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By Muhammad Asadi
Envision
yourself living in 7th Century Arabia: Society has very little scientific knowledge. Bedouin
tribalism is the "dominant feature" of the population (The
Arabs in History , Bernard Lewis (1958), page
23). This mostly desolate area in which you live, is an
"oral" culture, with a "nomadic" lifestyle. Very few people
know how to read, even fewer know how to write. Myth and
magic controls people's thoughts and guides their rituals.
Trade routes to the north (and the resulting contact with
the major Empires) has very recently been restored, after
two centuries of decline and deterioration (The
Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years ,
Bernard Lewis, 1995). How far would you go if you
wanted to discover the true origin of the universe? How much
progress would you make if you wanted to uncover the origin
of life?
We can move away from Arabia and scan the world scene at
that period in history. Nothing in the literature of the
world, including the literature of the ancient Greeks, comes
even remotely close to the accuracy of statements, without
error, about the natural world, contained in the Koran. In
fact some of the information that we come across in the
Koran was not known until about 40 years back and some of it
was not known until the day it was read in the Koran by
scientists just a few years ago. I invite you to take some
time and join me in this fantastic adventure....
It is highly probable that but for the Arabs, modern European civilization would have never assumed that character which has enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution. For although there is not a single aspect of human growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the paramount distinctive force of the modern world and the supreme course of its victory-natural sciences and the scientific spirit... What we call science arose in Europe as a result of a new spirit of inquiry; of new methods of investigation, of the method of experiment, observation, measurement, of the development of Mathematics in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs.[Robert Briffault, The Making of Humanity(1928)]
THE ORIGIN OF
THE UNIVERSE
" Do not the
rejecters see that the skies and earth were bound together
then we disunited [or separated] them
(Fataq in Arabic) ..." (Koran 21:30)
In the above statement,
the Koran gives an accurate description of the
Big Bang,
a theory of the origin of the universe widely accepted by
scientists today.
The Arabic word used in the Koran to signify separation is
Fataq. It means to
dis-joint or disunite. It essentially captures, in the
description, "symmetry breaking"
between particles and forces that modern cosmologists talk
about in explaining the complexity of the Universe.
Martin Rees, who is one of the
leading cosmologists in the world, states in his book,
Our Cosmic Habitat (2001)

"Our universe may once have been
squeezed to a single point, but EVERYONE whether on Earth,
or Andromeda, or even on the galaxies remotest from us can
EQUALLY claim to have started from that point..." (Rees,
page 55)
According to the physicist
Steven Weinberg:
"There was a time in the very early
universe....when the forces were all the same-not only
mathematically the same...but ACTUALLY the same." (quoted by
Ferris, Timothy 1997:215)
The Koran, over 14 centuries before the "Big Bang" theory
was presented, confirmed the "common origin" or source of
everything in the universe. The criticism by some that it
mentions the "earth" erroneously at this stage is unfounded.
The Koran is merely stating that the earth and the skies had
one common origin. It mirrors the statement by Martin Rees
quoted above when it mentions the "common origin" of
everything, including you and I, in the Universe. How do we
explain this information in the Koran, if it had its origin
in the mind of a 7th century man ?
The Koran talks about an "expanding"
Universe centuries before scientists
described it:
"And the sky We built it with
might, and we cause the expansion of it."
(Koran 51:47)
The fact that the Universe is not static
but in a state of expansion was discovered by the American
astronomer Edwin Hubble in the late
1920s, almost 1400 years after the Koran described it.
The Koran mentions that at a stage in its origin, the
universe was "gaseous":
"And also, turned He to the sky when it was as smoke.."(Koran
41:11).

