Quran, Chapter 87, Surah Al-A’la, The Most High “Extol the limitless glory” of the name of Allah, “the Most High, who creates and proportions well, who determines and guides.” 87:1-3
By Babatunde Jose
The story of Creation is wonderful and continuous. There are several processes which we contemplate in glorifying Allah’s name. First, He brings us into being. Secondly, He endows us with forms and faculties exactly suited to what is expected of us.
Thirdly, He has ordained laws and decrees, by which we can build ourselves and fit ourselves into His whole scheme of development for all His Creation. He has measured exactly the needs of all and given us instincts and physical predispositions which fit into His decrees.
Fourthly, He gives us guidance, so that we are not the sport of mechanical laws. Our reason and our will are exercised, that we may reach the higher destiny of man.
Fifthly, after maturity comes decay. But even in that decay, as when green pasture turns to stubble, we subserve other ends.
The idea here is that of an architect planning the size of the earth. This is an example of the infinite perfection of God in creation. The earth rotates on its axis 1000 MPH. If it were 100 MPH our days and nights would be 10 times longer and the hot sun would likely burn up our vegetation each long day while surviving sprouts would freeze in the long night.
Thus, the earth has been placed the proper distance from the sun to give it the proper amount of warmth. If the sun gave half as much more, we would roast.
The slant of the earth, tilted at an angle of 23 degrees, gives us our seasons. If it had not been tilted, vapors from the ocean would move north and south, piling up continents of ice.
If our moon were only 50,000 miles away instead of its distance of 221,000 to 253,000 miles, our tides would cover the continents twice daily.
It is evident from these and other facts that there is not one chance in millions or trillions that life on our planet could be a work of chance. There had to be a super-intelligence at work in the creation of all things as well as in the sustainability of it all.
Symbiosis in nature is not a product of chance or trial and error. Honeybees and flowering plants need each other to survive.
Consider other symbiotic relationships like crocodiles and plover birds, zebras and oxpeckers, shark, and pilot fish, etc. These interdependent relationships show that nothing occurs by chance or accident.
Plants need the atmosphere to grow. The earth’s atmosphere in turn is affected by plants.. Such relationship must have been carefully and thoughtfully designed. It is not something that occurred by chance or evolved over time.
The American scientist, A. Cressy Morrison, says in his book ‘Man Does Not Stand Alone’: 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. The owl is endowed with night vision, so, it can see the mouse as it runs in the grass in the blackest night.
Taste gives a very different sensation to each of us. How strange that these differences in perception are hereditary.
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.
There is a 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 and all go to the 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 thence to every river, lake, and little pond, so that each body of water is always populated with eels. There they can now grow and when they are mature, they will, by some mysterious law, go back through it all to complete the cycle. Where does the directing impulse originate?
Nature has also delayed the maturity of the European eel by a year or more to make up for its much greater journey. 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. When the work is complete, the cells stop work, for in some way they know it is quitting time.
An extraordinary fact throws some light on this mystery of recreation. If cells in the early stages of development are separated each has the ability to create a complete animal. Therefore, if the original cell divides into two and they are separated, two individuals will be developed. This may account for identical twins, but it means much more — each cell at first is in detail potentially a complete individual.
An acorn falls to the ground — its tough brown shell holds it safe. It rolls into some earthy crevice. In the appointed time the germ awakes, the shell bursts, food is provided by the egg-like kernel in which the genes were hidden. They send roots into the earth, and behold a sprout, a sapling, and in years a tree. The germ with its genes has multiplied by trillions and made the trunk, bark and every leaf and acorn identical with that of the oak which gave it birth. For hundreds of years, in each of the countless acorns is preserved the exact arrangement of atoms that produced the first oak tree millions of years ago. There is a creator!!!
True, there must be a Creator who guides these and other creatures, large and small. He is the One “who creates and proportions well, who determines and guides. (Quran 87:2-3)
Barka Juma’at and a very happy weekend. Babatunde Jose
