Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times

Almost every Surah of the Quran presents Monotheism in one metaphor or the other; often presenting God the Creator and arguing from tangible to the intangible. Several Surahs have long passages presenting God the Creator to the whole of humanity. Here are the passages from the thirty first Surah of the Quran:

خَلَقَ السَّمَاوَاتِ بِغَيْرِ عَمَدٍ تَرَوْنَهَا ۖ وَأَلْقَىٰ فِي الْأَرْضِ رَوَاسِيَ أَن تَمِيدَ بِكُمْ وَبَثَّ فِيهَا مِن كُلِّ دَابَّةٍ ۚ وَأَنزَلْنَا مِنَ السَّمَاءِ مَاءً فَأَنبَتْنَا فِيهَا مِن كُلِّ زَوْجٍ كَرِيمٍ

هَٰذَا خَلْقُ اللَّهِ فَأَرُونِي مَاذَا خَلَقَ الَّذِينَ مِن دُونِهِ ۚ بَلِ الظَّالِمُونَ فِي ضَلَالٍ مُّبِينٍ

“He created the heavens without any visible support, and He placed firm mountains on the earth––in case it should shake under you––and He spread all kinds of animals around it. We sent down water from the sky, with which We made every kind of good plant grow on earth: all this is God’s creation. Now, show Me what your other gods have created. No, the disbelievers are clearly astray.” (Al Quran 31:10-11)

Commentary of the above verses

Epigraph

“How can Allah have a son when He has no consort?” (Al Quran 6:101)

The field of biology has struck a fatal blow to the concept of Trinity and other dogma in Christianity on several counts. Firstly, there is the fundamental principle in biology “Like begets like,” which clearly refutes the concept of son ship of God. In the Holy Quran it is expressed in the words, “How can Allah have a son when He has no consort?” Man’s genetic code is made of 46 chromosomes and God is transcendent and beyond time, space and matter.

Secondly, the concept of Original Sin is completely incompatible with the fundamental laws of biology including the principles of gene inheritance and the facts supporting the theory of evolution. If all humans inhabiting the planet earth today are not direct descendants of Adam and Eve, who lived approximately 6000 years ago, then suddenly the very basic doctrines of Christianity, Original Sin and vicarious Atonement, Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, change into fiction.  All of us do not have the genes of “Original Sin” and are not in need of Jesus’ atonement. According to the theory of evolution modern humans have existed for at least more than 150,000 years, in other words Adam and Eve, who were merely 6000 years ago, are not the great grand parents of all the humans inhabiting planet earth today. I had originally written about this issue, in the Religion and Science section of the Summer 2008 volume of the Muslim Sunrise, the oldest Muslim publication of North America. Please read it on page 21 of the PDF file: Evaluating Original Sin against scientific discoveries.

Thirdly, one of the biggest contributions of biology in the last two centuries has been the fact that all living beings come from one lineage and inheritance and not three. Read on, and in the words of Sir Francis Bacon’s advice, “Read not to contradict … but to weigh and consider.” Erasmus Darwin grand father of Charles Darwin, was perhaps the first in suggesting that all life shared the same origin and that the secret of life lay in ‘filaments’ that are shared by all living beings, without exception. So, the 30 million life forms on this planet that have ever existed can be a witness of one God only and not three!

In the words of Matt Ridley in the first chapter of his book, Genome:

As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals; and many families of these animals long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life? asked the polymathic poet and physician Erasmus Darwin in 1794. It was a startling guess for the time, not only in its bold conjecture that all organic life shared the same origin, sixty-five years before his grandson Charles’ book on the topic, but for its weird use of the word ‘filaments’. The secret of life is indeed a thread.

Prof. Richard Dawkins quotes Matt Ridley in his book The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing:

In the beginning was the word. The word was not DNA. That came afterwards, when life was already established, and when it had divided the labor between two separate activities: chemical work and information storage, metabolism and replication. But DNA contains a record of the word, faithfully transmitted through all subsequent eons to the astonishing present.

The Intelligent Design movement has created extensive literature arguing with the atheists or agnostics that there ought to be a creator of this universe and life on this planet. Despite their strong rooting in Christianity they conveniently keep ignoring that the universe and life talk of one designer or creator and not three! They choose to ignore the elephant in the room and go on without ever mentioning this divide between Christianity and Islam.