The Koran uses the Arabic word Dukhan,
which stands for smoke. A perfect analogy for gas and
particles in suspension and the gasses being hot.
Scientists have only very recently confirmed that the
universe was indeed, at an early stage, a gaseous mass
composed of hydrogen and some helium, a big mass of hot
gasses. The Koran is more accurate in describing the gasses
as "smoke" rather than the word "mist" or "fog" used
frequently by scientists (Rees uses the word "fog" in his
book)as the gasses were hot.
The Koran used this analogy centuries before anyone in the
world had any idea about helium and hydrogen, yet even today
scientists use a crude form of the same analogy. The Belgian
cosmologist Georges Lemaitre,
lecturing in 1930, fourteen hundred years after the Koran,
described this stage of cosmic evolution as:
"..the filling of the heavens with
smoke."(Ferris, Timothy 1997:109)
BLACK
HOLES
The Koran is aware of the
phenomenon of "black holes", stars that have collapsed under
their intense gravitational field, so that even light cannot
escape. The Koran stated over 1200 years before the concept
was stated by John Michell in
1767, and 1400 years before John
Archibald Wheeler coined the term "black hole" in
1968:
I swear by the sky and (the
phenomena of) Tariq.
And what will explain to you what Tariq is?
It is a star that pierces (or makes a hole). (Koran 86:1-3)
The Koran uses the word
Thaqib in Arabic, a
word that literally signifies a puncture or a minute hole
Martin Rees, states in Our
Cosmic Habitat (2001)
"Space is already being
punctured
by the formation of black holes..."
(Rees, page 120)
Michael Moyer of Popular Science
writes :
A black hole is infinitely
dense, which means that it pulls the fabric of space-time to
the breaking point—creating a deep pockmark,
complete with a tiny rip
at the bottom.
(http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,12543,211498,00.html)

Black holes are objects literally "cut off" from the rest of the
universe. The black hole is wrapped in a zone called the
"event horizon". Once the event horizon is crossed, nothing
can return. A camel falling into the event horizon would
literally be stretched to the dimension of a yarn
(Ferris, Timothy
1998:83)
and can pass through the
"eye of the
needle"(Koran 7:40).
Contrary to the New Testament, the Koran uses this
terminology in relation to
"gates to the sky".
Many physicists have conjectured about "gates" or "passages"
in space being associated with black holes.
Inside the "event horizon" time itself comes to a
standstill. Black holes are exceedingly important to modern
physics. All endeavours towards a unifying theory, relating
quantum physics to general relativity have come from black
hole research.
THE
"WOVEN" SKY
"By the sky with all its weavings/knittings (huu-buk)" (Koran 51:7)
.
The Koran accurately
describes the sky as having "weavings", or being like a
knitted fabric. Space having "weavings" ties in with
String Theory in
physics. It is envisioned by scientists that at the smallest
Planck Scale (10^-35 m), spacetime is indeed
"weaved" or "knitted".

Physicist Lee Smolin, in his book,
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity(2001)
states,
"...space may be
'woven'
from a network of loops,...just like a piece of cloth is
'woven' from a network of threads."(Smolin, page 186)
Martin Rees, states in
Our Cosmic
Habitat(2001)
"According to our present concepts, empty space is
anything but simple..., and on an even tinier scale, it may
be a seething tangle of
strings."
(Rees, page 107)
The
idea that space is not "nothing" but "something" is a 20th
century discovery, i.e.over 1300 years after the Koran. The
physicist
Paul Davies in his book, The Edge of Infinity (1981),
terms it,
"One of the great
scientific discoveries of the twentieth century (Davies,
page18)"
THE
COLLAPSING UNIVERSE
If the density of
matter in the Universe is sufficiently large, gravitational
forces will eventually cause the Universe to stop expanding,
and then to start falling back in upon itself. If that
happens, the Universe will end in a second cataclysmic event
that cosmologists call
The Big Crunch
Andrei Linde of Stanford University and his colleagues have
shown that according to some theories of supergravity, which
try to describe gravity within the context of quantum
theory, the dark energy from a scalar field will do more
than simply reach zero - it will become negative and
possibly even plunge as far as minus infinity. This would
slow the rate of expansion of the Universe and then put it
into reverse, causing space and time to collapse to a point
in a big crunch. Linde and his colleagues calculate that the
typical time for the Universe to start this collapse would
be in 10 to 20 billion years from now. Its current age is
about 14 billion years
NEW SCIENTIST
The Koran describes the
Big Crunch
and what the physicist
Heinz Pagels
described as the
"Cosmic Code"
in this statement about the script of the universe:
"The day
when We shall roll back the skies, like a scribe rolls up a
written document.
As We began the first creation, We shall surely repeat it.
It is a promise (binding) upon us.
Indeed it will happen."
(Koran 21:104)
QUASARS & GRAVITATIONAL LENS EFFECT: LIGHT UPON LIGHT
"Allah is the Light
of the heavens and the earth. The example of His Light is as
a Niche wherein is a Lamp: the Lamp enclosed in Glass: the
glass as if it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed
Tree, (as) an olive, neither of the east nor of the west,
whose fuel is luminous even though no fire touches it:
Light upon Light! Allah guides whom He will to His
Light: Allah sest forth parables for humankind. Indeed Allah
has knowledge of all things". (Koran 24:35)
The statement of the Koran
reproduced above provides a detailed map of quasars and
their location within a galaxy. For those who study the
"light" in the heavens (the context of the Koranic
statement), the astronomers, the description given by the
Koran is very clear and easily discernable. Quasars or Quasi
Stellar Objects were first discovered in 1963 (over 1400
years after the Koran). They represent the brightest objects
in the Universe. Astronomers discovered that certain faint
"star-like" objects existed in the Universe that due to
their large redshifts must lie billions of light years away
and emit massive amounts of energy, in order to still be
visible. In the most widely accepted model of quasars, they
are described as the bright nucleus of an active galaxy
powered by a central black hole. The black hole is the
"niche", as the Koran states, wherein is the quasar, i.e. "the
lamp"

