He is a physician practicing in Upstate New York. He is the Chief Editor of the Muslim Times, which has more than 38,000 followers in Twitter. He was Chair of Religion and Science for the Muslim Sunrise, for more than a decade. He has authored more than 400 articles on Islam, Christianity, Secularism and Religion & Science. Follow in Twitter: @The_MuslimTimes
He who created the heavens and earth, and sent down for you out of heaven water; and We caused to grow therewith gardens full of loveliness whose trees you could never grow. Is there a god with God? Nay, but they are a people who assign to Him equals!
He who made the earth a fixed place and set amidst it rivers and appointed for it firm mountains and placed a partition between the two seas. Is there a god with God? Nay, but the most of them have no knowledge.
He who answers the constrained, when he calls unto Him, and removes the evil and appoints you to be successors in the earth. Is there a god with God? Little indeed do you remember.
He who guides you in the shadows of the land and the sea and looses the winds, bearing good tidings before His mercy. Is there a god with God? High exalted be God, above that which they associate!
Who originates creation, then brings it back again, and provides you out of heaven and earth. Is there a god with God?
Say: ‘Produce your proof, if you speak truly.’ (Al Quran 27: 59-64)
Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times Almost every Surah of the Quran presents Monotheism in one metaphor or the other; often presenting God the […]
Epigraph: People, here is an illustration, so listen carefully: those you call on beside God could not, even if they combined all their forces, create a fly, and if a […]
Allah says in verses 17-27 and I am quoting from the translation by Muhammad Abdel Haleem: So celebrate God’s glory in the evening, in the morning – praise is due […]
Epigraph: He is Allah, the Creator, the Maker, the Fashioner. His are the most beautiful names. All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him, and He is […]
Epigraph: He is Allah, the Creator, the Maker, the Fashioner. His are the most beautiful names. All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him, and He is the […]
Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times Sir David Frederick Attenborough is an agnostic, for he focuses on the question of suffering. If that question […]
“Say [Prophet], ‘Who provides for you from the sky and the earth? Who controls hearing and sight? Who brings forth the living from the dead and the dead from the […]
Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times
Almost every Surah of the Quran presents Monotheism in one metaphor or the other; often presenting God the Creator and arguing from tangible to the intangible. Several Surahs have long passages presenting God the Creator to the whole of humanity. Here are the passages from the thirty first Surah of the Quran:
“He created the heavens without any visible support, and He placed firm mountains on the earth––in case it should shake under you––and He spread all kinds of animals around it. We sent down water from the sky, with which We made every kind of good plant grow on earth: all this is God’s creation. Now, show Me what your other gods have created. No, the disbelievers are clearly astray.” (Al Quran 31:10-11)
Commentary of the above verses
Epigraph
“How can Allah have a son when He has no consort?” (Al Quran 6:101)
The field of biology has struck a fatal blow to the concept of Trinity and other dogma in Christianity on several counts. Firstly, there is the fundamental principle in biology “Like begets like,” which clearly refutes the concept of son ship of God. In the Holy Quran it is expressed in the words, “How can Allah have a son when He has no consort?” Man’s genetic code is made of 46 chromosomes and God is transcendent and beyond time, space and matter.
Secondly, the concept of Original Sin is completely incompatible with the fundamental laws of biology including the principles of gene inheritance and the facts supporting the theory of evolution. If all humans inhabiting the planet earth today are not direct descendants of Adam and Eve, who lived approximately 6000 years ago, then suddenly the very basic doctrines of Christianity, Original Sin and vicarious Atonement, Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, change into fiction. All of us do not have the genes of “Original Sin” and are not in need of Jesus’ atonement. According to the theory of evolution modern humans have existed for at least more than 150,000 years, in other words Adam and Eve, who were merely 6000 years ago, are not the great grand parents of all the humans inhabiting planet earth today. I had originally written about this issue, in the Religion and Science section of the Summer 2008 volume of the Muslim Sunrise, the oldest Muslim publication of North America. Please read it on page 21 of the PDF file: Evaluating Original Sin against scientific discoveries.
Thirdly, one of the biggest contributions of biology in the last two centuries has been the fact that all living beings come from one lineage and inheritance and not three. Read on, and in the words of Sir Francis Bacon’s advice, “Read not to contradict … but to weigh and consider.” Erasmus Darwin grand father of Charles Darwin, was perhaps the first in suggesting that all life shared the same origin and that the secret of life lay in ‘filaments’ that are shared by all living beings, without exception. So, the 30 million life forms on this planet that have ever existed can be a witness of one God only and not three!
In the words of Matt Ridley in the first chapter of his book, Genome:
As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals; and many families of these animals long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life? asked the polymathic poet and physician Erasmus Darwin in 1794. It was a startling guess for the time, not only in its bold conjecture that all organic life shared the same origin, sixty-five years before his grandson Charles’ book on the topic, but for its weird use of the word ‘filaments’. The secret of life is indeed a thread.
