Surah al-Anbiyaa:30 and the Mis­sion­ary Felix Culpa

Recent­ly the world’s most mal­adroit mis­sion­ar­ies have allowed an impromp­tu piece to be pub­lished in response to Shab­bir Ally’s views on Surah al-Anbiyaa : 30. Per­son­al­ly I do believe that Shab­bir’s inter­pre­ta­tion is wrong, albeit he was not the first Mus­lim to prof­fer such a cos­mo­log­i­cal hypoth­e­sis on this par­tic­u­lar Holy Ayaah. How­ev­er I feel that a two-fold response is req­ui­site. I shall seek to demonstrate :

    (1) that Andrew Var­go’s claims on clas­si­cal Big Bang cos­mol­o­gy are bla­tant­ly erro­neous and are the result of para­mount nescience, and ;
    (2) I shall prof­fer a more appropi­ate inter­pre­ta­tion on the Holy Ayaah in question.

Let us begin with my inter­pre­ta­tion of the Holy Ayaah ; Allah Sub­han Wa Ta’alaa says :

Do not the Unbe­liev­ers see that the heav­ens and the earth were joined togeth­er (as one unit of Cre­ation), before We clove them asunder?”

The impor­tant point in this Holy Ayaah is that the Ara­bic con­text refers to the uni­verse and the earth as one ; ratq” means mixed or blend­ed” so ratq describes the ini­tial first mate­ri­als that formed the entire uni­verse ; includ­ing the earth, and states clear­ly that they were mixed or blend­ed. In the very incip­i­ent pro­vi­so’s of the uni­verse ; the heav­ens aggran­dized and cooled. Par­ti­cles of mat­ter and anti-mat­ter orig­i­nat­ed for minus­cu­lar peri­ods of time ; how­ev­er the tem­per­a­ture would not sus­tain them for long. The elec­tro­mag­net­ic and weak inter­ac­tion were then cleaved ; now almost all of the anti-mat­ter and mat­ter was oblit­er­at­ed in this cleav­ing, except the minute amount that endured.

Thus the first ele­ments came about ; and all this came to pass in around three min­utes after the cre­ation of time itself. These ele­ments just as Allah Sub­han Wa Ta’alaa stat­ed would ulti­mate­ly form the phys­i­cal con­sti­tu­tion of our uni­verse ; includ­ing the earth. The Holy Quran describes I think an evo­lu­tion of the earth fro the very ini­tial stages of the uni­vers­es exis­tence ; that is the only way the Holy Ayaah can in my opin­ion be inter­pret­ed due to the con­text of the word employed. In fact Abdal­lah Yusuf Ali ; who did not have the same knowl­edge nor resources that I have avail­able at the present time, still wrote in his com­men­tary on the Holy Ayaah in ques­tion : The evo­lu­tion of the ordered worlds as we see them is hint­ed at.” Any­one famil­iar with the present-day data knows that the nascent prop­er­ties in the ear­ly uni­verse are what makes up the con­tents of our uni­verse today, so we can look at the begin­ning of the uni­verse as the ear­li­est point of the earth­’s exis­tence as it over time evolved by the Will of Allah Sub­han Wa Ta’alaa ; the earth itself was, quite can­did­ly cre­at­ed from ele­men­tary cos­mic gas.

As I stat­ed in my response to FTM’s objec­tions ; the same way if I show my favorite pic­ture of my moth­er and I you could object and say I am nowhere to be seen and that she is hold­ing a baby ; the objec­tion is moot for that was me in the ini­tial stages of my life and I grew over time by the Grace of Allah Sub­han Wa Ta’alaa.