Also discovered recently is
the fact that when viewed through the galaxy, the galaxy
produces a gravitational effect which is similar to the
quasar (the lamp) being surrounded by glass. This is exactly
what the Koran states, "...the lamp enclosed in glass".
NASA astronomers state: " The
gravitational effect of the galaxy on the distant quasar was
similar to the lens effect of a drinking glass on a distant
street light - it created multiple images ("light upon
light"- the Arabic word used in the statement "Nur"
signifies reflected light). But stars in the
foreground galaxy have been found to act as gravitational
lenses here too." (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap950711.html)

Timothy Ferris
writes in his book,
The Whole Shebang:
"As
light from a Quasar travels towards us…it may pass through
either side of an intervening cluster of galaxies. The
warped space surrounding the cluster can act as a lens, with
a result that we see two images of what is (or was) actually
one quasar. " (Ferris 1997:61)
The Quasar is powered by the black hole when "stars and gas"
from the galaxy are sucked into it. A "tree"- the Koran
states, powers it. It is not unusual for astronomers to
describe galaxies as "trees" comprised of stars, see the
Hertzsprung-Russell
diagram, reproduced in the Timothy Ferris book mentioned
above (Ferris 1997: 188).
Perhaps the most astonishing revelation in the Koran, in
that particular verse, is the section that accurately
describes the concept of non-fire combustion, the nuclear
fusion that produces luminosity. The Koran states,
"whose fuel is luminous even though no fire touches
it".
Since there is no free form oxygen gas in space, no
fire-based combustion is possible for stars or quasars to
shine as they do, for as long as they do. Stars begin their
life composed primarily of hydrogen. As the gas contracts,
due to gravity, it heats up; hydrogen atoms collide and
combine to form helium while energy is released. This
released energy, which gets radiated into space, is the
visible light that we see- even though no "fire" touches the
fuel. The ancients did not know about non-fire combustion,
it is a very recent discovery. It was long believed, even by
the Greeks that the sun and the stars shone by burning their
material like a fire through combustion. Correcting that
erroneous notion, the Koran is the first book on earth to
describe accurately the concept of luminosity produced
through non-fire combustion. Let us recap the entire
statement of the Koran:
"Allah (God) is the
Light of the heavens and the earth. The example of His Light
is as a niche
(black hole)
wherein is a
Lamp
(quasar) :
the Lamp enclosed in Glass
(gravitational
lens effect of the galaxy)
: the glass as it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed
Tree (the
galaxy that feeds the black hole) , (as) an olive (see image above), neither of the east nor of the west
(stars and gas as
fuel from all sides)
, whose fuel is luminous even though no fire touches it
(non-fire/oxygen combustion) : Light upon Light(gravitational
lens effect)!
Allah guides whom He will to His Light: Allah sets forth
Parables for humankind. Indeed Allah has knowledge of all
things". (Koran 24:35)
THE SUN AND THE MOON
"He created the skies and the earth for truth.
He coils the night upon the day and He coils the day upon
the night"(Koran 39:5)
At a time when a geocentric cosmology was in vogue, the
Koran not only corrected the erroneous notions associated
with that world-view, but made clear that night and day were
caused by a coiling motion. The Koran uses the arabic verb
Kawarra
which in its original usage signifies the "coiling" of a turban
around the head. A perfect analogy to the movement that
causes night and day, i.e. the earth's rotation.
"He it is
who has created the night and day, and the sun and the moon.
They all, in their orbit, swim (yasbahoon)" (Koran
39:5)
To make this notion of a
rotating earth causing night and day even clearer, the Koran
mentions that the night "merges" into the day and day
"merges" into night (Koran 3:27)
and that the night and day "interchange" into each other
