False gratitude?

Apparently there is an Islamic teaching that we are essentially indebted to God for our own lives, and that such a summary view should be the guiding principle to shape our constant attitude toward God. There is something right and something wrong about this view.

Everything we receive in life is a gift. But in what sense can you give the gift of existence to someone? To my mind, my birth was a gift to my parents and even to God himself; I certainly wasn’t anywhere to receive the gift of myself to myself. Besides being philosophically inept, it’s false piety masked as some sort of ultimate gratitude—as if to say, “I’m so grateful, I’m grateful to even exist!” I don’t think anyone actually is, though. We are grateful for what we have and experience—even for every next breath and heartbeat—but not for the possibility of having and experiencing itself. It may therefore seem entirely wrongheaded to frame our relationship to God as one of indebtedness for even our mere existence, and the source of the problem is a misapplied notion of debt. God does not tell us that we are His debtors. He tells us that He loves us as adoptive sons and daughters, and that He made us one with Himself in the life, death, burial, descent, and resurrection of the Son.

There is a way however in which gratitude is the correct posture for God’s creatures. In fact, we don’t have so many options for the first words to our Creator that we should be able to choose something that communicates our awe better than gratitude. It’s a sort of an “I thank you that I may experience your presence.” Additionally, Christians are in the divine Trinitarian life, in the Spirit of Christ who taught us his own way of thanksgiving to the Father. In other words, it’s an eternally begotten reason for thanksgiving that we’re drawn into as human beings.