Now the démodé libel launched on Shab­bir’s hypoth­e­sis is sure­ly wor­thy of a response ; because it expos­es Answer­ing Islams absolute dense­ness to mod­ern cos­mol­o­gy. You see, to my absolute aston­ish­ment a one Andrew Var­go actu­al­ly tries to chal­lenge the Big Bang the­o­ry. Based upon the most prim­i­tive of quon­dam sci­en­tif­ic resources, he in his men­da­cious prat­tle gives us an abun­dance of rea­sons for sus­pect­ing that the Answer­ing Islam team are not dex­ter­ous enough to offer a seri­ous chal­lenge to the Din ul Haq. Var­go should not have ran his lips on such a enig­mat­ic sub­ject espe­cial­ly due to his severe igno­rance to the top­ic ; alas we can for­give the young­ster for he prob­a­bly just googled some­thing along the lines of how to dis­prove the most empir­i­cal­ly ver­i­fied mod­el in cos­mol­o­gy to date”.

Any­way ; he starts off by quot­ing Sir Fred Hoyle (who by the way, received an award for the most incor­rect pre­dic­tions in cos­mol­o­gy), Var­go then attempts to dis­cred­it the evi­dence for the Big Bang the­o­ry by sim­ply rehash­ing crit­i­cism that was pro­posed aeons ago and received suf­fi­cient answers through obser­va­tion­al averment.

Argu­ment One : CBR, For or Against the Stan­dard Model ?

Anon from as ear­ly as 1941 cos­mic back­ground radi­a­tion (CBR) was detect­ed although at that point in time not with intent even though such detec­tion was desider­a­tum. Now you see ; inter­stel­lar gas clouds in per­petu­um sub­sume atoms and mol­e­cules. The spec­tra of mol­e­cules are much more labyrinthine, owing to the fact that mol­e­cules as an enti­ty can cir­cum­volve and elec­trons surge and leap around, how­ev­er the impor­tant point is that mol­e­cules can be iden­ti­fied by their spec­tra. It was W.S Adams who first not­ed the metas­ta­sis of cyanogen with­in a mol­e­c­u­lar cloud sit­u­at­ed betwixt Zeta Ophi­uchus and the earth. From the appur­tenant data, A. Mckel­lar con­clud­ed that a sin­gle idio­syn­crat­ic line in the spec­trum of cyanogen had no pal­pa­ble expli­ca­tion unless of course the mol­e­cules were being agi­tat­ed by pho­tons with an esti­mat­ed tem­per­a­ture of approx­i­mate­ly 2.3 K.

Lat­er on in 1965 George Field, N.J Woolf and I.S Shklovsky came to real­ize the para­mount­cy of the afore­men­tioned obser­va­tion, and in 1993 I. Hawkin, D.M Mey­er and K.C Roth took spec­tra of cyanogen in diver­si­fied clouds from amidst the more prox­i­mate stars and the earth pur­po­sive­ly seek­ing out the CBR tit­il­la­tion. They found a tem­per­a­ture of 2.729 K which was con­gru­ous with the oth­er old­er mea­sure­ments ; how­ev­er COBE i.e the Cos­mic Back­ground Explor­er laid the argu­ment to rest by duteous­ly mea­sur­ing the tem­per­a­ture to be 2.725 K. From the begin­ning of the hypoth­e­sis of an expand­ing uni­verse the stan­dard big bang mod­el pre­dict­ed this exact back­ground radi­a­tion, which is just an exem­pli­fi­ca­tion of the hot dense era of our won­der­ful uni­vers­es boda­cious past. So Var­go’s first non­sen­si­cal claims on this mat­ter have now been denud­ed as the ad hoc asser­tions that they were and always will remain, we cog­nize the fact that the big bang mod­el pre­dict­ed the CBR with­in a math­e­mat­i­cal cer­tain­ty ; real­i­ty is. This because the Big Bang mod­el presages that ear­ly on the mat­ter den­si­ty was immense as was the tem­per­a­ture and over time the uni­verse expand­ed and cooled. To quote Pro­fes­sor John F. Haw­ley and Kather­ine A. Hol­comb, “…it tells us imme­di­ate­ly that the uni­verse was once very much hot­ter than it is today, which by itself is con­vinc­ing evi­dence for the hot big bang.“Pro­fes­sor John F. Haw­ley and Kather­ine A. Hol­comb, Foun­da­tions of Mod­ern Cos­mol­o­gy, Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press 2006 ; p. 412