Prof. Richard Dawkins quotes Matt Ridley in his book The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing:
In the beginning was the word. The word was not DNA. That came afterwards, when life was already established, and when it had divided the labor between two separate activities: chemical work and information storage, metabolism and replication. But DNA contains a record of the word, faithfully transmitted through all subsequent eons to the astonishing present.
The Intelligent Design movement has created extensive literature arguing with the atheists or agnostics that there ought to be a creator of this universe and life on this planet. Despite their strong rooting in Christianity they conveniently keep ignoring that the universe and life talk of one designer or creator and not three! They choose to ignore the elephant in the room and go on without ever mentioning this divide between Christianity and Islam.
In the words of Matt Ridley in first chapter of his book, Genome:
The three-letter words of the genetic code are the same in every creature. CGA means arginine and GCG means alanine – in bats, in beetles, in beech trees, in bacteria. They even mean the same in the misleadingly named archaebacteria living at boiling temperatures in sulphurous springs thousands of feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic ocean or in those microscopic capsules of deviousness called viruses. Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug or blob you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary and know the same code. All life is one. The genetic code, but a few tiny local aberrations, mostly for unexplained reasons in the ciliate protozoa, is the same in every creature. We all use exactly the same language.
Contrast this with the fact that modern computers are built around a number of mutually incompatible machine languages, determined by their processor chips. The different machine languages, in this example point to the different manufacturers.
Ridley continues, “This means – and religious people might find this a useful argument – that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born. Of course, that life might have been born on a different planet and seeded here by spacecraft, or there might even have been thousands of kinds of life at first, but only Luca survived in the ruthless free-for-all of the primeval soup. But until the genetic code was cracked in the 1960s, we did not know what we now know: that all life is one; seaweed is your distant cousin and anthrax one of your advanced relatives. The unity of life is an empirical fact. Erasmus Darwin was outrageously close to the mark: ‘One and the same kind of living filaments has been the cause of all organic life.’”
It is mind boggling that in this age of rationality the Trinitarian Christians are still maintaining their dogma. We invite them to real monotheism and offer them three better choices. These are in the order of preference:
♦ Islam ♦ Unitarian Christianity ♦ Judaism
Richard Dawkins quotes Francis Crick in his book The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, “Heredity is all-or-none. That’s digital. But what neither Mendel nor anyone else before 1953 knew was that genes themselves are digital, within themselves. A gene is a sequence of code letters, drawn from an alphabet of precisely four letters, and the genetic code is universal throughout all known living things. Life is the execution of programs written using a small digital alphabet in a single, universal machine language. This realization was the hammer blow that knocked the last nail into the coffin of vitalism and, by extension, of dualism. The hammer was wielded, with undisguised youthful relish, by James Watson and Francis Crick.”
James Watson and Francis Crick’s famous one-page paper, describing the structure of DNA, appeared in Nature in 1953. In addition to being a biological epiphany, it also turned out to be an amazing religious epiphany. Trinity was no more! There could be only one creator of life on our planet earth. In the words of Allah:
“He created the heavens without any visible support, and He placed firm mountains on the earth––in case it should shake under you––and He spread all kinds of animals around it. We sent down water from the sky, with which We made every kind of good plant grow on earth: all this is God’s creation. Now, show Me what your other gods have created. No, the disbelievers are clearly astray.” (Al Quran 31:10-11)
Here Allah declares the unity of His creation as a proof of there being one God only.
Epigraph: People, here is an illustration, so listen carefully: those you call on beside God could not, even if they combined all their forces, create a fly, and if a […]
Allah says in verses 17-27 and I am quoting from the translation by Muhammad Abdel Haleem: So celebrate God’s glory in the evening, in the morning – praise is due […]
Epigraph: He is Allah, the Creator, the Maker, the Fashioner. His are the most beautiful names. All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him, and He is […]
Epigraph: He is Allah, the Creator, the Maker, the Fashioner. His are the most beautiful names. All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him, and He is the […]
Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times Sir David Frederick Attenborough is an agnostic, for he focuses on the question of suffering. If that question […]
“Say [Prophet], ‘Who provides for you from the sky and the earth? Who controls hearing and sight? Who brings forth the living from the dead and the dead from the […]
Almost every Surah of the Quran presents Monotheism in one metaphor or the other; often presenting God the Creator and arguing from tangible to the intangible. Several Surahs have long passages presenting God the Creator to the whole of humanity. Here are the passages from the thirteenth Surah of the Quran:
“These are the signs of the Scripture. What your Lord has sent down to you [Prophet] is the truth, yet most people do not believe. It is God who raised up the heavens with no visible supports and then established Himself on the throne; He has subjected the sun and the moon each to pursue its course for an appointed time; He regulates all things, and makes the revelations clear so that you may be certain of meeting your Lord; it is He who spread out the earth, placed firm mountains and rivers on it, and made two of every kind of fruit; He draws the veil of night over the day. There truly are signs in this for people who reflect. There are, in the land, neighboring plots, gardens of vineyards, cornfields, palm trees in clusters or otherwise, all watered with the same water, yet We make some of them taste better than others: there truly are signs in this for people who reason.