(Koran 24:44). The above
statement stated that this change is brought about by
orbital motion similar to (in principle) but
distinct from the orbital motion of the sun and the moon.
"They all" says the Koran,
"all" signifies night and day, the sun and the moon. The
word translated "swim" above is the Arabic
Yasbahoon. It signifies movement with one's own motion. If you
refer to a man doing this on the ground, it means he is
walking and not rolled by someone else.
"And the sun constantly journeys towards a homing place
for it
And for the moon We have determined phases...
It is not for the sun to overtake the moon,
neither can the night outstrip the day.
And they all swim (yasbahoon) in their own orbits (Koran
36:38-40)"
The Koran mentions the movement of the sun. The sun's
movement is not something that is evident to our eyes or
experience but requires specialized equipment. Modern
science has found out that the sun rotates around its axis
every 26 days and is continually on a journey in space
towards its "homing place", the central nucleus of our
galaxy, just like mentioned in the Koran (36:39), in its
orbit of around 226 million miles (accurate to within 6
percent), according to Mark Reid,
a Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer. Also, the Koran is known
to be the first book to use the modern term "phase"
(Manazil in Arabic) associated with the moon's
appearances.
By stating that the sun is not permitted to "overtake" the
moon, the Koran is making clear for astronomers, in their
own terminology, that the sun and the moon are not revolving
around the same object. It also makes clear that the
movement that causes night and day has nothing to do with
the movement of the sun and the moon. In the first part of
the statement, the sun is mentioned as the one that cannot
"overtake" the moon. In the second part it is the
night that cannot "outstrip" the day. This is
completely contrary to popular earth-centered (geocentric)
systems, in which day and night were associated with the
sun's movement (popular at the time of Muhammed).
Simon and Jacqueline Mitton,
in their book, Invitation to
Astronomy (1986),
state on page 20:
...a planet travels more slowly
the further it is away from the sun. Thus the Earth
regularly "overtakes on
the inside", the planets
that are further out. The
overtaking causes the
apparent backward loop in the planet's path." (Mitton
1986:20)
Not only this, the Koran completely debunks the geocentric
hypothesis when it states:
By the Sun and its brightness
And by the moon when it imitates it (i.e. reflects that
brightness)
And by the day which reveals it.
By the night which conceals it." (Koran 91:1-4)
The above statements of the Koran not only reveal
the reflected nature of the moon's light but also debunk the
erroneous claim of the geocentrists that the sun's movement
causes day and night. It is the morning that "reveals" the
sun and the night that "conceals" the sun, not the other way
around. In other words, the sun is
stationary relative to night and day. The movement
that causes night and day is not the movement of the sun!
The fact that the earth, sun and moon move with their own
motion is a notion that even the "father of gravity",
Issac Newton, did not fully
understand. It was clarified by
Einstein in 1912 (almost 1400 years after the Koran)
and formed the essence of his General Theory of
Relativity. Physicist Brian
Greene, in his book, The
Elegant Universe (1999) states on page 71:

...Einstein has taught us that the warping of space is gravity. The
mere presence of an object with mass causes space to respond
by warping. Similarly, the earth is not kept in orbit
because the gravitational pull of some other external object
guides it...Instead, Einstein showed that objects move
through space along the shortest possible paths- the
"easiest possible" paths or the "paths of least resistance".
(Greene, Page 71)
ATOMISM
"(God is)The
Knower of the unapparent.
Not an atom's weight in the skies or the earth, nor anything
smaller than that,
or larger, escapes him, but is in a clear record." (Koran
34:3)

