By Claude

[0:00] HOST INTRO

HOST: Welcome back. Today we’re looking at four short verses from the Quran: chapter 51, Surat al-Dhariyat, verses 20 to 23. They read: “And on the earth are signs for those who have certainty of faith, and in your own selves. Will you not then see? And in the heaven is your sustenance and that which you are promised. By the Lord of the heaven and the earth, it is surely the truth, just as surely as you speak.” My guest is Dr. Zia H. Shah. He’s a physician in pulmonary and sleep medicine, Program Director of the Lourdes Internal Medicine Residency Program in Binghamton, New York, and the founder of thequran.love, where he has just published several commentaries on this passage. Dr. Shah, welcome.

DR. SHAH: Thank you. It’s a joy to be here.

[0:45] HOST: Let’s start simple. Of all the passages in the Quran, why these four verses, and why now?

DR. SHAH: Because they are one of the clearest examples of how the Quran argues from the tangible to the intangible. Look at the order. First, the earth beneath your feet. Then, your own self. Then, the sky above you. Those are three places anyone can look, touch, and measure. Only then does the passage step into the unseen: “that which you are promised,” the resurrection and the judgment. And it seals the whole thing with an oath that rests on the one fact no listener can doubt. That he is speaking. thequran

Why now? Many of our atheist friends, especially strict physicalists or materialists, put enormous weight on empirical evidence. Show me. Let me observe it. I respect that. What moves me is that these verses don’t run away from that demand. They start exactly there, with the observable. And then, step by step, they build a wholesome and coherent theology. Downward to the earth. Inward to the self. Upward to the sky. And then back to your own voice.

[2:15] HOST: The passage ends with an oath: “By the Lord of the heaven and the earth.” A skeptic might say an oath is just rhetoric. Swearing something is true doesn’t make it true. Why oaths?

DR. SHAH: Fair question. In the Quran, oaths are not decoration. They’re closer to calling a witness to the stand. thequran Every Quranic oath has three parts: the particle, “by”; the thing sworn by; and the thing sworn to. thequranthequran And there’s usually a real connection between the witness and the claim.

This surah opens with four oaths. By the scattering winds. By the clouds bearing their heavy load. By the ships gliding with ease. And by those who apportion affairs by command. Then comes the claim: “What you are promised is true, and the Judgment will surely come.” thequranthequran The logic is simple. Look how dependable this system is: the winds, the clouds, the rain. The God who keeps that promise every season will keep the larger one. thequran

And notice the ascent. At the start, God swears by created things. By verse 23, He swears by Himself: “the Lord of the heaven and the earth.” The great commentator al-Razi noted that the little word “fa,” meaning “so,” marks the matter as already proven by argument and now sealed by oath. thequran

[4:50] HOST: Let’s walk through the verses. Verse 20: “On the earth are signs.” What signs? And I know people make big claims about mountains in the Quran.

DR. SHAH: They do, and I want to be careful here. The Quran describes mountains as “pegs,” awtad, and as firm anchors. thequran And modern geology did discover something striking. In the 1850s, surveyors in India expected the Himalaya’s huge mass to pull their plumb lines northward. The pull was much smaller than they calculated. George Airy and John Pratt worked out why. Mountains float on the denser mantle with deep, buoyant roots, like an iceberg. Under southern Tibet, seismic surveys measure crust roughly 70 to 85 kilometers thick. That’s about twice the continental average. So yes: a peg has a small visible head and a long hidden shaft. So does a mountain. thequran

But honesty matters. A mountain’s root is a consequence, not a nail holding the crust down. And mountain belts are often the most earthquake-prone places on earth. Think of Nepal in 2015. So I don’t say mountains “prevent earthquakes.” I say the stability the Quran speaks of is closer to habitability. Mountains are water towers. Walter Immerzeel and colleagues, writing in Nature in January 2020, counted 1.9 billion people living in or directly downstream of mountain areas. Mountains help drive the Asian monsoon. Their weathering rock helps regulate carbon dioxide over geological time.

And the earth’s signs go far beyond mountains. Plate tectonics recycles carbon and water. A molten iron core generates a magnetic field that shields us from the solar wind. Mars lost its field, and with it most of its atmosphere. The Moon steadies our planet’s tilt. semanticscholar In my writing I keep a rule: the Quran is not a physics textbook. These are resonances, not miracle proofs. thequran The verse asks only that we notice. thequran

[7:15] HOST: Verse 21: “And in your own selves. Will you not then see?” You’re a lung and sleep doctor. What do you see?