…
It is He who shows you the lightning, inspiring fear and hope; He builds up the clouds heavy with rain; the thunder sounds His praises, as do the angels in awe of Him; He sends thunderbolts to strike whoever He will. Yet still they dispute about God– He has mighty plans. The only true prayer is to Him: those they pray to besides Him give them no answer any more than water reaches the mouth of someone who simply stretches out his hands for it– it cannot do so: the prayers of the disbelievers are all in vain. All that are in heaven and earth submit b to God alone, willingly or unwillingly, as do their shadows in the mornings and in the evenings.
Say [Prophet], ‘Who is Lord of the heavens and the earth?’ Say, ‘God.’ Say, ‘Why do you take protectors other than Him, who can neither benefit nor harm even themselves?’ Say, ‘Are the blind equal to those who can see? And are the depths of darkness equal to the light?’ Have the partners they assign to God created anything like His creation so that their creation is indistinguishable from His? Say, ‘God is the Creator of all things: He is the One, the All Compelling.’
He sends water from the sky that fills riverbeds to overflowing, each according to its measure. The stream carries on its surface a growing layer of froth, like the froth that appears when people melt metals in the fire to make ornaments and tools: in this way God illustrates truth and falsehood– the froth disappears, but what is of benefit to man stays behind– this is how God makes illustrations.” (Al Quran 13: 1-5 and 12-17)
Epigraph: People, here is an illustration, so listen carefully: those you call on beside God could not, even if they combined all their forces, create a fly, and if a […]
Allah says in verses 17-27 and I am quoting from the translation by Muhammad Abdel Haleem: So celebrate God’s glory in the evening, in the morning – praise is due […]
Epigraph: He is Allah, the Creator, the Maker, the Fashioner. His are the most beautiful names. All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him, and He is […]
Epigraph: He is Allah, the Creator, the Maker, the Fashioner. His are the most beautiful names. All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him, and He is the […]
“Say [Prophet], ‘Who provides for you from the sky and the earth? Who controls hearing and sight? Who brings forth the living from the dead and the dead from the […]
Northern lights in Iceland. The Muslim Times has the best collection of articles about the holy Quran and Monotheism
“Say [Prophet], ‘Who provides for you from the sky and the earth? Who controls hearing and sight? Who brings forth the living from the dead and the dead from the living, and who governs everything?’ They are sure to say, ‘God.’ Then say, ‘So why do you not take heed of Him? That is God, your Lord, the Truth. Apart from the Truth, what is there except error? So how is it that you are dissuaded?’ In this way, your Lord’s word about those who defy [the Truth] has been proved– they do not believe.
Ask them, ‘Can any of your partner-gods originate creation, then bring it back to life again in the end?’ Say, ‘It is God that originates creation, and then brings it back to life, so how can you be misled?’ Say, ‘Can any of your partner-gods show the way to the Truth?’ Say, ‘God shows the way to the Truth. Is someone who shows the way to the Truth more worthy to be followed, or someone who cannot find the way unless he himself is shown? What is the matter with you? How do you judge?’ Most of them follow nothing but assumptions, but assumptions can be of no value at all against the Truth: God is well aware of what they do.” (Al Quran 10:31-36)
Epigraph: People, here is an illustration, so listen carefully: those you call on beside God could not, even if they combined all their forces, create a fly, and if a […]
Allah says in verses 17-27 and I am quoting from the translation by Muhammad Abdel Haleem: So celebrate God’s glory in the evening, in the morning – praise is due […]
Epigraph: He is Allah, the Creator, the Maker, the Fashioner. His are the most beautiful names. All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him, and He is […]
Epigraph: He is Allah, the Creator, the Maker, the Fashioner. His are the most beautiful names. All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him, and He is the […]
Do not the disbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were a closed-up mass, then We opened them out? And We made from water every living thing. Will they not then believe? (Al Quran 21:31)
By Thomas David Parks: Ex Research Chemist, Ph.D., University of Illinois. Formerly Chairman Department of Chemistry, Stanford Research Institute; and Director of Research, Clorox Chemical Company. Specialist in microchemistry, electrolytic phenomena, X-ray diffraction and synthetic resins.
Whittaker Chambers in his book Witness tells of a simple incident which was probably the turning point of his life (and perhaps of the affairs of mankind). He was watching his little daughter and unconsciously became aware of the shape of her ears. He thought to himself how impossible that such delicate convolutions could have come about by chance. They could have been created only by premeditated design. But he pushed this thought out of his agnostic mind because he realized that the next step in logical sequence would have to be: design presupposes God — a thesis he was not yet ready to accept.