Many centuries before
Muhammed was born, there was a well known theory of ATOMISM,
advanced by the Greeks, Democritus in particular, who lived
in the 4th century BC. Democritus and the people who came
after him assumed that the material world is made up of tiny
indivisible particles called atoms, the smallest pieces of
matter,each having the same mass, the smallest unit mass
possible. The Arabs used to deal in the same concept. The
word in Arabic, ZARRA, most commonly meant that.
The Koran breaking with that tradition clearly states that
there are things "smaller" than an atom (see Koran 34:3
above).
It was not until 1897 that the concept of the 'indivisible
atom' was challenged when the English physicist J.J Thomson,
working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge found ways
to study bits that had been broken off atoms
(Gribbin, John
1998. The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory
of Everything)

How could Muhammed have known that particles existed smaller than
what was believed to be the smallest indivisible unit known?
MICROSCOPIC EMBRYOLOGY
Then We placed
him as a drop (of seed) in a safe lodging. Then fashioned
the seed into a leech.. (Koran 23:13-14)
The Koran is known to be the
first book to give microscopic details of human embryology,
hundreds of years before the discovery of the microscope!
The Koran contains information on embryology which was not
discovered till about 30 years back and certain details were
new even to modern scientists but were immediately confirmed
as being accurate.
The Koran mentions that at a certain stage, the developing
human is like "allaqa" (Koran 23:13-14), a leech-like clot.

Fig:Leech
(allaqa) on top,human embryo (24 days) at the bottom
If you take a microscopic picture of a human embryo of days 7-24
and place it next to a picture of a leech, they both look
identical. Not only do they look the same but they function
in the same way too. Just like a leech derives nourishment
from its host's blood, the embryo derives nourishment from
the decidua or the pregnant endometrium.

Keith L. Moore, a world
authority on embryology, states in his book, The Developing
Human (1998):
"Reference (in the Koran) is also made to the leech-like
appearance of the early embryo. (The four week embryo shown,
looks like a leech or blood sucker.)" (Moore, page 8)
Keith Moore has authored standard textbooks on embryology.
Books that are termed "required readings" by prestigious
medical institutions all around the world.
EMBRYO SEX
DETERMINATION
"And it is He (God) who has created the two pairs, male and female
from the ejaculated drop." (Koran 53:45)

In the above statement, the
Koran says that the sex of a human baby is determined by the
" ejaculated drop".
It is common knowledge that semen is the fluid that is
ejaculated by males during sexual acts. Females do not
possess such "ejaculated semen."
The point is that the sex of the baby, whether it be male or
female, will indeed be determined by the 'ejaculated drop'
, i.e. the father's sperm. It has been scientifically
established, only recently ,that the female ovum contains
only X chromosomes. If the ejaculated drop bears the Y
chromosome, the offspring will be male, otherwise the
offspring will be female. No one living at the time of
Muhammed or even Darwin for that matter had any knowledge of
such genetics.
In a standard text on Genetics, Elements of Medical
Genetics, a book that has gone through eleven editions, Alan
E. H. Emery and Robert F. Mueller , write in chapter 1,
under, "The Development of Genetics":

"Aristotle in the third century BC suggested that male semen originated from
the blood and possessed the ability to give life to the
embryo...this idea was generally accepted for nearly 2000
years until the 17th century when William Harvey achieved
fame for his studies of blood circulation, demonstrated that
in deer killed at various times after mating, there was
never any evidence of coagulation of menstrual blood but a
small embryo developed that gradually increased in size and
complexity throughout the whole period of gestation,
a possibility foreseen in
the Koran, the Holy Book of the Muslims several centuries earlier. "
The fact is that the Koran foreshadows William Harvey by
almost ten centuries, it also described microscopic stages
of human embryology before the discovery of the microscope,
stages that William Harvey could not describe.
"Those who have been given knowledge see that what is sent
down to you from your Cherisher (God) is the truth...(Koran
34:6)"
THE WATERY ORIGIN OF LIFE
The Koran mentions that all
life "originated" from water (Koran
21:30)and that man
himself is "created" of water and so are all the animals on
earth (Koran 25:54, and 24:45).
These statements to an Arab would have sounded atrocious in
that day and age. Even today such statements in the Koran
might cause you to wonder. The fact that all life originated
in water is well established by the scientific community,
today. We have evidence to support the fact that the first
living beings were cyanobacteria also called bluegreen
algae, and they existed in water. The fact that human beings
and animals are created of water is also well established
since cytoplasm the basic component of "life" in any animal
cell is over 80% water.