DR. SHAH: I see it every day. Take breathing. You’ve taken hundreds of breaths since we started, and you didn’t decide a single one. Oxygen crosses a membrane in your lungs, binds to iron in your hemoglobin, and rides to every cell. And there are many cells. An adult body has about 37 trillion of them; Bianconi and colleagues, writing in the Annals of Human Biology in 2013, put the figure at 3.72 times ten to the thirteenth. The first truly complete human genome, published in Science in 2022, runs to about 3.055 billion base pairs. nih Your brain has about 86 billion neurons; Azevedo and colleagues counted an average of 86.1 billion, plus or minus 8.1 billion, in adult male brains in 2009.

But here’s the deeper point. None of that, by itself, proves God. A naturalist will say “evolution,” and I accept common ancestry. I argue for guided evolution. thequranthequran The real sign in “your own selves” is the one you never see on a scan: the fact that you are experiencing anything at all. The philosopher David Chalmers called this the “hard problem” of consciousness. thequranthequran We can map which brain regions light up when you see red. But why is there something it feels like to see red? scholarpedia Thomas Nagel, who is an atheist, wrote a whole book arguing that the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is “almost certainly false,” because it can’t account for consciousness, cognition, and value. google +2

Some physicalists answer boldly: consciousness is an illusion. That’s the illusionist view of Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish. I take it seriously, but I think it defeats itself. An illusion is something appearing to someone. A mirage on the highway isn’t an illusion to the asphalt. It’s an illusion to the traveler. So if consciousness is an illusion, to whom does it seem? thequranthequran You can’t get rid of the witness.

The same goes for free will. People cite Benjamin Libet’s experiments showing brain activity before a reported decision. But in 2012, Aaron Schurger and colleagues modeled that signal as random neural noise crossing a threshold, not a hidden decision. biorxivjosegudemd And Libet himself kept a conscious “veto.” thequran

The Quran’s stance here is humility: “of knowledge you have been given but little.” I’ve called the hard problem “the modern name for the mystery of the Ruh,” the soul. Will you not then see? The evidence isn’t missing. What’s missing is attention. thequran

[10:20] HOST: Verse 22: “In the heaven is your sustenance.” Most of us picture rain. Is there more?

DR. SHAH: Much more, and it starts with one word. Again and again, the Quran says God sends down water from the sky. Here it says rizq: provision, nourishment. thequranthequran And science shows rain isn’t just water. A lightning bolt is briefly hotter than the surface of the sun. It splits the nitrogen in the air, and that nitrogen falls in rain as natural fertilizer. thequran Borucki and Chameides estimated about 2.6 billion kilograms of nitrogen fixed by lightning every year. duke NASA’s CALIPSO satellite tracked Saharan dust across the Atlantic. Using seven years of that satellite data, Hongbin Yu and colleagues found that, of the 182 million tons of dust leaving the Sahara each year, 27.7 million tons fall on the Amazon basin, carrying an estimated 22,000 tons of phosphorus. That’s about what the rainforest loses to rain and flooding. And the US Geological Survey calculates that a cumulus cloud about a cubic kilometer in size holds roughly 500,000 kilograms of water, about 1.1 million pounds. Suddenly the surah’s opening image, “clouds bearing a heavy load,” feels very literal.

Then go higher. The carbon in your DNA, the oxygen you breathe, the iron in your blood: all of it was forged in stars that died before our sun was born. thequranthequran In 1953, Fred Hoyle predicted that carbon must have a special energy level, or there would be far too little carbon for life. Experiments confirmed it. bioethicsobservatory Hoyle later wrote: “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.” christiantodaythequran

Now, I won’t pretend seventh-century Arabic encoded stellar physics. But it’s legitimate reflection to say that science has shown our provision reaches from the clouds to the stars. thequran And notice the pairing: your provision, and what you are promised. The provision you can measure stands as collateral for the promise you can’t yet see. The One who revives dead land with rain can revive the dead. thequran

[13:00] HOST: That brings us to the heart of it. “It is surely the truth, just as surely as you speak.” What does that mean, and why is it a good argument?

