Polytheism Means Ruination of the Cosmos (21:22)

بِسۡمِ اللّٰہِ الرَّحۡمٰنِ الرَّحِیۡمِ

In the Name of Allah, the Rahman, the Merciful

Allah سبحانه وتعالى says, putting forward a compelling argument against polytheism:

لَوۡ کَانَ فِیۡہِمَاۤ اٰلِہَۃٌ اِلَّا اللّٰہُ لَفَسَدَتَا

If there had been in them (the Heavens and the Earth) gods beside Allah, they both would have been ruined

(Surah 21, Ayah 22)

The polytheists and pagans believe their deities are independent of each other, with their own separate wills. But if the cosmos is governed by multiple deities, independent of each other with the potential for conflict between them, the result would have been ruination of the cosmos and utter chaos. Incidentally, ancient pagan mythologies speak of cosmic wars between their deities. In Norse mythology there was the Aesir-Vanir War, between two sets of deities, the Aesir and the Vanir, which ended in a truce. In Hindu mythology there is the Devasura War between the Devas and Asuras. It is similar to Greek mythology in which there was the Titanomachy, a ten year cosmic war between the Titans and the Olympians for dominion over the universe, with the latter prevailing. Then in the Trojan War, a conflict among mortal humans, the Olympian deities Athena, Hephaestus, Hera, Hermes, Thetis and Poseidon fought on the side of the Greeks while Aphrodite, Apollo, Ares, Artemis, Leto, Scamander and Zeus fought on the side of the Trojans. In Egyptian mythology, Osiris was murdered by his brother Seth, and that murder was then avenged by Osiris’s son Horus who then claims the divine throne. In Mesopotamian mythology, Marduk, the patron deity of Babylon, defeats the primordial goddess Tiamat, making the sky and the Earth from her dismembered body, and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers from her eyes. In Zoroastrianism, a plainly dualist religion, there is the continuing cosmic struggle between Ahura Mazda or Yazdan and Angra Mainyu or Ahriman. Both of these deities are independent of each other. Aztec mythology likewise speaks of conflicts between the deities, the most prominent being the one between Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca. These pagan mythologies often claim that cataclysmic events and major disasters in this world are an effect of the violence these deities employ against each other. Yet if they are deities who have cosmic powers and dominion then the effects of their internecine wars would also be chaos in the cosmos and its untimely destruction too.