ISOSTACY AND THE ROOTS OF MOUNTAINS
Have we not expanded the
earth and made the mountains as tent pegs
(Koran 78:6-7)
We have cast into the earth anchors lest it shake with you
(Koran 31:10)
Consider the above two
statements in the Koran and compare them to a visual
cross-section of a mountain from a modern standard text.
Just like the Koran stated centuries earlier, mountains are
like "tent-pegs", i.e. they have a root extending down into
the earth like "anchors" and this gives stability and
balance to the earth. This was discovered less than 150
years ago by scientists and now accepted as a fundamental
law in geology, the concept of ISOSTACY. If the photograph
isn't enough evidence consider this narration from a
standard text: M. J Selby in a standard-text on the subject
entitled "Earth's Changing Surface(Clarendon Press, Oxford
1985) states on page 32:

"G.B Airy in 1855 suggested that the crust of the earth could be
likened to rafts of timber floating on water. Thick pieces
of timber float higher above the water surface than thin
pieces and similarly thick sections of the earth's crust
will float on a liquid or plastic substratum of greater
density. Airy was suggesting that mountains have a deep root
of lower density rock which the plains lack. Four years
after Airy published his work, J.H Pratt offered an
alternative hypothesis...By this hypothesis rock columns
below mountains must have a lower density, because of their
greater length, than shorter rock columns beneath plains.
Both Airy and Pratt's hypothesis imply that surface
irregularities are balanced by differences in density of
rocks below the major features (mountains and plains) of the
crust. This state of BALANCE is described as the concept of
ISOSTACY."
THE "STRETCHING" EARTH
"Have We not expanded the earth..."(Koran 78:6-7)
"It is God who has stretched
out (Mad-a in Arabic) the earth,
AND
made therein
mountains (as anchors) and rivers..."(Koran 13:3)
The Koranic verse quoted above, mentions the expansion/stretching of
the earth. Mentioned together with the stretching of the
earth are mountains and rivers.The surface of the Earth
today is very different than it once was. It is believed
that all of the continents we once connected in one giant
land mass, named Pangaea (a Latin word meaning "all lands").
Expansion or widening of the sea floor is one of the main
reasons continental plates are always moving, a process
called 'continental drift'. Expansion is caused by an up
welling of molten material through cracks, fissures, and
faults in the Earth's crust.
Currently, continents drift apart at the rate of about one
inch per year. The most obvious sea floor expansion in the
world is taking place under the ocean between Arabia and
Africa, where the two continents are drifting apart three to
four times faster than any other continental plates. When
expansion occurs on land rather than the sea bed, an ever
widening valley is formed such as East Africa's Great Rift
Valley.
The idea of the expansion of the earth was first stated in
1912, fourteen centuries after the Koran, by
Alfred Lothar, German meteorologist and explorer.
If we get a relief map that covers Utah, Nevada, and
California, in the US, we will be able to see the Basin and
Range Province. The Utah Geological Survey states:
The ranges and basins have been forming for the past 10
to 20 million years in response to
east-west stretching
of the earth's crust. Stretching creates tension that is released by
slow continuous movement or sudden movement along a fault (a
break in the earth's crust), which causes earthquakes.
During an earthquake, the mountains rise while the valleys
drop along the faults. The stretching continues today.
(Utah Geological Survey, http://www.ugs.state.ut.us/education/tc/tc12-96.htm)
Not only do mountains rise due to the "stretching" of the
earth, but according to simulated models of the continents,
"stretching" resulted in the formation of the major rivers
on earth as well, exactly as implied by the Koran.
 
