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The Fingerprints of God

SHAFAQNA-  We certainly show them Our Signs in the universe, and in their own selves, until it becomes manifest to them that it is the Truth. Is it not sufficient in regard to your Lord that He is a Witness over all things?’ 1

Introduction

We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world around us. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible for us. The gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend.

Maybe except in our childhood, few of us get a chance to wonder why nature is the way it is. We have taken everything in this world so much for granted that do not realize what would happen to all our daily activities if life on this melting planet was otherwise.

The purpose of this chapter is to share with you the testimony of all living things including every single cell in your body that there is an Omni-intelligent Creator who has designed them and there is no room for chance or dice playing in the story of creation.

If you have ever been wondering where can you find God, this chapter is a must for you to read. Nevertheless, all I can do is to show you the Signs for His presence and His fingerprint on every being including yourself.

His Fingerprint on Atom

Atom is the smallest physical building block of nature. In ancient Greek philosophy the word “atom” was used to describe the smallest bit of matter that could be conceived of. This “fundamental particle”, to use the present-day term for this concept, was thought of as indestructible; in fact, the Greek word for atom (atoms) means “not divisible”.

All atoms of any given element behave in the same way chemically. Thus, from a chemical viewpoint, the atom is the smallest entity to be considered.

The lightest of all atoms, hydrogen, has a diameter of approximately 10 -8 cm and a mass of about 1.7 × 10 -24 g. An atom is so small that a single drop of water contains more than a thousand billion billion atoms. Since atoms are hundreds of times smaller than the wavelength of visible light, they could not even be revealed by any optical microscope, no matter how powerful.

Each atom has two particles; proton with a positive charge and neutron which is an uncharged particle. The number of proton and neutron in every atom is exactly the same. The mass of a proton is 1.6726 × 10 -27 kg, or approximately 1,836 times that of an electron. In a simple language a proton weigh nearly one million billion of a gram and still an electron is 1836 times lighter than proton!

The structure of an atom is explained in quantum physics in that electrons move in definite orbits at a considerable distance from the nucleus with the speed of 3000 kilometers per second. This means in every second an electron moves two million times around itself.

Having considered all sophisticated and superlative structural design of an atom, is not just the matter of a common sense to acknowledge the intelligence of its Designer? And if every atom is to be considered a word of God and a fingerprint of His creation, imagine how many uncountable signs is already out for you to know Him.

Let us now recite together:

And if all the trees on the earth were pens and the sea were ink (wherewith to write), with seven seas behind it to add to its supply, still the Words of God would not be exhausted. Verily, God is All-Might, All-Wise.” 2

His Fingerprint on Insects

Perhaps with the exception of mainly bees and earthworms our usual response to insects is to ignore or to annihilate them. Most people, if they could, would deny insects’ planetary citizenship.

Yet, in the final analysis, life on earth would be impossible without insects; they are essential links in the ecological chain.

Nearly out of 11 million species of life on earth, one million species are the insects and there are still more to be discovered. Some insects are so small that can easily go through the whole of a needle.

In spite of their extreme variety in their superficial appearance, there are many common characteristics in their anatomy, reproductive systems, social structure, etc.

For instance, the eyes of all insects are compound with many facets. In the case of a housefly for example this is as many as 4000 facets.

The ways insects communicate are amazingly different. Some by increasing and decreasing of the light such as flies, or by the means of smelling such as ants, or waggle-dance as in bees.

In order for the honeybees to manufacture a kilogram of honey, every worker bee needs to ingest the nectar of the flowers 65000 times and convert it to honey in special sacs in their oesophagi and the total colony of the bees fly over 45 to 64 million flowers to complete the production of a kilogram of honey.

Really, how would a worker bee distinguish poisonous flowers from the sweet ones?

How this factory of honey manufacturing has been made within this tiny insect?