I have known many scientists among my professors and fellow research workers who have had similar thoughts about observed facts in chemistry and physics, even though they have not spoken from the depths of despair that Whittaker Chambers found himself in.
I see order and design all about me in the inorganic world. I cannot believe that they are there by the haphazard, fortunate coming together of atoms. For me this design demands an intelligence, and this intelligence I call God.
Probably to a chemist the periodic arrangement of the elements is the most arresting. One of the first things a freshman chemistry student learns is the periodicity or order found in the elements. This order has been variously described and classified but we usually credit Mendeleev, the Russian chemist of the last century, with our periodic table. Not only did this arrangement provide a means of studying the known elements and their compounds but it also gave impetus to the search for those elements which had not yet been discovered. Their very existence was postulated by vacant spaces in the orderly arrangement of the table.
Chemists today still use the periodic table to aid them in their study of reactions and to predict properties of unknown or new compounds. That they have been successful is sound testimony to the fact that beautiful order exists in the inorganic world.
But the order we see around us is not a relentless omnipotence. It is tempered with beneficence — a testimony to the fact that good and pleasure are as much a concern of Divine Intelligence as the immutable laws of Nature. Look around you at the exceptions and deviations that do, in fact, defy the laws of cold rationality.
Plitvice Waterfalls
Take, for example, water. From its formula weight –18 — one would predict it would be a gas at ordinary temperatures and pressures. Ammonia — with a formula weight of –17– is a gas at temperatures as low as minus 33° C. at atmospheric pressure. Hydrogen sulfide, closely related to water by position in the periodic table and with a formula weight of 34, is a gas at temperatures down to minus 59° C. The fact that water exists as a liquid at all, at ordinary temperatures, is something to make one stop and think.
(This article is reproduced from a book the Evidence of God in an Expanding Universe edited by John Clover Monsma, published in 1958. This book is a collection of short articles by different scientists about their views about God. The pictures and the Periodic Table diagram have been added by the Muslim Times)
The Muslim Times’ Chief Editor’s comments:
Christian apologists want to make a case for Christianity based on laws of nature and science, by showing that there ought to be a Transcendent Creator of our universe. They make this case, in one breath, and in the very next, deny all of science, by insisting on Eucharist, man-God of Jesus, who is not Transcendent, resurrection and miracles that violate laws of nature.
Atheists are right in exposing the irrationality of the Christian dogma. However, the Christians are right in as far as their claim that there needs to be a Creator of this universe, Who employed natural means to do His work. However, both parties in their self-conceit are not listening to how Islam resolves their conflict; Islam as understood by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and presented in the Muslim Times.
In a trilateral discussion between atheists, Christians and Muslims, I believe we can appreciate reality better and come up with better theology, especially if the discussion not only involves the Creator and purpose of the universe, but, also His complete Transcendence, Original Sin and evolution of life on our planet, Trinity, Mother Mary and Eucharist.
And We sent down water from the sky according to measure, and We caused it to stay in the earth—and surely it is We Who determine its taking away. (Al Quran 23:18)
Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times
A lot of geological evidence suggests that Mars once had quite a bit of surface water. The magnetic field of Mars is too weak to protect its atmosphere from solar wind. The solar wind striped off Martian atmosphere and it lost all its surface water into space. This was discovered by NASA.
If my articles are boring to you, it may be that you need to read more of them, as was suggested by John Cage, “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”
This article I believe will give you a scientific paradigm to read the holy Quran like no commentator of the Quran has ever done before. So, if you leave this page without reviewing or reading this article, can I respectfully say that you do it at your own peril.
There are at best only 250 verses of the Quran about legislative issues and yet a large proportion of the Muslims lead their lives in dreams and activism to implement those in the Muslim societies and bring the discussions to the brim of irrationality and chaos.[1]
Nevertheless, a large majority of them are oblivious to the fact that there are 750-1000 verses inspiring believers to study nature and ponder over and stand in awe of the creativity and marvel of God’s creation.[2] There are several verses in the Quran talking about the marvel of water, its importance for life and the water cycle.
The water was already present when the Earth assembled itself out of the accretionary disk. Continued outgassing of volcanoes transferred the water into the atmosphere which was saturated with water. And rain transferred the water onto the surface.
Compared to other planets and smaller solar system object Earth has a big advantage. It is large enough to prevent water molecules to leave the gravitational field, and it has a magnetic field which prevents atmospheric erosion (Wikipedia). This is due to the Earth’s outer core being liquid (Moving charged liquid = magnetic field). Mars probably had oceans until its outer core solidified so much, that the convection was stopped. After the magnetic field disappeared a few million years of solar radiation removed all of the atmosphere and the oceans.