"In all cases the greatest stress occurred at the location of the
Earth's major rivers. This development suggests that the
major riverbeds came into existence as a result of expansion
rather than random erosion. Since the continents were
fixed on an expanding surface, it may be logically deduced
that expansion caused the land masses to
stretch and, at the points of greatest tension, to break, thus
forming the rivers."
The Expanded Earth, Benchmark Publishing & Design, Windsor,
Ontario, Canada, http://www.wincom.net/earthexp/n/rivers.htm
THE INVISIBLE BARRIER
He has made the two seas to flow freely
(so that) they meet together:
Between them is a barrier which they cannot encroach.
Which then of the bounties of your Lord will you deny?
(Koran 55:19-21)

THE ATLANTIC AND
THE MEDITERRANEAN MEET BUT
DO NOT INTERMIGLE OVER THE GIBRALTAR BECAUSE OF THE
"BARRIER"
The Koran states that there
are two large bodies of flowing water (Bahr-ain in Arabic)
that meet but do not intermingle because of a "barrier"
between them, a barrier that doesn't prevent meeting but
prevents intermingling (Koran 55:19-20)
It is a necessity that seas intermingle through straits
between them. The Koran however is aware of a very unusual
phenomenon, which scientists discovered only recently. The
Mediterranean and Atlantic ocean differ in their chemical
and biological constitution. The French scientist Jacques
Yves Cousteau conducted various undersea investigations at
the Strait of Gibraltar and explaining these phenomena
concluded:
"Unexpected fresh water springs issue from the southern and
northern coasts of Gibraltar. These mammoth springs gush
towards each other at angles of 45 degrees forming a
reciprocal dam. Due to this fact the Mediterranean and the
Atlantic Ocean cannot intermingle (as quoted by Nurbaki)."
Did Muhammed do research on the chemical and biological
components of seawater to discover this unusual phenomena?
OCEANS & INTERNAL WAVES
"..Or (as the example of)
darkness in the
deep ocean
, covered by
a wave, on top of which is a wave, on top of which are
clouds.
Darkness one on top of the other (as layers)..."(Koran
24:40)
The Koran, in the verse
above, stated over 1400 years ago, that there are internal
waves in a deep ocean (note that internal waves are topped
by surface waves which are topped by clouds). Also stated in
the verse are the layers of darkness associated with the
depth of the ocean. The photograph below was taken using
remote sensing equipment (satellite imagery). It reveals
internal waves a few kilometers east of the Strait of
Gibraltar.

The average depth of the
oceans is 3795 meters (12450 feet). Without protective
equipment humans cannot go down below 40 meters. At 200
meters light has been successively absorbed, layer by layer,
in all its color frequencies except blue.There is almost no
light at 200 meters.(Oceans, Elder and Pernetta, p. 27).
Internal waves in the "deep ocean" have been recognized
only
in the past two decades (now four) due to remote sensing
from space platforms
(Apel et al.Observations of oceanic internal waves from the
ERTS , 1975; Fedorov,Observations of oceanic internal waves
from space 1976).

Internal waves form at the interfaces between layers of different
water density, which are associated with velocity shears
(i.e., where the water above and below the interface is
either moving in opposite directions or in the same
direction at different speeds). Oscillations can occur if
the water is displaced vertically resulting in internal
waves.
The Koran is the first book on earth to clearly mention
"internal waves" and their association with layers of
darkness in a "deep ocean". This was fourteen centuries
before remote sensing equipment was invented.
CONCLUSION
The ancient Greeks, more learned than the pre-Islamic Arabs,
whenever they opined on nature made multiple errors per
every accurate statement made.
(http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/GreekScience/Students/Ellen/EarlyGkAstronomy.html)
The Bible made multiple errors when it talked about the
natural world and the origin of the universe (http://www.bible.rationalreality.com).
The Koran, contrary to that, not only avoids all the errors
made by pre-scientific communities prevalent at the time, it
made pioneering statements about the natural world that are
amazingly accurate and were not uncovered and could not have
been uncovered until recently, as documented above.
There is more testable evidence of a
scientific nature
presented above (Also read the article
Scientific Revelation )and in the link pages to support
the
single hypothesis of the divine origin of the Koran,
than has been presented in support of any other
single
hypothesis in the
entire history of science. The Koran
offers what has not been offered by any "religious" book: a
logical framework, empirical evidence and falsification
If we deny the Koran's claim of being a revelation, from the
One who has knowledge of everything, then we have to account
for the above information, and how it made its way into the
Koran, always without error, and always accurate. Justice,
truth and sincerity demands that or we fool ourselves alone.
"Which of the bounties of your
Cherisher (God) is it that you deny?" (Koran 55: multiple)
KORAN & CRITICAL RATIONALISM
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