Let us recite together:

“And your Lord revealed to the bee…” 3

Many chapters of the Quran have the names of animals and insects such as ‘bee’ (chapter 16), ant (chapter 27), spider (29).

His Fingerprint on Earth

And in the earth are Signs for those who have faith with certainty.” 4

Earth is the third planet from the Sun. It is like an elliptical spaceship which weigh 6.6000 million billion tones.

The Earth has 8 different movements. In common with the entire solar system, the Earth is moving through space at the rate of approximately 72000 km/h. The Earth and its satellite, the moon, also move together in an elliptical orbit about the Sun with an approximate speed of 940,000 km over one solar year of nearly 365 days making seasons.

It also travels along it at a velocity of about 106,000 km/h. The core temperature of the Earth is up to 195000 degrees which is 35 times more than the surface of the Sun.

Atmosphere

The Earth is protected by a mixture of gases that has a gravitational field which is strong enough to prevent the gases of the Earth from escaping on the one hand, and to prevent the harmful rays of the Sun as well as many celestial meteors hitting the Earth on the other hand.

Everyday 20 million meteors with the speed of about 50 km/s are shot towards the Earth and its only due to the atmosphere of the Earth that we even do not realize their exposure and destruction. Do you know one of those 20 million meteors is enough to destroy life on earth?

Let us then recite together:

“And We have made the heaven (above the Earth) a roof, safe and well guarded. Yet, they turn away from its Signs.” 5

Do you know if the diameter and circumference of the Earth were a little bit more or less, it affects its gravity and life is destroyed on earth?

Have you ever imagined if the distance of the Earth from the Sun were a little bit more or less than it is, the Earth would be either too hot live and all the water would have been evaporated, or too cold and frozen and again no life would be possible?

Can you really say that all these are so accurately designed just by chance? Or:

“And there is a measure with Him of everything” 6

Water

Water is the major constituent of living matter. From 50 to 90 percent of the weight of living matter is water. Blood in animals and sap in plants consist largely of water and serve to transport food and remove waste material.

Ocean covers about three-quarters of the Earth’s surface. Nonetheless, it is not drinkable. So how can all living organisms benefit from it?

“ God is He Who sends the winds, so that they raise clouds, and spread them along the sky as He wills, and then break them into fragments, until you see rain drops come forth from their midst.”[30:48]

When rivers of water flow towards the ocean they carry the minerals with them to make the ground suitable for farming on the one hand, and keep the ocean salty to avoid the stink. However, since such salty water is not suitable for drinking, it has to be refined.

Unlike other liquids, water has unusual physical and chemical properties. It is one of very few naturally occurring liquids with evaporation properties. Evaporation system purifies the water from all the minerals like a huge refinery and drop from the clouds.

Do you not see the intelligence behind all these natural processes?!

Imagine if the raindrops were not in their ordinary diameter sizes, and would have poured like a river, do you thing still they would be useful?! Which wisdom and intelligence had made the water cycling system in the present manner?!

His Fingerprint on Sun

The Sun is the star that by the gravitational effects of its mass, dominates the solar system, the planetary system that includes the Earth. The Sun has a diameter of 1,390,000 km. The total mass of Sun is 200 billion billion tones. The Sun is 10 million times bigger than the Earth.

Sun: the main supporter of life on earth

The Sun furnishes directly or indirectly all of the energy supporting life on Earth. Some of its very obvious benefits are:

1) The Sun is made up primarily of hydrogen. Every second it generates more than 657 million tones of hydrogen, which by the radiation of its electromagnetic energy supports life on Earth. This is because all foods and fuels are derived ultimately from plants that are using the energy of sunlight.

2) All planets in the solar system are moving on their orbits around the Sun due to the gravitational effects of the Sun, or else, they would destroy immediately.

3) If there were no energy released from the Sun, the Earth would have been an uninhabitable frozen planet.

4) Without the energy of the sunlight, no plants would photosynthesize, and no evaporation for raining would occur.