The holy Quran says:
Have you thought: If (all) your water were to disappear into the earth, who then could bring you gushing water? (Al Quran 67:30)
Do the disbelievers not realize that the heavens and earth were once one mass then We split them apart? And We created from water every living thing. (Al Quran 21:30)
These three verses, including the one in the epigraph, are profound coming from 7th century Arabia, because they talk about subject of scientific import and truths about nature that were of no interest to the Arab society immersed in darkness, which had no concern about science, geology and astronomy.
In my introduction of these Quranic verses about water, what I want to emphasize is what could have gone wrong, if the holy Quran was not the literal word of God, as we see in the case of the Hhly Bible, or was a myth, as we see in the case of the Chinese and the Japanese myths about creation.
The contrast with scientific contradictions in the Bible and sheer mythical nature of Chinese and Japanese traditions, brings out the elegance and beauty of the holy Quran.
The Chinese tell of a time during the Hsia dynasty, in the third millennium before Jesus, when our cosmic environment suddenly changed. Ten suns appeared in the sky. The people on earth suffered greatly from the heat, so the emperor ordered a famous archer to shoot down the extra suns. The archer was rewarded with a pill that had the power to make him immortal, but his wife stole it. For that offense she was banished to the moon.
The Japanese have their own share of myths. According to them, Izanagi-no-Mikoto (male) and Izanami-no-Mikoto (female) were called by all the myriad gods and asked to help each other to create a new land which was to become Japan. They were given a spear with which they stirred the water, and when removed water dripped from the end, an island was created in the great nothingness. If our Western Navy personnel find these myths to be literally true our ships and fleets may begin to sink!
If you read the book of Genesis in the Bible carefully, the earth is created before the sun, we can have days and nights before the creation of the sun, our earth has a roof or a vault called the sky, plants and animals gain existence only after mankind and to top it all off, Grand Ma Eve was created from Grand Pa Adam’s rib, while he was sleeping.
Additionally, there are only four rivers in the planet earth, if time and space were not a consideration, I could keep on reading Genesis over and over and keep on adding to this list.
According to the second chapter of Genesis seas have been created, the whole of universe is in place, God has rested for a day also and yet there has been no rain at all on planet earth. In contrast to the holy Quran the water cycle simply does not exist for the writers of the holy Bible!
The Quran was a wonderful book for its original addressee of the seventh century Arabia but its miracle and awe has been increasing with every new discovery and this was predicted in the Quran:
All praise is due to Allah, to Whom belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is in the earth. His is all praise in the Latter Days. He is the Wise, the All-Knowing. He knows whatever goes into the earth and whatever comes forth from it, and whatever descends from the heaven and whatever ascends into it. He is Ever Merciful, Most Forgiving. (Al Quran 34:1-2)
Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times
In, “Ancient Greece and ancient Rome — people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity ‘daemons.’ Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar.” Says Elizabeth Gilbert in her famous Ted talk, Your elusive creative genius, “The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist’s studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.” [1]
So, are our best intuitions our very own or a gift from the All Knowing God?
While, I leave you pondering about this question, let me talk about our physical world and what the holy Quran has to say about this, for example, let us say, the flight of the birds. In Surah Nahl we read: “Do they not see the birds held under subjection in the vault of heaven? None keeps them afloat save Allah. Indeed, in that are Signs for a people who believe.” [2] When the modern humans think about birds, they think of physical laws of physics and aerodynamics and generally don’t pause to attribute every flight of birds to the First Cause, the All Knowing and All Powerful God of the Abrahamic faiths. In other words, we need to make a distinction and be mindful of style of our modern communication and style of the scriptures, whether the holy Quran or the holy Bible. By substituting one for the other, the mundane processes for the Divine source, we sometimes confuse the discussion. At one level every event on our planet earth, whether a flight of a bird, a wave in the ocean, a gentle breeze, a thought, a romantic emotion, an epic making intuition, a true dream, a wonderful prophetic revelation while awake, have physical explanation in the natural laws and at another level have a detailed theological explanation behind the natural that meets the eyes.
True dreams of every human being and the revelations of the saints and the prophets of God have a Divine source, but they share the neurobiology of sleep of every mammal, be they chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys, horses, cats, dogs and mice. It is not a blasphemy, only a discussion of biology of the mammals, some 5416 kinds and counting. [3]
A rare sleep disorder, namely narcolepsy, has given us a detailed understanding of not only the neurobiology of sleep and dreaming, but also for revelation while awake.
Joyce was still a child when she knew that something was wrong. Growing up in Rhode Island should have been idyllic, except that something was not quite right. At the age of four she would see the clothes moving in the closet. It seemed that every night she would be screaming for her parents to come and get the monster hidden in the hangers. The only thing worse than that was the monster under her bed. That one would keep her awake by tickling her feet. Even in the summer heat, it was only by covering feet with blankets that the tickle monster could be held at bay. Her parents would turn on the lights, shake out the clothes, and check under the bed.
