods of world history.
Can you honestly say that you wouldn’t have supported slavery if you lived in the American South in the 1800s?
Do you honest believe you would have accepted ‘their/them ‘ pronouns in Victorian England?
This is why just loosely and vaguely doing what ‘seems right’ to you personally or societally, is not enough.
Abdullah Al Andulusi explains beautifully why acknowledging God’s right to be obeyed and worshipped is what actually gives a person true nobility, beyond simple pleasure seeking in the guise of ‘being nice ‘:
Most people are born and socialised with desires and preferences they never choose or chose. Some are born as psychopaths (inability to emphasise with others), or born/raised with a sadistic streak (which involves pleasure or fascination at causing pain or watching living things die), and others are born really enjoying socialising with others or enjoying getting validation from helping others.
Now, Humans have been given nobility, which means we want to follow something higher than ourselves, a greater narrative, greater purpose than beyond simply existing – something that we can do of a higher value than merely accidental cause and effect.
The only real choice we have then, as humans, is what do we put as the basis for our principles (i.e. what do we worship). To this, we have three options…
We can choose to either worship
1) ourselves [e.g. narcissism] where we believe we our the highest value in existence,
2) Other people, or whatever society tells us to do, where we give the highest value to our culture, group, nation or ancestors or
3) the Lord of all Creation, which everyone starts to know initially as ‘The Truth’ from the moment they can reason.
(The first two options are essentially, feed-back loops of human motivations)
Because all humans are motivated by seeking pleasure/avoiding pain a sociable person may only be sociable because they see benefit in it (e.g. accruing a social debt from society as favours in return), or because their genes/upbringing conditioned them to get pleasure from it as social validation- but had they been given different genes/upbringing, they would have taken equal pleasure in being sadistic.
Have you ever noticed, that among animals of the same species, or even litter, they have different personality traits? Some aggressive, others sociable? These are traits we also don’t choose.
*But* what we can choose, is whether we acknowledge there is something greater than ourselves upon which all of existence depends upon, but is independent itself of all things (Al-Samad). Being Creations of this Creator and fundamental sustainer of our existence, our very existence and therefore our purpose is defined as bearing witness to Him. There is no other purpose that we can serve, nor any other that could hold any sense.
Additionally, the Creator actively sustains our existence, and there is nothing that can be independent of Him. If we live, it’s because He sustains our continuance with His power.
So for any if us to choose to reject Him and deliberately choose not to bear witness to Him is the worst crime of all.
It is not just a crime of profound ingratitude,or abuse of another’s property (we being the property of Allah), but it is a crime against reality itself.
Facebook Post, Abdullah al Andulusi
Once we understand the above, it becomes apparent that our obligations and duties towards others, can only be consistently and universally grounded upon our willingness to serve and obey God.
Can we continuously obey God, without being in awe of his greatness? Without understanding that he is perfect? Without acknowledging that we owe our very existence to him? Surely not.
We cannot robotically dedicate our whole life to a being we have not seen, without understanding his attributes and feeling a deep personal relationship to him.
Therefore, it is necessary to always keep his greatness, his judgement of us, his favours always in mind. This is why we worship and praise him, not to fulfill any need of his.
When you work in an organisation, a certain deference is given to the boss. Being rude to her, or picking and choosing which of her instructions you ‘feel’ make sense, is going to get your employment terminated at some point.
In a school, being nice to your friends is good, but hardly the most important thing.
You have to address the teacher with respect, be willingly to follow their instructions to the letter, or otherwise your learning journey will be a short one.
In a state, the monarch or president is invested with great respect. They are bowed to, one stands up to greet them and they are referred to with reverence as ‘Majesty’ or ‘Excellency’.
One also addresses judges as ‘your honour’ or ‘my lord’ and stands up in their presence, until told to sit down.
In each of the above examples, the very functioning of the organisation, relies on these symbols of obedience.
For without such respect, the whole chain of command becomes irrelevant and proper outcomes cannot be achieved.
The same is true of universal justice and morality. It hinges on our willingness to bow before God.
God is not just a King, nor is he simply a judge or teacher.
He is the Eternal King with unlimited power and knowledge. He is the only judge, who decides our fates, both here and hereafter. He has taught man all that he knows, or all that he can know.
It stands to reason that refusing to acknowledge his authority, or rebelling against his worship will be treated as a punishable offence just like treason against the monarch, disobedience against the teacher and contempt of the judge in court is.
In each of these cases, the judge, teacher or Head of State is not being vain or arrogant.
Nor are they needy for praise and reverance.
However a school cannot impart education properly until teachers are treated with due respect, for if the teachers superior knowledge and status is not acknowledged, how will the children learn?
How will a business succeed if employees feel they can carry on talking amongst themselves, while their boss calls them to the office?
Why would people obey the judge’s verdict if they see him as unworthy of judging them, and do not regard his office with honour?
To give another scenario: imagine the head of a charity, its CEO. He has set up a charity to benefit others, not himself.
He is a billionaire and does not take a salary for his work for the charity. He can easily replace all the staff at anytime he wants.
If he expects people to follow his instructions and treat him with courtesy and respect, is this neediness or vanity? It seems unlikely.
