‘Thank God!’ – What We All Feel But Can’t Explain

(‘The glass half-overflowing’ by Almas Aasia)

Sabahat Ali, USA

When I was a kid, my birthdays were a little unconventional. I’d wake up well before sunrise, with my dad handing me 20 dollars.

Only it wasn’t for me.

“Put this in the Sadaqah jar,” he would say. ‘Sadaqah’ in Islam is a term for charity. I remember standing next to my father for the pre-dawn prayer on those cold January mornings knowing that the first thing to do on my birthday was thank the One Who gave me life in the first place. The second was to be charitable: after all, “one who is not grateful to humanity cannot be grateful to God.”

We all have a gratitude language.

Some of the most powerful experiences in life are “impossible thank-you moments” – when an act of kindness is so big that it paralyzes you. Your tongue moves but fails to convey the crashing waves in your heart. Your veins flow with liquid gratitude. It’s like being stuck in the most wonderful place in the world.

And perhaps the only thing more powerful than that is when you see that “impossible thank-you” shine through another person’s eyes for something you’ve done. When they’re suspended in amber awe – speechless, overwhelmed. The way you connect in that moment is more than just chemical. It’s sacred. Even spiritual.

Are Your Thank-Yous Even Real?

So when atheists ask: “Why should I care if God exists?” They miss a universe full of points. If God exists, He gave you everything. Your beating heart. Your working lungs. Your family. Every breath you take. Every morsel that sustains you. The privilege of love. The gift of empathy. The joy of laughter. The miracle of life.

Have you ever walked up to the counter at your favourite coffee shop only to learn that the stranger before you paid for your breakfast? That singular act of kindness forges an instantaneous bond, like a spiritual quantum entanglement. Your soul bursts with the desire to say “thank you!”

That’s why it baffles me that when it comes to thanking the Creator of everything – the Architect of your existence – suddenly, it’s beneath consideration?

I can only call it cosmic arrogance. To not even investigate the ultimate Cause – the Prime Mover, the First Domino. I’ve spoken with hundreds of atheists who simply shrug it off: “We can’t know if God exists.”

Respectfully, this strikes me as the ultimate cop-out. If there’s even a microscopic chance God exists, don’t we at the very least owe Him the effort to find out? Doesn’t our existence demand the greatest use of “thank-you” in the universe’s history?

Atheists often fixate on so-called ‘flaws’ – what they call suffering and evil. But mischaracterizing the role that suffering plays in the grand scheme is itself a grave error. It’s like criticizing a gear while ignoring the clockwork of the cosmos. If you rip one part out of context and call it broken, that proves nothing about the whole. Islam demonstrates that everything we call suffering operates within a divine system that maximizes good and ensures perfect justice. This life is an abode of trials – tests for us to strive, develop and grow through perseverance and courage. And while we see many of the rewards and consequences in this life, the great system of balance and equilibrium will see its true splendour in the afterlife.

Is Gratitude A Divine Language?

Of all the eminent figures in Islamic history, one man’s spiritual legacy continues to touch and transform tens of millions worldwide spanning six continents. Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (as) of Qadian, India (who also claimed to be the awaited Mahdi and Messiah) observed something about gratitude that reaches the absolute outer limits of human expression:​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“The word ḥamd — true praise — is reserved only for one who performs a good deed deliberately, and who grants a favour with the intention of doing good. It is not mere flattery. Rather, it a true expression of gratitude towards someone who acts wilfully, not by accident or force. In its truest sense, ḥamd is reserved only for that Being whose every favour and blessing is given knowingly and intentionally… Such praise is only warranted and deserved when the benefactor is fully aware of their act of kindness and chooses to do it — not when it happens unconsciously or unintentionally…”
(Aijaz-ul-Masih, Ruhani Khaza’in Vol. 18, pg. 129)

Why a special word? Because thanking God is an impossible task. Every microsecond spent counting blessings creates new ones. Each breath. Each heartbeat. Billions of cells synchronizing perfectly. Neural circuits firing in patterns too complex to map.

It’s like trying to count stars while they multiply before your eyes. No human effort to thank God will ever be enough. We’re like children running to catch light beams racing away at 186,000 miles per second. But the gap between our “thank yous” and God’s favors is greater still.

Is Proof For God Hidden In Consciousness?