“Go back to sleep,” they would tell her. “You’re having a nightmare.”
Even at a young age, she knew that it was something else. How could she be having a nightmare if she was still awake?
As Joyce got older, she found the closet monster replaced with colorful visions of dancing figures with fanciful faces and festive hats. The tickle monster has stayed for life. To read more about Joyce’s story please go to the reference. [4] But, the point I want to make here is that in narcolepsy, some of the features of the dreaming sleep, referred to as REM sleep, intrude into the waking hours and daytime revelations of the prophets are similar in biology, without some of the negative consequences seen in narcolepsy.
There is a commonly known Hadith that true dreams are 1/46th part of prophethood. So, at least in that sense every Muslim should believe that prophethood, at least a part of it, is continuing. The dreams we experience during our sleep are mostly during REM sleep, the full name being rapid eye movement sleep. The other type of sleep is NREM sleep or non REM sleep. Humans seem to have three states of existence, awake, REM sleep and NREM sleep. If we experience some of the dreaming physiology during awake state then it could be called revelation, if it be true and a message from All Knowing God, the Arabic word for the experience is ‘Ilhaam.’
Such an experience in a diseased state will be called visual hallucination, when it does not serve any useful purpose.
For the neurobiology of dreaming, one can go to any textbook of biology and I have presented a reader friendly version in a previous article: True Nature of Divine Revelations. [5]
Neurobiology of revelation while awake can be understood by reading about narcolepsy. I believe revelation, of course, does not have the accompanying pathological components of narcolepsy.
Is the source of the content of one’s dream or revelation only one’s subconscious mind or the All Knowing God, is not decided by biology. For the criterion to distinguish the two, I suggest a chapter, The Nature of Revelation, of a book by Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad, Khalifatul Masih IV (rh), Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge and Truth. [6]
Incidentally, Quantum physics allows for revelation from All Knowing God, without violating any laws of physics as we understand them. I have previously written and collected in the Muslim Times, articles about Quantum physics and theology. [7, 8, 9, 10, 11]
Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times
Acting on a tip from explorer of caves four years ago, scientists in South Africa discovered what the cavers had only dimly glimpsed through a crack in a limestone wall deep in the Rising Star Cave: lots and lots of old bones.
The remains covered the earthen floor beyond the narrow opening. This was, the scientists concluded, a large, dark chamber for the dead of a previously unidentified species of the early human lineage — Homo naledi.
New York Times reported in September 2015, the new hominin species was announced in by an international team of more than 60 scientists led by Lee R. Berger, an American paleoanthropologist who is a professor of human evolution studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The species name, H. naledi, refers to the cave where the bones lay undisturbed for so long; “naledi” means “star” in the local Sesotho language.
In two papers published this week in the open-access journal eLife, the researchers said that the more than 1,550 fossil elements documenting the discovery constituted the largest sample for any hominin species in a single African site, and one of the largest anywhere in the world. Further, the scientists said, that sample is probably a small fraction of the fossils yet to be recovered from the chamber. So far the team has recovered parts of at least 15 individuals.
Francis Thackeray, of the University of the Witwatersrand, suggests that H. naledi lived about 2 million years ago (±0.5 million years), based on the skulls’ similarities to H. rudolfensis, H. erectus, and H. habilis, species that existed around 1.5, 2.5, and 1.8 million years ago, respectively.[38][39]
Modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago. We have slender skeletons, hands well-suited to tool-making, and large brains. We’ve lost the curved fingers, deep brow ridges and sloping foreheads of our ancestors. We are taller but less powerful.
And Homo naledi shares characteristics with all of those groups.
In the very first part of the holy Quran, in the second chapter, there is a detailed description of the creation of Adam:
Allah it is Who created for you all that is in the earth; then He turned towards the heavens, and He perfected them as seven heavens; and He knows all things.
And when thy Lord said to the angels: ‘I am about to place a vicegerent in the earth,’ they said: ‘Wilt Thou place therein such as will cause disorder in it, and shed blood? — and we glorify Thee with Thy praise and extol Thy holiness.’ He answered: ‘I know what you know not.’
And He taught Adam all the names, then He put the objects of these names before the angels and said: ‘Tell Me the names of these, if you are right.’
They said: ‘Holy art Thou! No knowledge have we except what Thou hast taught us; surely, Thou art the All-Knowing, the Wise.’
He said: ‘O Adam, tell them their names;’ and when he had told them their names, He said: ‘Did I not say to you, I know the secrets of the heavens and of the earth, and I know what you reveal and what you conceal?’
And remember the time when We said to the angels: ‘Submit to Adam,’ and they all submitted. But Iblis did not. He refused and was too proud; and he was of the disbelievers.