In the words of Matt Ridley in first chapter of his book, Genome:

The three-letter words of the genetic code are the same in every creature. CGA means arginine and GCG means alanine – in bats, in beetles, in beech trees, in bacteria. They even mean the same in the misleadingly named archaebacteria living at boiling temperatures in sulphurous springs thousands of feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic ocean or in those microscopic capsules of deviousness called viruses. Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug or blob you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary and know the same code.
All life is one. The genetic code, but a few tiny local aberrations, mostly for unexplained reasons in the ciliate protozoa, is the same in every creature. We all use exactly the same language.

Contrast this with the fact that modern computers are built around a number of mutually incompatible machine languages, determined by their processor chips. The different machine languages, in this example point to the different manufacturers.

Ridley continues, “This means – and religious people might find this a useful argument – that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born. Of course, that life might have been born on a different planet and seeded here by spacecraft, or there might even have been thousands of kinds of life at first, but only Luca survived in the ruthless free-for-all of the primeval soup. But until the genetic code was cracked in the 1960s, we did not know what we now know: that all life is one; seaweed is your distant cousin and anthrax one of your advanced relatives. The unity of life is an empirical fact. Erasmus Darwin was outrageously close to the mark: ‘One and the same kind of living filaments has been the cause of all organic life.’”

It is mind boggling that in this age of rationality the Trinitarian Christians are still maintaining their dogma. We invite them to real monotheism and offer them three better choices. These are in the order of preference:

♦ Islam
♦ Unitarian Christianity
♦ Judaism

Richard Dawkins quotes Francis Crick in his book The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, “Heredity is all-or-none. That’s digital. But what neither Mendel nor anyone else before 1953 knew was that genes themselves are digital, within themselves. A gene is a sequence of code letters, drawn from an alphabet of precisely four letters, and the genetic code is universal throughout all known living things. Life is the execution of programs written using a small digital alphabet in a single, universal machine language. This realization was the hammer blow that knocked the last nail into the coffin of vitalism and, by extension, of dualism. The hammer was wielded, with undisguised youthful relish, by James Watson and Francis Crick.”

James Watson and Francis Crick’s famous one-page paper, describing the structure of DNA, appeared in Nature in 1953. In addition to being a biological epiphany, it also turned out to be an amazing religious epiphany. Trinity was no more! There could be only one creator of life on our planet earth. In the words of Allah:

خَلَقَ السَّمَاوَاتِ بِغَيْرِ عَمَدٍ تَرَوْنَهَا ۖ وَأَلْقَىٰ فِي الْأَرْضِ رَوَاسِيَ أَن تَمِيدَ بِكُمْ وَبَثَّ فِيهَا مِن كُلِّ دَابَّةٍ ۚ وَأَنزَلْنَا مِنَ السَّمَاءِ مَاءً فَأَنبَتْنَا فِيهَا مِن كُلِّ زَوْجٍ كَرِيمٍ

هَٰذَا خَلْقُ اللَّهِ فَأَرُونِي مَاذَا خَلَقَ الَّذِينَ مِن دُونِهِ ۚ بَلِ الظَّالِمُونَ فِي ضَلَالٍ مُّبِينٍ

“He created the heavens without any visible support, and He placed firm mountains on the earth––in case it should shake under you––and He spread all kinds of animals around it. We sent down water from the sky, with which We made every kind of good plant grow on earth: all this is God’s creation. Now, show Me what your other gods have created. No, the disbelievers are clearly astray.” (Al Quran 31:10-11)

Here Allah declares the unity of His creation as a proof of there being one God only.

Some additional related articles below:

The Quranic Challenge to the Atheists: Make a Fly, if You Can

Epigraph: People, here is an illustration, so listen carefully: those you call on beside God could not, even if they combined all their forces, create a fly, and if a […]

Surah Rome: A Powerful Case for Our Creator God

Allah says in verses 17-27 and I am quoting from the translation by Muhammad Abdel Haleem: So celebrate God’s glory in the evening, in the morning – praise is due […]

Everything is a Miracle According to the Holy Quran and Albert Einstein

Epigraph: He is Allah, the Creator, the Maker, the Fashioner. His are the most beautiful names. All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him, and He is […]

The Muslim Times, Perhaps the Only Medium Presenting the Creator God of the Holy Quran

Epigraph: He is Allah, the Creator, the Maker, the Fashioner. His are the most beautiful names. All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Him, and He is the […]

A Slight Twist Makes David Attenborough a Great Teacher for God of the Abrahamic Faiths

Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times Sir David Frederick Attenborough is an agnostic, for he focuses on the question of suffering.  If that question […]

Surah Yunus: From Tangible to Intangible

“Say [Prophet], ‘Who provides for you from the sky and the earth? Who controls hearing and sight? Who brings forth the living from the dead and the dead from the […]