MYSTERIES OF LIFE: PERFECTION OF GOD’S CREATION
“Extol the limitless glory of the name of your Lord, the Most High, who creates and proportions well, who determines and guides, who brings forth the pasturage, then turns it to withered grass.” (SŪRAH Al-A`lā :1-5)
“He (Allah) is the Originator of the heavens and the earth… He created all things and He has knowledge of all things.” (Surat al-An’am: 101)
By Babatunde Jose
Everything God has created is well proportioned and perfected. Every creature is assigned its own role and given guidance so that it may know its role and play it. It is told the purpose of its creation, given what it needs for sustenance and guided to it. This is clearly visible in everything around us, large or small, important, or trivial. For everything is well perfected and guided to fulfil the purpose of its creation.
There are many unexplained mysteries of creation exemplified in the behaviours of animals and plants:
- Bird migration is one of nature’s great wonders. The physiology that allows birds to navigate storms and extreme distances to their destinations defies logic. Birds can fly up to 16,000 miles during their migration. Some go at 30 mph to arrive at their destination on time. Birds can travel up to 533 hours at this speed to reach their destination. Some birds would need 66 days to travel 8 hours daily to reach their migration goal.
Migrating birds use celestial cues, (quantum effects) to navigate, much as sailors of old used the sun and stars to guide them. But unlike humans, birds also detect the magnetic field generated by Earth’s molten core and use it to determine their position and direction.
There is the record-breaking feat of the Arctic Tern. By far the longest migration known in the animal kingdom, this medium-sized bird travels 90,000 km (55,923 miles) from pole to pole every year — from Greenland in the North to the Weddell Sea in the South.
Bar-tailed Godwit broke a Guinness World Record, when it flew 8,435 miles non-stop from Alaska to Tasmania, Australia. The 11-day journey without rest or food was tracked by a satellite tag on the migratory bird. Incredible!!!
- The tiny insects must have microscopic eyes, how perfect we do not know, and the hawks, the eagle and the condor must have telescopic vision. They were created that way, not by evolution.
Other wonders of God’s creation include some of the following:
- People believe that mosquitoes feed on blood. Mosquitoes feed on flower nectar. The female mosquito is the only one that sucks blood, and that is for the sake of the eggs that she carries.
- Dogs have inquiring noses and have a terrific sense of smell which surpasses that of man. Hence, they are useful as sniffers in crime investigations. Who trained the dog to sniff?
- All animals hear sounds, many of which are outside our range of vibration, with an acuteness that far surpasses our limited sense of hearing.
- The young salmon spends years at sea, then comes back to its own river, and what is more, it travels up the side of the river into which flows the tributary in which it was born. What brings them back so definitely? If a salmon going up a river is transferred to another tributary, it will at once realize it is not in the right tributary and will fight its way down to the mainstream and then turn up against the current to finish its destiny. Who gave the salmon this sense of direction?
- There is, however, a much more difficult reverse problem to solve in the case of the eel. These amazing creatures migrate at maturity from all the ponds and rivers everywhere, those from Europe across thousands of miles of ocean, all go to the Sargasso Sea, (abysmal deeps south of Bermuda). There they breed and die. The little ones, with no apparent means of knowing anything except that they are in a wilderness of water, start back and find their way to the shore from which their parents came and then to every river, lake, and little pond, so that each body of water is always populated with eels.
The mystery of the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) goes back millennia. Naturalists and researchers were stumped by their life cycle and the late development of sex organs.
With its many life stages, its biology is truly vexing. But perhaps the biggest mystery has been tied to just where all eels set out for when they head toward the ocean via coastal streams and rivers at the end of their lives.
Though scientists had seemingly solved the mystery of the eel and its reproduction by the early 1900s through the discovery of its sex organs, no one knew where they went to procreate. The eels disappeared into the ocean, and aged larval eels appeared near the shores. The question remained, where did they go?
The first inkling that the eels might be traveling to the Sargasso Sea came from the herculean efforts of Danish zoologist Johannes Schmidt. From 1904 to 1921 Schmidt tirelessly trawled the ocean to find the larvae and by extension the birthplace of eels.
The eels did indeed make a 3,000 – 6,200-mile (5,000 – 10,000 km) migration across the Atlantic Ocean, the second longest recorded migration of a bony fish. They have braved the mighty currents, storms, and tides, and have conquered the beating waves on every shore. They can now grow and when they are mature, they will, by some mysterious law, go back through it all to complete the cycle.
Nature has also delayed the maturity of the European eel by a year or more to make up for its much greater journey. *Where does the directing impulse originate? Do atoms and molecules when combined in an eel have a sense of direction and willpower to exercise it?*
- Many animals are like a lobster, which, having lost a claw, will by some re-stimulation of the cells and the reactivation of the genes discover that a part of the body is missing and restore it.
- A fresh-water polyp divided into halves can reform itself out of one of these halves.
- The calf of the giraffe immediately it is born, hits the ground running, failing to do this, it becomes suya for the waiting predators. Who thought the calf to walk immediately it is born? It is its creator, God!
In the melee of creation many creatures have come to exhibit a high degree of certain forms of instinct, and intelligence. The wasp catches the grasshopper, digs a hole in the earth, stings the grasshopper in exactly the right place so that it becomes unconscious but lives as a form of preserved meat.
The wasp lays her eggs exactly in the right place, perhaps not knowing that when they hatch, her children can eat the insect which it had buried for them. The wasp must have done all this right the first and every time, or there would be no wasps of this species.
Science cannot explain this mystery, and yet it cannot be attributed to chance. The wasp covers a hole in the earth, departs cheerfully, and dies. Neither she nor her ancestors have reasoned out the process, nor does she know what happens to her offspring. She doesn’t even know that she has worked and lived her life for the preservation of the race.
*How do the inanimate atoms and molecules of matter composing an ant set these complicated processes in motion? There must be Intelligence somewhere. True, there must be a Creator who guides these and other creatures, large and small. There is God!*
The examples we have quoted above are but a few of the large number of remarkable aspects science has recorded in the worlds of plants, insects, birds, and animals. But all these aspects reflect only a part of the import of the two verses: *“who creates and proportions well, who determines and guides.” (Quran 87:2-3)*
Our knowledge covers only a scanty part of what is in the visible universe, beyond which extends a whole world of which we know nothing apart from the few hints God has chosen to drop us, as befits our limited abilities.
Let us consider how Allah created the earth so that living things can survive, how orderly everything in the universe is.
Many events on earth make it possible for us to live. Is it possible that these thousands of events have come together spontaneously and formed such a place as earth? Of course not. Not even one of these events could happen by chance.
Allah has created earth for human beings. And, because of this, earth is the most suitable place for us. The talks of going to colonize and populate another planet are scientific fantasia. That is even if man discovers a planet that can sustain life. God created man for earth and the earth for man.
*Subhana Rabbika Rabbil ‘izzati ‘amma yasifun, Wa salamun ‘alal-Mursalin, Wal hamdu lillahi Rabbil ‘alamin. Thy Lord is Holy and clear of all that is alleged against Him (by the non-believers); and He is Exalted.*
*Barka Juma’at and a happy weekend.*
*Babatunde Jose*
*O Allah! Nobody can hold back whatever You have granted, and none can grant what Thou hold back. And no great person can benefit from his greatness in opposition to Thy Greatness. Jumuah Mubarak*