Far more likely, he wants employees to work efficiently and meet the targets, so others can can benefit.
He knows, a disrespectful employee who cares nothing for the boss’s reputation or honour, is not going to work as well as one who dutifully follows his instructions.
This is why God wants us to worship him, so we can effectively purify our selves and succeed eternally. He has no needs.
Man can only succeed in the afterlife – the real life, that is everlasting – if he acknowledges God is due to obedience and worship.
If he cannot acknowledge God’s rights over himself, and is not in awe of him, he can never truly and consistently benefit himself or other humans, because otherwise his ‘good’ acts are simply culturally-specific or entirely subjective.
To be a good person, is to be a godly person.
One who shuns God, can only be good in entirely superficial, self-deluding way.
It is also an insidious myth, that humans can ever not worship something. Throughout human history, humans have dedicated themselves to the worship of idols, animals, other humans.
None of whom deserved worship, or had any bearing on their existence.
Humans continuously falter into worshipping imaginary beings or their own selves.
Directing servitude to the one Being with true authority over us, is in fact a great favour: It liberates us from all false bondage.
As the great Philosopher-Poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal said “This one prostration to God that you deem to be a burden / Liberates you from thousands of prostrations to others”.
In Atheism, a person ends up worshipping his own desires.
David Foster Wallace famously explains why everyone worships something, and why a divine or transcendental object of worship is always required:
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C., or Allah, be it Yahweh, or the Wican mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you will worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million different deaths before they finally plant you…Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
Think about this also: God is our closest and most important relationship.
He was with me before I was born, and will remain with me after I die.
My parents, and siblings were given to me, by him for a short interval during my life. However, either I will predecease them or they will leave me.
The same applies to one’s spouses, children, relatives, friends, jobs and careers, and indeed the world. My relationship with all worldly things, is temporary, changeable and fragile.
I am just a temporary visitor to this world, and once I am gone, it will tick along without me just fine.
What happens to the causes I so desperately fought for? ( civil rights, the environment, world peace etc) or the people who relied on me, will be irrelevant to me and I will become a distant memory to others.
How then can I be a ‘good’ person, if I ignore the most important relationship of all ? Can we call a person ‘good’ who is obnoxious to his family but good to his work colleagues?
So how can a God-hater be good, by despising the most important being in his life?
The one enduring relationship is the one with my creator. The one relationship that cannot ever change or be severed, or lose its value or importance.
God is with me every moment. He never leaves me alone and is always a thought and prayer away. He knows my every thought, indeed, he understands me better than I do.
He loves me and offers me his love, why would I disdain it? Why would I fail to keep this relationship as the centre of my life?
God doesn’t need me for anything, but worshipping him fulfils my emotional and spiritual needs. Indeed research shows the clear benefits of prayer and spirituality on the human psyche, health and life expectancy.
My worship is a symbolic expression of my relationship with God, and a constant reminder that he is beside me, so I don’t get lost in the world and forget my way home to him, in the afterlife.
Calling upon his might and mercy, reflecting on his greatness, makes me ‘see him’ with the mind’s eye.
As God doesn’t need anything from me and gives me everything, how else would I maintain a deeply personal relationship with him?
Worship helps clear the fog from my mind, so I can see the divine countenance in all its majesty and glory.
Additionally, God is the source of all beauty and all goodness. He is perfect, and thus truly worthy of adoration.
Praising humans profusely is unseemly because it always leads to hyperbole, and can encourage big-headedness.
In the case of God, all goodness and beauty only exists due to him and no human praise could ever fully convey his magnificence.
We admire artists, but would scorn the sculptor of reality? We marvel at human inventions, but reject the creator of human intellect? We love music, but cast off the very source of our sense of hearing and melody?
None deserves praise as God does, and this is rationally undeniable.
Finally, it is axiomatically accepted that using certain facilities, creates certain rights and obligations.
For instance, living in a country in peace and security obligates one to pay taxes and obey the law. Being married to a person, obligates one to care for them and provide for their physical and emotional needs.
In the case of God, everything we have belongs to him. Indeed even our bodies, are his property.
All the faculties we have including existence, consciousness, aesthetics, intelligence, sight, hearing, taste, touch are from him and him alone.
Who could be more ungrateful and rude then a person who uses everything that somebody provides, yet treats him with contempt?
If you live within the borders of a country, which provides you security and opportunity, and treats with you respect. You will be punished if you refuse to pay taxes.
You will be punished more severely if you refuse to stop, when instructed by the police. And you may be given the death penalty if you commit treason, and conspire with the enemies of your country against it.
Living at every moment due to God’s grace, but spending that life in rebellion against him is the greatest treachery and deserves the greatest punishment:
And if any is grateful, truly his gratitude is (a gain) for his own soul; but if any is ungrateful, truly my Lord is free of all needs, Supreme in honour
Al-Quran 27:40
And [always] does He give you something out of what you may be asking of Him; and should you try to count God’s blessings, you could never compute them. [And yet,] behold, man is indeed most persistent in wrongdoing, stubbornly ingrate!
Al-Quran 14:34