Seven Places
Fact 01The Expanding Universe
We constructed the sky with our hands, and we will continue to expand it.[51:47]
For most of scientific history the universe was taken to be a fixed size. That picture ended in 1929. Edwin Hubble combined distance measurements with radial velocities Vesto Slipher had been collecting since 1912. He published the relation now called the Hubble–Lemaître law: the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is receding. The universe is getting larger.
That the universe expands is now among the most firmly established facts in astronomy, confirmed from several independent directions. And in 1998 two teams found that the expansion is speeding up, not slowing. That work took the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The verse says God built the sky and is still at it. The weight sits on the tense: not that He expanded it and stopped, but “we will continue to expand it” [51:47]. Something ongoing, stated as ongoing, fourteen centuries before anyone could measure it.
Source: Hubble, E. (1929), PNAS 15(3): 168–173 · Riess et al. (1998), Astronomical Journal 116: 1009 · Perlmutter et al. (1999), Astrophysical Journal 517: 565 · Nobel Prize in Physics 2011
Fact 02The Sky That Guards
And we rendered the sky a guarded ceiling. Yet, they are totally oblivious to all the portents therein.[21:32]
The Quran calls the sky a ceiling that guards, and it says what the guarding is for. “And we guarded it against every rejected devil. If any of them sneaks around to listen, a mighty projectile will chase him back.” [15:17-18] The same in two other places: God “guarded its borders with projectiles against the devils” [67:5], and “We guarded it from every evil devil.” [37:7] A guarded border, stated four times.
The sky guards in a second way as well, and none of it was known when the verse was written. Ozone in the stratosphere absorbs 97 to 99 percent of the sun's ultraviolet in the 200 to 315 nanometre band. Those are the wavelengths that damage DNA. Without it, nothing could live on an exposed surface. The atmosphere burns up the overwhelming majority of the rock that falls toward us. And it holds the surface within a range life survives, averaging about fifteen degrees Celsius instead of swinging between extremes. Three shields, each one necessary, in what looks from the ground like empty air.
A ceiling, and a guarded one, on every level anyone has since been able to reach. The verse then says the thing that is still true: people are oblivious to all of it.
Source: Fabry, C. & Buisson, H. (1913), Journal de Physique, on atmospheric ozone · WMO Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion, for the absorbed fraction · NASA, on atmospheric entry and mean surface temperature
Fact 03All Life From Water
Do the unbelievers not realize that the heaven and the earth used to be one solid mass that we exploded into existence? And from water we made all living things. Would they believe?[21:30]
Every organism known needs water to metabolise and reproduce. Cells are mostly water by mass. The chemistry of life runs in solution and stops without it. The shape DNA holds depends on the shell of water molecules around it. There is no exception anywhere in biology.
It is also where the search for life beyond this planet begins. The first question put to any other world is whether it has liquid water, or ever had. Nothing else is known to do the job.
The Quran states the rule plainly, then illustrates it: “And GOD created every living creature from water. Some of them walk on their bellies, some walk on two legs, and some walk on four. GOD creates whatever He wills. GOD is Omnipotent.” [24:45] Every living creature, from one substance, sorted by how they move — the way someone writes having watched.
Source: Ball, P. (2008), Water as an active constituent in cell biology, Chemical Reviews 108(1): 74–108 · NASA Mars Exploration Program, Follow the Water
Fact 04The Stages in the Womb
We created the human being from a certain kind of mud. Subsequently, we reproduced him from a tiny drop, that is placed into a well protected repository. Then we developed the drop into a hanging (embryo), then developed the hanging (embryo) into a bite-size (fetus), then created the bite-size (fetus) into bones, then covered the bones with flesh. We thus produce a new creature. Most blessed is GOD, the best Creator.[23:12-14]
The verse gives the sequence. Here is what a microscope found, centuries later.