Var­go con­tin­ues on apro­pos due to his impetuosity ;

    The prob­lem with using the CBR as proof of the Big Bang” is that CBR is uni­form through­out the Universe…

Is this guy kid­ding me ? That is half of the argu­ment for the Big Bang, the Robert­son-Walk­er met­ric describes a homo­ge­neous and isotrop­ic space time. The fact that the uni­verse is as the met­ric elu­ci­dates, was por­tend­ed in the Big Bang mod­el before it was con­firmed. Var­go goes on to argue that the mat­ter in the uni­verse is not uni­formed or as I under­stand him, even­ly dis­trib­uted. This is a pre­pos­ter­ous claim ; every­one knows that the uni­verse has even­ly dis­trib­uted mat­ter in large scales of super clus­ters. Fur­ther­more ; the mat­ter den­si­ty was also prog­nos­ti­cat­ed (keep­ing in mind that there is non-lumi­nous matter)and attest­ed, addi­tion­al­ly the neces­si­tat­ed pro­por­tion­ate val­ue of the crit­i­cal den­si­ty cor­re­sponds to around 10 hydro­gen atoms per cubic meter of space, thus the ver­i­ta­bly exist­ing mat­ter suc­cess­ful­ly ful­fill the needs of the stan­dard Big Bang mod­el hence the mat­ter in our uni­verse is pre­cise­ly bal­anced and uni­formed as pre­dict­ed by the stan­dard model.

To put it in a lay­man’s term for Var­go : mat­ter is uni­form­ly dis­trib­uted through­out the uni­verse as well as con­cen­trat­ed in some places to a much high­er extent than our galaxy. Var­go did not offer any alter­na­tive expla­na­tion for the CBR’s exis­tence, how­ev­er since I am kind guy I will do it for him Insha’Al­lah. The sur­ro­gat­ed the­o­ry is that the radi­a­tion comes from a back­ground of gaseous and stel­lar exu­da­tions. But now its time for the nail in Var­go’s argu­men­ta­tions emblem­at­ic cof­fin ; COBE also con­firmed that the radi­a­tion had to emanate from the uni­verse itself, due to the fideli­ty of the CBR to a black­body spec­trum”. Thus, the CBR has to be the radi­a­tion rem­nant of the big bang ; there is quite sim­ply no oth­er option to this fact and hence there is just no real alter­na­tive to the Big Bang.For a brief dis­cus­sion on quan­tum alter­na­tives and a cri­tique of the SEC mod­el please see my paper The Ulti­mate Ques­tions I could just leave it at that because the afore­men­tioned is undis­put­ed empir­i­cal evi­dence for the Big Bang mod­el. How­ev­er, because I do not want to make it easy for the mis­sion­ar­ies to cop out of this hilar­i­ous blun­der I will push onwards and address Var­go’s oth­er two argu­ments against the stan­dard mod­el of the uni­verse as taught in uni­ver­si­ties worldwide.

Argu­ment Two : The Amount of Heli­um With­in the Uni­verse, For or Against the Stan­dard Model ?

I find it to be phe­nom­e­nal how Var­go has failed to quote a book from after the year 1994 ; con­sid­er­ing how daedal our won­drous field of cos­mol­o­gy is and how fast the con­sen­sus changes, this must be not­ed as one of Var­go’s major fal­lac­i­es, i.e. fail­ing to keep up with cos­mo­log­i­cal advance­ment. Learn from expe­ri­ence, my friend.

Now he rel­e­gates us to a paper writ­ten by Alan Guth, how­ev­er it is clear that the paper he refers us to has absolute­ly noth­ing to do with the heli­um prob­lem. The very name of the paper, A Pos­si­ble Solu­tion to the Hori­zon and Flat­ness Prob­lem” clear­ly shows that the paper was on what some call the causal­i­ty rid­dle”; the lack of any nat­ur­al expla­na­tion for the uni­verse’s smooth­ness, albeit for the­ists this is no prob­lem, and the paper was also try­ing to tack­le the geo­met­ric idio­syn­crasy of the uni­verse once again a pseu­do-prob­lem for us theists.

