From the brilliant mind and soul of Adi Shankaracharya to the simple village farmer, murti puja, or image worship, is firmly entrenched in the daily lives of all Hindus through countless generations of fruitful worship. The hundreds of thousands of mandirs, large and small, scattered over the Indian subcontinent, are visited daily by tens of millions of the faithful.
The advent of the industrial age and the rise of science as a supposedly omniscient superpower created a parallel disregard for things spiritual. Unexplainable phenomena of supernatural implications were denounced as primitive beliefs or plain heathenism. It has been overlooked that advancement in one field of human interest does not necessarily initiate degradation or confirm the untruth of another field.
The bafflement of many who first behold the array of Hindu murtis springs from the deep-rooted Western and antagonism to imaging the Divine at all.
However, worship of God through belief in His presence in an image is considered to be one of the foremost aids to spiritual realization in Hinduism.

The Hindu Viewpoint
A mandir without an enshrined murti is not a mandir, it remains a building, no matter how majestic and scripturally correct its construction may be. Just as houses have a meaning only when they have people. Murtis are to the Hindu worshipper what diagrams are to the geometrician.
One day Swami Vivekanand went to the royal court of Alwar. The young westernized Maharaja was a sceptic.
"Swamiji, you talk of God. Do you believe in the stone gods in the mandirs?"
"Yes."
"But how can God be a thing made of stone?"
Swamiji turned to the Prime Minister present at the court. "Please take down the picture of the Maharaja and give it to me."
When the Prime Minister did so, "Now spit on it! It is not the Maharaja." Vivekanand suggested,
"Oh, no, How can I?" said the Prime Minister.
Swamiji then turned to the Maharaja and said: "Do you see my point now? This stone God is like your portrait – a symbol."
The Prime Minister out of respect for the Maharaja refused to spit on the Maharaja's portrait. To him the portrait represented the Maharaja.
That the portrait was a painting unable to move or talk, or respond or receive in any way did not in any manner lessen the respect the Prime Minister had for the portrait.
Although Swami Vivekanand in the above incident uses the word 'symbol' to describe the murti, the Hindu worshipper sees no symbol or representation, but an actual manifestation.
From the moment the Vedic rites are completed and a statue or painting of the deity is consecrated God through the image manifests in all His glory and grace. He accepts various devotions. He listens to prayers and woes. He is at once a confidant and giver of blessings.
Thus a murti cannot be said to be a beautiful statue or doll, nor an excellent painting. The image is God.
Says Swami Vivekanand, "It has become a trite saying that idolatry is bad, and everyone swallows it at the present time without questioning. I once thought so, and to pay the penalty of that, I had to learn my lessons sitting at the feet of a man who realized everything from idols. I allude to Ramakrishna Paramhansa."
"Yet idolatry is condemned. Why? Some hundreds of years ago, some man of Jewish blood happened to condemn it. He happened to condemn everybody else's idols except his own. If God is represented in any beautiful form or any symbolic form, said the Jew, it is awfully bad; it is sin. But if He is represented in the form of a chest (box) with two angels sitting on either side, it is the holiest of holies. If God comes in the form of a dove, it is holy. But if He comes in the form of a cow, it is heathen superstition, condemn it..."
To complicate the issue, murti puja is also frowned upon by some professing Hindus. They question the use of murti puja by arguing that if God is present in all creation it means He is present within every atom. So why not meditate on an individual atom! Without a definite shape or symbol the mind cannot be stilled!
Swami Dayanand Saraswati, an ardent Vedantist once saw a mouse crawl over a Shivaling. Doubts arose in his mind – Is God so impotent that he cannot brush even a mouse from his body? Dayanand soon lost all faith in murtis and founded the Arya Samaj – a society vehemently opposed to murti puja.
Over the years Dayananda Saraswati has found some support and great opposition. One scholar writes, "For one whose life is the Vedas and who believes the omnipresence of God, how can Dayanand not believe that God is present in an image? It is said that he lost faith in murti puja when he saw a mouse crawling over an image. If a person loses faith by such a small incident can he be termed great? And from the debate point of view, how great is God, who, although no one else allows, did allow a little mouse over His head!"
Another great Indian leader, Vinobaji, says, "If an insignificant animal such as a mouse is not allowed to play in its creator Lord's lap, where is it supposed to play?"
God is all-powerful. He can at will assume a form finer than the smallest of atoms or a form more vast than the most colossal of galaxies! What is to stop Him from making Himself accessible through an image – be it of wood, stone or canvas?
Bhagwan Swaminarayan explains citing the case of Shukdevji who spoke to his father, Ved Vyas, by entering a tree and Adi Shankaracharya entering the dead body of a king. Bhagwan Swaminarayan says that if a human can attain such miraculous powers of entering other bodies at will surely God can do so as well. (Vachanamrut Gadhada I-68). Bhagwan Swaminarayan says again, "(A Yogi), who has attained a yogic feat can hear talks from thousands of miles away as if he is hearing them from very close quarters. He can also behold any object from a distance...
"Similarly, Shri Krishna Bhagwan even though He resides in His divine abode manifests wherever He desires before many in many forms simultaneously. If a yogi possesses such yogic powers to see or hear from a distance, why is it surprising if God wields such powers? The scriptures describe Him as immanent because of His divine powers of manifesting in forms at many places simultaneously..."
Adi Shankaracharya, the proponent of Advait philosophy says,
"Although Parabrahma is all pervading, to attain Him one should accept that He is 'more' present in one particular place. Just as we 'see' Vishnu in the Shaligram a small round stone..." In other words Shankaracharya supports murti puja!
Ramanujacharya who propounded the Dvait philosophy says in his Shri Bhashya,
"Although God is all pervading, using his omnipotent powers He appears before devotees to accept their devotion through a murti."
Here it suffices to say that, with the ancient Hindus murti puja was not left to be treated as an ignorant and useless practice fit only for the ignorant and spiritually immature; even the greatest visited mandirs, and worshipped murtis, and these thinkers did not do so blindly or unconsciously. A human necessity was recognized, the nature of the necessity was understood, its psychology systematically analyzed, the various phases of murti puja, mental and material were defined. The modern Hindu follows in the footsteps of his forefathers.