And We said: ‘O Adam, dwell thou and thy wife in the garden, and eat therefrom plentifully wherever you will, but approach not this tree, lest you be of the wrongdoers.’
But Satan caused them both to slip by means of it and drove them out of the state in which they were. And We said: ‘Go forth; some of you are enemies of others, and for you there is an abode in the earth and a provision for a time.
Then Adam learnt from his Lord certain words of prayer. So He turned towards him with mercy. Surely, He is Oft-Returning with compassion, and is Merciful.
We said: ‘Go forth, all of you, from here. And if there comes to you guidance from Me, then whoso shall follow My guidance, on them shall come no fear, nor shall they grieve.’ (Al Quran 2:230-239/229-238)
Most if not all the present day commentaries of all denominations among the Muslims that I have seen, present these verses literally and even if they subtly recognize evolution, the commentaries do not address the natural ramifications of the Darwinian evolution and how they affect the understanding of the Quranic text.
Now, if we take these verses literally as majority of the Muslims do, and if we believe in the Darwinian evolution and recent account of the human like and human species, we cannot reconcile the Quranic and the scientific accounts.
According to conventional understanding of the Bible and the Quran the prophet Adam existed some 6000 years ago. If prophet Adam is taken as the first human being, by the fundamentalist believers, it clearly puts the religion at odds with the scientific account of how life evolved on our planet earth.
The story of Adam is mentioned again in Sura Aaraf and here there seems to be a subtle hint towards evolution, if you have a keen eye:
And We have established you in the earth and provided for you therein the means of subsistence. How little thanks you give! And We did create you and then We gave you shape; then said We to the angels, ‘Submit to Adam;’ and they all submitted but Iblis did not; he would not be of those who submit. (Al Quran 7:10-11/11-12)
The verses say that God first created humans as if in some earlier form, like the first life forms and then gave them shape, for example initially a mammalian shape and then an ape like shape.
There is another account of all the children of Adam in the same Sura, how Allah took a Covenant from all of them:
And when thy Lord brought forth offspring from the loins of the sons of Adam, He made them witnesses against their own selves by asking them: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ They said, ‘Yea, we do bear witness to that.’ This He does lest you should say on the Day of Resurrection, ‘We were surely unaware of this.’ (Al Quran 7:172/173)
This verse, most enlightened believers believe, refers to an imprint of God consciousness in human psyche rather than any literal assembly of humans addressed by God.
It is easy for most of the believers to take this verse metaphorically as that is how they have learnt and read it over the years.
Likewise, I am suggesting that all the verses about creation of Adam, his mistake or ‘original sin’ as the the Christians call it, with mother Eve, his expulsion from paradise, his repentance and his learning of language, are to be taken metaphorically, otherwise countless contradictions open up and the holy Quran by its own declaration is a book, a revelation from the All Knowing God, which is clearly immune from any contradiction. (Al Quran 4:82/83)
We have no choice but to understand the evolution of human body, human languages, human consciousness and human conscience in biological light and interpret the Quran and the Bible in that light, otherwise a Pandora box of confusion opens up.
Adam, may peace be on him, who lived some six thousand years ago was the first prophet but was clearly not the first man. As we noted above the modern humans have existed for more than 200,000 years and human language began to evolve much before 6000 years ago. The term ‘first human being,’ is an oxymoron. The first human being does not exist, if we begin to understand how species split from the parent species and new species develop ever so gradually over millions of years, we can conceptualize this reality.
If we go back to the verse from the second sura of the Quran, quoted earlier: “And He taught Adam all the names, then He put the objects of these names before the angels and said: ‘Tell Me the names of these, if you are right.’” This may refer to an earlier Adam as the language was being given or evolving in earlier hominid species.
Searching for ‘Adam’ in any Quranic translation will give us all the instances that Adam is mentioned in the holy Quran. If it refers to the first prophet, it can be taken literally in the sense of him receiving revelation from Allah, for example:
Allah did choose Adam and Noah and the family of Abraham and the family of ‘Imran above all peoples. (Al Quran 3:33/34)
There is no reason to doubt that the first prophet Adam existed around 6000 years ago, but he was not the first man or the first person to speak a language.
There are several verses of the holy Quran with subtle reference to language and biological evolution and evolution in general, but those are for another day.
(CNN) The oldest fossil remains of Homo sapiens, dating back to 300,000 years, have been found at a site in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. This is 100,000 years older than previously discovered fossils of Homo sapiens that have been securely dated. The discovery was presented in a study in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
This marks the first discovery of such fossils in north Africa, and widens the“cradle of mankind” to encompass all of Africa, the researchers said. Previous finds were in south or east Africa. The fossils, including a partial skull and a lower jaw, belong to five different individuals including three young adults, an adolescent and a child estimated to be 8 years old. Stone tools, animal bones and evidence of fire were also found within the same layer at the site.
