Nature and Science Speak about God

Nature and Science Speak about God

1990 9 September 21-24 Nature and Science Speak about God (1269) 5

Isn’t it preposterous to believe that this mathematical exactness in the universe developed on its own? An aspect of the wisdom and significance found in the universe which is worth pondering upon is that it has such potentialities as may be exploited by man whenever the need arises. For instance, let us take nitrogen. Human beings and animals would die of starvation if our diet did not contain nitrogen compound. Each puff of air may contain 78% nitrogen, but no nutritive plant will grow without an interaction between nitrogen and the soil taking place, and there are only two ways that soluble nitrogen can be mixed with the soil to fertilize it. One of them is by the typical bacterial process. Certain bacteria, which live in the roots of leguminous plants such as peas, beans, alfalfa and peanuts, assimilate atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into a compound of nitrogen. When the plant dries up, some part of this compound remains stored in the soil. Another form of fixed nitrogen, nitric acid, occurs naturally in the atmosphere when lightning discharges. The action of electrical energy on the atmosphere, which dissociates nitrogen and oxygen molecules, allows the free atoms to form nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, and this nitrogen compound is brought down by rainfall to our fields. The amount of nitrate obtained from nitrogen by this means according to one estimate, is five pounds per acre of soil, in each year. This quantity is equal to 30 pounds of sodium nitrate.1

1. Lyon, Buckman and Brady, The Nature and Properties of Soils.

Both these sources have proved inadequate in meeting the nitrogen requirements of man, for fields which are repeatedly cultivated over long periods eventually run short of nitrogen. Hence the practice of crop rotation by farmers. Owing to an increase in population and intensive cultivation at the beginning of the present century, a general deficiency of nitrogen compound began to make itself felt and man appeared to be heading for a prolonged period of famine. It is strangely significant that, at such a critical time, we discovered the method of artificially preparing this compound from the air. One of the several different essays in this field entailed the artificial causation of thunder and lightning in the atmosphere. A force of about three lakhs horsepower was applied to cause this phenomenon, and, as had been estimated, a small amount of nitrogen was thus produced. Man, with his God-given wisdom, had marched one step forward. It was ten thousand years after the dawn of human history that methods had been invented to convert nitrogen gas into fertilizers. This invention placed man in a position to produce this essential part of his nutrition himself, without which, he would surely have died of starvation. It is inspiring to think that, for the first time, throughout the entire history of the earth, man had discovered a solution to the problem of food scarcity at the exact point in time when it was about to cause ultimate disaster to the human species. Many other significant aspects of divine wisdom and purpose are immanent in the universe. All that has so far been revealed by scientific enquiry is quite imaginably nothing in comparison to the facts which still await discovery. Be that as it may, whatever little, comparatively speaking, man has discovered of nature is still too vast in scope to be covered by the present volume. In fact, any attempt on the part of man to list and describe divine blessings would be inadequate. No matter how comprehensive the description may be, the moment our tongues and pens stop moving, we begin to feel that all we have done is delimit rather than describe. Indeed, no account of divine wisdom as manifested in the universe would be complete, even if all knowable facts were to come to light and all human beings, equipped with all of the resources available in the world were to join together in describing them.

And if all the trees in the earth were pens, and the sea, with seven more seas to replenish it, were ink, the writings of Allah’s words could never be exhausted. Mighty is God and wise.1

Anyone who has attempted to make an exhaustive study of the universe will admit that there is no element of exaggeration in these words from the divine scripture. They are just a plain, unembroidered expression of the truth.

In the last few pages, we have referred to the wonderful organization, meaningfulness and extraordinary wisdom which manifest themselves in the universe. The antagonists of religion will no doubt concede that these are facts, but they will insist on a different interpretation of their significance. They do not glimpse even fleetingly, an Organizer and Sustainer in this universe. On the contrary, they hold that life on earth and the existence of the universe are simply chance occurrences. As T.H. Huxley puts it:

Six monkeys, set to strum unintelligently on typewriters for millions of millions of years, would be bound in time to write all books in the British Museum. If we examined the last page, which a particular monkey had typed, and found that it had chanced, in its blind strumming, to type a Shakespeare Sonnet, we should rightly regard the occurrence as a remarkable accident, but if we looked through all the millions of papers the monkey had turned out in untold millions of years, we might be sure of finding a Shakespeare Sonnet somewhere amongst them, the product of the blind play of Chance. In the same way, millions of millions of stars wandering blindly through space for millions of millions of years are bound to meet with every kind of accident; a limited number are bound to meet with that special kind of accident which calls planetary systems into being.2

1. Quran, 31: 27.

2. Quoted by Sir James, The Mysterious Universe, pp. 3-4.

But one of the greatest of our contemporary physicists, Sir. Fred Hoyle, asks if it is at all possible that chance could operate on such a large scale, and answers emphatically in the negative. As he puts it in his book, The Intelligent Universe:

‘The Universe, as observed by astronomers, would not be large enough to hold the monkeys needed to write even one scene from Shakespeare, or to hold their typewriters, and certainly not the wastepaper baskets needed for the rubbish they would type.’

None of our sciences up till now has unearthed any such “chance occurrence” as could have accounted for such a great, meaningful and permanent phenomenon as the universe. Of course, there are certain random happenings which do explain certain aspects of nature. For instance, a gust of wind sometimes carries away pollen grains from a red-coloured rose and, with them, pollinates the stigma of a white-coloured rose. This cross pollination produces pink-coloured roses. But such an incident is only a minor event in the entire existence of the rose. Its continued presence under specific conditions in this universe, and its wonderful adaptation to the whole physical system of the rest of the world, can never be fully understood simply by ascribing these things to a random flow of air. The term ‘chance occurrence’ expresses one facet of the truth, but as an explanation for the existence of the universe and its processes, it is patently absurd. According to Professor Edwin Conklin, a biologist at Princeton University, ‘The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the Unabridged Dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.’1

1. The Evidence of God, p. 174.

(To be continued)