Immortal : A Collection of The Miracles of Qur'an.

The Big Bang Part 2 (detailed analysis)

By Umar Nasser

INTRODUCTION
According to Muslims, the Holy Quran is the Word of God, while nature is the Work of God. As such, we can expect to find considerable harmony between God's Word and God's Work. While the Quran is not a scientific textbook, it uses physical phenomena to demonstrate spiritual truths, hence the frequent allegories to the life-giving water (revelation) reviving a (spiritually) dead Earth. However, in many cases the descriptions of physical phenomena seem to serve another purpose — to act as prophecies of future scientific discoveries. These confirm the reader's conviction that the Quran is not the work of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, but rather the word of God. Naturally, verses claimed to be scientific prophecies have become a major attraction to Islam in the recent era, with many people of a scientific bent being extremely impressed by their articulacy and accuracy.

In this article, we will explore one verse claimed to describe the Big Bang, and another claimed to describe the expansion of the universe. To do so, we will first recount the relevant science, then the verses themselves, as well as the criticisms of  the Muslim argument. We find that the Quranic claim is accurate and that its criticisms fall short, bolstering the claim that the Author of the Quran is the Author of the Universe.

THE SCIENCE

Just over 100 years ago, luminaries such as Einstein, along with almost the entire scientific world, believed that the universe did not have a beginning. It was static — it always was and always will be. But Einstein's own Theory of General Relativity changed that. When physicists looked at the equations governing its applications, they realised that the universe should be expanding. Like a balloon being blown up, if you rewind the clock, you realise that an expanding universe should have started from an initial much smaller point of origin. So was the universe expanding?  The physics world didn't have to wait long. Painstaking work by Edwin Hubble in the 1920's showed that the light from distant galaxies was red-shifted — its wavelength was being stretched, like a squiggly line on a balloon becoming stretched as the balloon's skin expanded. For the first time, cosmologists could 'see' the expansion of the universe. Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian Priest who moonlighted as a mathematical prodigy, extrapolated the expansion of the universe back in time to a 'Primeval Atom' — a state of the universe where it was highly dense and compact, before expanding and evolving into the cosmos we know and love today.

While his idea was widely acclaimed for being an elegant solution to cosmology's problems, many found the idea of a beginning repugnant. It seemed like the religious idea of a 'Creator' who set of the universe was creeping into physics. Over the next few decades however, the idea of a Big Bang gained immense empirical support. What really won the day was discovering the radioactive 'afterglow' of the Big Bang, the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, whose measurement confirmed the Big Bang Theory's predictions. More evidence has poured in since then, and today Big Bang cosmology is the starting-point for understanding of the universe's origin and evolution.

THE QURAN

The Holy Quran describes God as both the originator and sustainer of the universe. In fact, the second line of the Quran begins by describing God as 'Rabbil Aalameen,' meaning that God is the Creator, Sustainer, and Developer of every world. Evolution is the overriding law of the Quran's cosmology, first from God's decree into actual existence, and from there into the universe we see today.

(Please note that the Ahmadiyya Quranic numbering system follows traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, which tell us that chapters begin with the verse "Bismillah...'. Thus we enumerate this verse at the beginning of every chapter. This means that in Qurans published by non-Ahmadi publishers, you should subtract 1 from the verse number given below, in all chapters apart from Chapter 9).