And the list is much longer than our patience.

Scientists believe the Sun has been generating such a vast energy for about 4.5 billion years and can continue for another 4.5 billion years! On the other hand, as I mentioned it generates 657 million tones of hydrogen every second!

Could you calculate how much energy it has generated so far?!

Where all this energy is coming from?

Let us recite together:

“And there is not a thing, but with Us are the stores thereof. And We send it not down except in a known measure.” 7

“And of His Signs are the night and the day, and the Sun and the Moon.” 8

His Fingerprint on Heavens

Let us now turn our gaze towards the starry sky above us. Do we know what is really out there? Can we find the fingerprints of God there too?

Here we are on the planet Earth that is one of the planets of the solar system. The solar system is located in the Milky Way galaxy; the large disc-shaped galaxy.

The diameter of the disc is about 100,000 light years. (unit of length used in astronomy to measure vast distances. It is equal to the distance that light travels in a mean solar or astronomical year. At the rate of approximately 300,000 km/s, a light year is approximately equal to 9,461,000,000,000 km)

The number of stars visible to the naked eye from Earth has been estimated to total 8,000, of which 4,000 are in the northern hemisphere of the sky and 4,000 in the southern hemisphere. At any one time during the night in either hemisphere, only about 2,000 stars are visible. The others are obscured by atmospheric haze, especially near the horizon, and by faint sky light.

Astronomers have calculated that the stars in the Milky Way, the galaxy to which the Sun belongs, number in the hundreds of billions.. The individual stars visible in the sky are simply those that lie closest to the solar system in the Milky Way. Andromeda is the companion galaxy to our Milky Way. Every group of galaxies makes a cluster of galaxies.

Our galaxy is one of a small group of about 20 galaxies that astronomers call the Local Group. The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are the two largest members, each with 100 to 200 billion stars.

The Milky Way and Andromeda are only two of several hundred million such galaxies visible through large modern telescopes. The largest known galaxy has about 13 times as many stars as the Milky Way.

There is a cluster which consists of about 300 galaxies amidst Great Bear moving away in an opposite direction to Milky Way with the speed of 750 miles per second.

There is also an amazing galaxy which its speed is one third of the light speed. This means, its light visible to our eyes today has left the galaxy more than 4000 million years ago, and by the time we see it, it has already moved 6500 million light years away from its previous location!

The most massive galaxy that was discovered only a year ago by NASA has something like 4 trillion solar masses. This is only our universe and still what we don’t know is by far greater!

Astronomers today are suspecting parallel universes, which are yet to be detectable from within our universe!

Could there be other universes outside of our own?

Dr. Sten Odenwald (Hughes STX) for the NASA writes in response to the above question:

“ If our universe is infinite, then you can still have an infinite number of other separate universes outside it because so far as humans understand infinity, it can accommodate an infinite number of infinite things.

If the universe is finite…like a ball…then you can think of a bunch of coconuts floating in an infinite ocean, and again you end up with the possibility of having an infinite number of finite universes embedded in some vaster kind of space.

Yes there could be other universes out there, but they would be unobservable no matter how old our universe became…even infinitely old!! So, such universes have no meaning to science because there is no experiment we can perform to detect them.”

http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/ask/a11215.html

“Are you more difficult to create or is the heaven that He constructed?”9

“This is the creation of Allah, so show Me that which those besides Him have created.” 10

Expanding Universe

Since 1929 the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble provided the first evidence that the entire universe is expanding. Later on the general theory of relativity confirmed the expansion of the universe in just the way Hubble observed.

‘Scientific American’ in its current issue (July 2001) printed an article about the measurement of the expansion rate and the size of the universe.

Don’t you still see the fingerprint of the Creator?!