But what the researchers found to be most remarkable about these fossils is that they capture a moment in time of evolution. The facial features of the skull look like a modern human, but the brain case is very elongated and archaically characteristic of early humans.
There has been increasing evidence that the modern human lineage diverged from Neanderthals and Denisovans 500,000 years ago, making us close relatives rather than direct descendants. Before this discovery, it was believed that the early modern humans we evolved from were in Africa 200,000 years ago and looked very similar to modern humans. But what happened in between that time?
This is still unknown, although the researchers suggest the possibility that there were multiple groups of hominins, or human ancestors, overlapping and having complex relationships.
Because they didn’t previously have fossil evidence of Homo sapiens from 300,000 years ago, this helps to fill a small part of that gap in the fossil record. The fossils provide insight about this evolutionary time for Homo sapiens before the early modern stage 200,000 years ago.
“Our analysis convinced us that this material represents the very root of our species, the oldest Homo sapiens ever found in Africa or elsewhere,” said Jean-Jacques Hublin, lead study author, paleoanthropologist and professor at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
“We confirmed that they display this surprising combination of very advanced features and more archaic conditions. It allowed us to envision a more complex picture for the emergence of our species with different parts of the anatomy evolving at different rates, some features being fixed very early in a modern way and others taking a longer time to reach the modern condition.”
If we could see these Homo sapiens from 300,000 years ago walking around today, they would look very similar to us — if they were wearing a hat, Hublin said. Their faces would be short, flat and retracted compared to Neanderthals, and even some of the dental aspects are similar to ours.
But that elongated skull would give them away as being not quite like us. Their brains, and specifically the cerebellum, wasn’t shaped like ours. But based on the brain case they discovered, these Homo sapiens did have a larger cerebellum than Neanderthals.
“The story of our species in the last 300,000 years is mostly the evolution of our brain and in this time period, a number of mutations occurred affecting brain connectivity,” Hublin said.
Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times
Are science and religion at odds with each other?
Cary Funk and Becka A Alper nicely summarized a recent Pew Research Center survey in USA, “A majority of the public says science and religion often conflict, with nearly six-in-ten adults (59%) expressing this view in newly released findings from a Pew Research Center survey. The share of the public saying science and religion are often in conflict is up modestly from 55% in 2009, when Pew Research conducted a similar survey on religion and science.
People’s sense that there generally is a conflict between religion and science seems to have less to do with their own religious beliefs than it does with their perceptions of other people’s beliefs. Less than one-third of Americans polled in the new survey (30%) say their personal religious beliefs conflict with science, while fully two-thirds (68%) say there is no conflict between their own beliefs and science.”
Moreover, the view that science and religion are often in conflict is particularly common among Americans who are, themselves, not very religiously observant (as measured by frequency of attendance at worship services). Some 73% of adults who seldom or never attend religious services say science and religion are often in conflict. By contrast, among more religiously observant Americans – those who report that they attend religious services on a weekly basis – exactly half (50%) share the view that science and religion frequently conflict.
It seems that human rationalization is at play in resolving possible conflict between religion and science and as is true for all things in life, we tend to give more credit to ourselves than others.
Given the above description of human reality, it is easy to appreciate that most Muslims do not see any conflict between science and the Quran, but, see that many parts of the Bible are at odds with science. As a Muslim writer I have often written about this, for example my article: The Root Cause of Science and Religion Conflict: Wrong Theology, published in prior volumes of the Muslim Sunrise.
Today I want to talk about age of Noah both in the holy Bible and the holy Quran.
First few chapters of Genesis talk about creation in general and about Adam and his family. According to Genesis 5: “Adam lived a total of 930 years, and then he died.” (Genesis 5:5) Genesis 5 ends with the following description of Noah’s family: “After Noah was born, Lamech lived 595 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Lamech lived a total of 777 years, and then he died. After Noah was 500 years old, he became the father of Shem, Ham and Japheth.” (Genesis 5:30-32)
Chapter 6 through 9 of Genesis talk about Noah and flood in his time. The Bible describes a flood that engulfed the whole of the earth and caused extinction of mammoth proportions, for which geologists and biologists have not found any evidence.
My understanding of the Quran is not borrowed from one teacher or commentator, no matter how much popularity he may have enjoyed in his time in any group. The Quran is a book of All Knowing God and of infinite wisdom and to be fair and just with the book, I learn from teachers of all walks of life and all different sects of Islam and even non-Muslim scholars.
Having said that the first question in the following video that is in Urdu talks about commentary of a verse of the holy Quran that talks about the age of the prophet Noah and then goes into discussion of the verse 3:7. This adds useful metaphors to discussion at hand how to read and understand the Quran:
And lest anyone be worried about my sources of information, let me add a line for everyone’s satisfaction that no one is the final authority or the final word on the holy Quran. The journey into the Quran continues eternally, and individuals are blessed according to their capacity and efforts.
The Quranic Compassion 