A drop, placed somewhere protected. The fertilised egg travels to the uterus and implants. It is completely embedded in the wall by about the eleventh day. Then a hanging thing, attached to that wall and soon suspended from the stalk that becomes the umbilical cord. Something bite-size. At around four weeks a row of blocks runs along the embryo's back, giving it a notched outline. Then bones, then flesh over the bones. Cartilage models of the limbs and spine are laid down. They begin hardening from the sixth to eighth week, with muscle forming around that frame.
Five terms, in that order. They were set down when the early weeks could not be observed at all.
And the Quran says what it is telling us this for. Wherever these stages appear, they are answering doubt about resurrection: if He assembled you once from that, He can do it again [22:5].
Source: O'Rahilly, R. & Müller, F. (1987), Developmental Stages in Human Embryos, Carnegie Institution of Washington · Schoenwolf, G. et al., Larsen's Human Embryology, on myogenesis and ossification timings
Fact 05Down to the Fingertip
Does the human being think that we will not reconstruct his bones? Yes indeed; we are able to reconstruct his finger tip.[75:3-4]
Someone doubts that a body long decayed could be put back together. The answer does not argue about bones. It goes smaller: the fingertip.
Friction ridges there begin forming in the womb from around the tenth week, settle into their pattern by about the sixth month, and hold it for life. No two prints from different people have ever been shown to be indistinguishable at the level of ridge detail — not even among identical twins, whose prints differ although their DNA does not. Francis Galton published the first major study of them in 1892, and the same year fingerprints were first used to identify a criminal.
Of all the parts God could have named to answer a question about scale, the verse names the one that turns out to carry the finest detail a human body has.
Source: Galton, F. (1892), Finger Prints, Macmillan · Jain, Prabhakar & Pankanti (2002), On the similarity of identical twin fingerprints, Pattern Recognition 35(11): 2653–2663
Fact 06The Sun Is Going Somewhere
The sun sets into a specific location, according to the design of the Almighty, the Omniscient.[36:38]
The sun has a destination. It carries the whole solar system around the centre of the Milky Way at something between 800,000 and 900,000 kilometres per hour, taking over two hundred million years to complete one circuit, and relative to the stars nearest us it is travelling toward a particular point in the constellation Hercules — the solar apex, first inferred by William Herschel in 1783.
Nothing in the universe is standing still, and the verse two lines later says so of the whole arrangement: “The sun is never to catch up with the moon—the night and the day never deviate—each of them is floating in its own orbit.” [36:40]
Each in its own orbit, the sun bound for a specific location, and a design named behind all of it. That is a verse about motion with a purpose, written when the sun's daily and yearly circuit was all anyone could describe.
Source: Schönrich, R., Binney, J. & Dehnen, W. (2010), MNRAS 403(4): 1829–1833, on the solar apex · GRAVITY Collaboration (2019) and Reid & Brunthaler (2020), on the galactic circular speed · Herschel, W. (1783), Phil. Trans. R. Soc. 73: 247–283
Fact 07Skin, and the Renewing of It
Surely, those who disbelieve in our revelations, we will condemn them to the hellfire. Whenever their skins are burnt, we will give them new skins. Thus, they will suffer continuously. GOD is Almighty, Most Wise.[4:56]
The nerve endings that register pain from the body surface sit in the skin. A burn that destroys the full thickness of the skin destroys them with it, which is why the deepest burns can be insensate at their centre while the shallower burn around them is agony. For the surface pain to continue, the skin itself has to be there to feel it.
That is the mechanism the verse turns on. The skins are burnt; new skins are given; and the reason stated for giving them is that the suffering continues. Remove the clause about the skin and the sentence stops working.
Sherrington established in 1906 that pain has its own dedicated receptors, and how they fire was worked out a century after that. The verse had already made the renewing of the skin the condition of the suffering.
Source: Sherrington, C. S. (1906), The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, Yale University Press · Basbaum, A. I. et al. (2009), Cell 139(2): 267–284