But here’s where atheism hits an insurmountable philosophical wall: authentic gratitude requires consciousness on both ends.

When you use AI to solve a problem, you might feel the urge to say “thank you” to your screen. But that gratitude dies in the digital void because there’s no conscious mind there – no intentional choice to help you, no deliberate act of kindness. Real gratitude flows from one consciousness to another, acknowledging willful benevolence. It literally celebrates the intention behind the act.

This creates an impossible dilemma for atheists. When they claim to feel grateful, who are they being grateful to? To quantum fluctuations? To unconscious, unintentional, blind evolutionary processes? To the statistical accidents that assembled DNA through blind chance?

You cannot genuinely thank unconscious forces that had no intention of benefiting you, no awareness of your existence, no capacity to choose kindness over indifference. Directing gratitude toward mindless processes is like writing heartfelt thank-you letters to a coin flip. Compare the beauty of someone in front of you paying for your breakfast with a machine accidentally dispensing you free food.

The atheist who feels authentic thankfulness for existence itself unknowingly acknowledges what their worldview denies: a conscious Creator who chose to grant life, chose to make reality beautiful, chose to make consciousness possible.

In the end, true gratitude is impossible without factoring God into the equation of life.

The Power of Thank-You: How It Transforms Your Life

“But does it really matter how you view gratefulness – isn’t it just a philosophical discussion?”

It matters.

The old adage illustrates how: branches heavy with fruit bow lowest to the ground. True thankfulness bends you. Humbles you. The weight of gratitude impacts every action in our life. It’s transformative in uncountable ways.

How you treat others. How you move through the world. How you react to difficulty. The energy that you carry into a room. Your gratefulness footprint matters.

And Islam is proof.

Before a single morsel of food touches your lips, a believer starts in the name of God. After every meal, believers praise God Almighty. If someone cooked that meal, Islam requires you to thank them sincerely and pray for their well-being. When someone gives you a gift, Islam teaches there’s only one response to kindness (ihsan): return it with equal or greater kindness.

Even reacting to a sneeze becomes sacred. Modern science is just discovering this reflex’s brilliance, but 1400 years ago Muslims were already saying “All praise belongs to God” with each one.

Five times daily, believers retreat from the world to express raw gratitude to God. Between prayers, they constantly scan for opportunities to return kindness with kindness. In fact, Muslims are taught to think of kindness as part of a never-ending competition of goodness with their fellow humans beings.

This awareness permeates every aspect of Muslim tradition – from how you greet others to how you conduct business to how you care for animals and plants. Show me any atheistic philosophy with this comprehensive, minute-by-minute gratitude training.

And this all flows from acknowledging and having a living connection with God. No atheistic framework comes close to teaching thankfulness with such precision and totality.

The Happiest People In The World

Islam is the name of a transformation which seeks to lift us out of our primitive animal state – prisoners of our carnal passions – and liberate us so that we reflect divine light. The Holy Qur’an (14:8) states it plainly: be grateful, and blessings multiply. Be ungrateful, and God’s system of expressing His displeasure comes into play.

This isn’t supernatural – it’s a law of the universe that works whether you believe or not. People who can’t appreciate what they have sink into a specific hell – a leaden, suffocating gloom. Their vision narrows to see only what’s broken.

Think of the happiest people you know. They find rainbows in storms. Beauty in broken things. This exact quality – gratitude for what exists rather than bitterness about what doesn’t – is the cornerstone of seeing clearly. It starts with gratitude to existence’s foundation: God.

If you deny the Greatest Benefactor – the One who created everything, including gratitude itself – despite all your claims and philosophical smoke and mirrors, you can never be truly grateful.

So, here is my challenge: for one week, live as if God exists. Thank Him for your morning coffee, your safe commute, your ability to read these words. And that doesn’t mean you thank the people in your life any less. In fact, because the Holy Prophet of Islam said that one who is not thankful to people is not thankful to God, you’ll find that you’ll be expressing gratefulness to every element of your life (Sunan Abi Dawood, The Book of Etiquettes, Chapter 12, Hadith No. 4811). From the origin story of existence, down the chain of cause and effect, your gratitude will become a life-changing exercise in infinity. And who knows? You might just discover that saying ‘Thank God’ is simply the most rational response to existence itself.

About the author: Sabahat Ali is a missionary of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in The Review of Religions and serves as the Editor of The Existence Project.