“ With power did We construct the heaven. Verily, We are expanding the vastness of space thereof.” 11

Prominent Scientists Find the Fingerprints of God

شهد الله انه لا اله الا هو و الملائكه و اولوالعلم قائما بالقسط

1) Dr. Ross sees the imprint of the Creator’s hand in the Universe:

“Wherever we look….we see evidence of God’s design… [When] we examine the cosmos on its largest scale or its tiniest, His handiwork is evident…God’s fingerprints are visible.” 12

(Dr. Hugh N. Ross graduated from UBC with a B.Sc. in Physics. Subsequently he earned M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Astronomy from the University of Toronto .)

2) Professor Jay Roth of the University of Connecticut , says:

” There is so much in the physical nature of the universe we inhabit, the exact balances of everything needed to support life, the piling of coincidence on coincidence, everyone of which is vitally necessary for the development of a stable star with a planet that can support life. These physical properties of the universe lead me to favor a Designer or Creator …” 13

3) Einstein famous saying: “God does not play dice”.

“Coughlin [of the Los Angeles tabloid Illustrated Daily News, in hot pursuit of asking Einstein a provocative, headline-inducing question] found the right moment while tailing the car that was speeding the couple [the Einstein] north on the coast road to Pasadena . It had stopped to let Einstein stroll over to a small headland known as Sunset Cliffs, where he stood gazing at the sea and sky.

Seizing the moment, Coughlin leaped from his car, the question on his lips, followed by Spang, his camera at the ready. “Doctor”, Coughlin said, “is there a God?” Einstein stared at the water’s edge some twenty feet below, then turned to his questioner.

Coughlin later wrote: “There were tears in his eyes, and he was sniffing. Spang shot the picture as Einstein was hustled away before he could answer me. “Well,” I said, “the way he reacted, he believes in God. Did you ever see such an emotional face?” 14

4) Stephen Hawking expresses the view:

” It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way; except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us. ”

5) Paul Davies states it:

” The impression of design is overwhelming. ”

6) In 1997 the leading science journal Nature published a survey of religious belief among scientists in the United States. The authors found that nearly 40 percent of the 1000 scientists surveyed said they believed in a personal God- ‘a God in intellectual and affective communication with humankind, i.e. a God to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer.’15.

Why some scientists do not believe in God?

A survey was published in ‘Nature’ in 1998 entitled ‘Leading Scientists Still Reject God’. That survey revealed that of the ‘elite’ biologists of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States , approximately 95 percent were men or women who did not believe in a personal God! 16Why would this be?

There are many factors involved. I shall in this brief mention only two out of many:

1) God is not observed in my lab!

Popular scientific dogma holds that if something can’t be proven scientifically, i.e.; by observation and experimentation, it really doesn’t exist.

2) god of Christianity does not exist.

In many instances when a western scientist rejects the existence of God, as a matter of fact, he or she is rejecting the Christin concept of god in terms of resurrection of Jesus and being son of god or god and things like that which is of course nothing more than a myth, and has nothing to do with the true concept of a unique God who is the Creator of all including prophet Jesus. Hence, according to Christians all Jewish people and Muslims are atheists for they do not believe in Jesus as God!

  • 1.Refer to Ayah 41:53
  • 2.Refer to ayah 31:27
  • 3.Refer to ayah 16:68
  • 4.Refer to ayah 51:20
  • 5.Refer to ayah 21:32
  • 6.Refer to ayah13: 8
  • 7.Refer to ayah 15:21
  • 8.Refer to ayah 41: 27
  • 9.Refer to ayah 79:27
  • 10.Refer to ayah 31:11
  • 11.Refer to ayah 51:47
  • 12.The Creator and the Cosmos , p. 146
  • 13.Cosmos, Bios, Theos , p. 198
  • 14.Einstein: A Life, Denis Brian, Page 206.
  • 15.Nature, vol. 386, 1997, pp. 435-36
  • 16.Nature, vol. 394, 1998, p.313

 

Source: Excerpt taken from “Ultimate Questions in Philosophy of Religion” by Shaykh Mansour Leghaei

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