DR. SHAH: This is my favorite verse in the passage. Ask yourself: what is the one thing you cannot doubt right now? You might doubt cosmology. You may never see a mountain’s root. But while you’re speaking, you can’t seriously doubt that speech is happening. Even to say “I doubt that I’m speaking,” you have to speak. thequran

The classical commentators saw this centuries ago. Al-Qurtubi asks why God chose speech out of all the faculties. The eye can be fooled by a mirror. Bile can change taste. The ear can ring with sounds that aren’t there. “But speech,” he says, “is free of that.” quran +2 Ibn Kathir explains the verse this way: do not doubt it, as you do not doubt your speech when you speak. quranquran7m Muhammad Asad calls speech “something of which man is absolutely, axiomatically conscious.” It’s close to a Quranic cogito. Descartes reached certainty through thinking. The Quran reaches it through speaking, which is thought made public. thequran

And notice what’s packed into one sentence. As a pulmonologist, I can tell you speech starts in the lungs: controlled breath across the vocal cords, shaped by tongue and lips, coordinated by the brain. But a spectrogram can describe the frequencies. It can’t tell you what the sentence means, or whether a promise is sincere. thequran Underneath speech is a conscious subject that physics has not explained. And a grammar, Noam Chomsky’s great insight, that builds unlimited meaning from a finite set of parts. In a 2014 review in Frontiers in Psychology titled “The mystery of language evolution,” eight scholars, including Marc Hauser, Chomsky, Ian Tattersall, and Richard Lewontin, surveyed the field. They concluded that the evolution of language “will remain one of the great mysteries of our species.” Others dispute that pessimism. But it tells you how deep the question goes.

So the verse is not a formal syllogism. It’s an existential oath. It takes the most immediate empirical fact of your life and says: the promise is no less real. thequran Speech assumes consciousness. Consciousness assumes a body built from stardust, on a habitable planet, in a life-permitting cosmos. And the whole chain points back to the First Cause. We reach the Hidden One through the most manifest thing we have: our own voice. thequran

[16:15] HOST: Let me press as a skeptic. Isn’t science enough? Why do we need anything beyond it?

DR. SHAH: I love science. I practice it every day. But science, by design, describes how nature behaves. It can’t, by itself, tell us why there is a lawful, intelligible world at all, or why minds like ours can understand it. Physics describes gravity. Meteorology models rain. Neuroscience correlates brain states with experience. None of those descriptions settles why there’s an ordered reality to describe. thequran

And strict physicalism has a deeper problem. Alvin Plantinga argues that if our minds were shaped only for survival, we’d have no special reason to trust them about truth. thequran Including the truth of naturalism itself. reasonablefaith Mathematics, the reliability of reason, consciousness, your own speech: these are data too. A worldview that has to deny the witness in order to keep its theory is in trouble.

And please notice: this is not “God of the gaps.” I’m not saying, “Science can’t explain X, therefore God.” A completely understood rain cycle would still be a sign. Hoyle’s carbon resonance became more remarkable once it was understood. I put it this way: lawful nature is a witness, not a rival. thequranthequran

[17:50] HOST: Many young Muslims feel religion is anti-science. What do you say to them?

DR. SHAH: First, I understand. Thoughtful people drift for real reasons. Some heard bad arguments from religious sources: overconfident “scientific miracle” claims that collapse on inspection. Critics like Parvez Hoodbhoy were right to push back. Even Mahmud Shaltut of al-Azhar warned against tying scripture to provisional science. thequran Others feel the cultural pressure that says educated people don’t believe. And some sincerely looked, and felt God was silent.

To that last group: the Quran calls God al-Zahir and al-Batin, the Manifest and the Hidden. Clear enough in His signs to be found by a striving heart. Veiled enough never to force Himself on anyone. Hiddenness makes room for freedom and love. thequranthequran And notice the Quran’s own question. It’s not “Will you not obey blindly?” It’s “Will you not then see?” It invites looking, thinking, seeing.

[19:05] HOST: Last question. If someone listening has drifted away, stopped praying, stopped believing, what would you want them to hear?

DR. SHAH: Come back as a seeker, not a suspect. You don’t have to leave your mind at the door. Bring it. Look down at the earth. Look inward at the miracle of your own awareness. Look up at a sky that rains down fertility, and once forged the iron in your blood. Then listen to your own voice: the one fact you cannot doubt. The Quran says the promise is as real as that.

And the surah tells us what the gift is for. Verse 18 describes people who, before dawn, use their speech to seek forgiveness. thequran Speech that recognizes its Giver becomes gratitude, and gratitude becomes worship. thequran If you don’t know where to start, start honestly: “O God, if You are there, show me.” thequran Your next prayer can be that one sentence.

The full commentaries, with all their sources, are at thequran.love. Read them. Argue with them. And thank you for having me.

HOST: Dr. Zia H. Shah, thank you.

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