Now by the 1950’s the amount of heli­um was explained, but grant­ed there was indeed an orig­i­nal gra­diose exi­gency demand­ing an expla­na­tion on the vast amount of heli­um with­in the uni­verse. Stars as every­one should know pro­g­en­er­ate heli­um, how­ev­er the Big Bang actu­al­ized most of the heli­um present in our uni­verse today and then the rest was cre­at­ed by stel­lar parox­ysm. Fur­ther­more heli­um has actu­al­ly gone a long way to poise the big bang mod­el, for the aggre­gat­ed quan­ti­ty of heli­um can be used so as to con­firm the amount of species of neu­tri­nos. The­o­ret­i­cal data from the big bang mod­el pre­dict­ed the exis­tence of three species of neu­tri­nos, mea­sure­ments of the amount of heli­um cou­pled with amaz­ing amounts of deu­teri­um as well as lithi­um assev­er­ate that there are three species of neu­tri­no’s ; so we now have two empir­i­cal pos­i­tive pred­i­ca­tions of the stan­dard model.

Argu­ment Three : The Red­shift, For or Against the Stan­dard Model ?

Allah Sub­hana Wa Ta’alaa says : Waalssamaa banay­na­ha bi-aydin wa-inna lam­oosioona, mean­ing, And it is We Who have con­struct­ed the heav­en with might, and ver­i­ly, it is We Who are steadi­ly expand­ing it.” (Surah Adh-Dhariy­at, Holy Ayaah 47)

It is patent­ly lucid that Var­go has not even an infin­i­tes­i­mal clue as to what a cos­mic red shift is let alone whether or not they affirm or negate the stan­dard Big Bang mod­el. Obser­va­tion­al evi­dence tes­ti­fies to the fact that the uni­verse is steadi­ly expand­ing, so if a cos­mic source is approach­ing an observ­er he/​she will see a blueshift”; that is when light waves are agglom­er­at­ed and are thus tou­sled to more exten­sive fre­quen­cies. Hence if the source is mov­ing away from the observ­er light waves shift to low­er fre­quen­cies thus result­ing in what we call a red­shift”. Edwin Hub­ble mea­sured the red­shift in the light from remote galax­ies ; his mea­sure­ments proved that the uni­verse is indeed enlarg­ing.Edwin Hub­ble, A Rela­tion between dis­tance and radi­al veloc­i­ty among extra-galac­tic neb­u­lae” Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences 15 (1929): pp. 168 – 73 Var­go preys on an error of Edwin Hub­ble that has since been rec­ti­fied in light of cos­mo­log­i­cal advancement.

Hub­ble inter­pret­ed the extra­galac­tic red shift in terms of the Doppler shift, how­ev­er, the red shift is caused by the rel­a­tivis­tic expan­sio of the uni­verse itself, but this was not under­stood at the time that Hub­ble and Huma­son were com­pil­ing their data..“Pro­fes­sor John F. Haw­ley and Kather­ine A. Hol­comb, Foun­da­tions of Mod­ern Cos­mol­o­gy, Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press 2006, p. 290 The mea­sure­ment prob­lems Var­go men­tions are due to the those who did the mea­sur­ing, to quote Chris­tian­i­ty’s most promi­nent philoso­pher Dr. William Lane Craig, “…the anom­alous red-shifts ; these have been around for a long time, and they con­tin­ue to be cleared up as bet­ter and bet­ter mea­sure­ments are made of the objects that have these shifts.”

Con­clu­sions

I gen­uine­ly hope you are read­ing this, Mr. Var­go, and I do not want you to be abashed by the afore­men­tioned ; cos­mol­o­gy is a won­der­ful field, alham­dulil­lah. How­ev­er, my friend, you must put in the hard yards. I sug­gest you pur­chase upgrad­ed text books and always make it a point to keep up with the lat­est cos­mo­log­i­cal data, Insha’Al­lah. Now bethink­ing on my neo­teric inter­pre­ta­tion of Surah al-Anbiyaa Holy Ayaah 30 the rest of Var­go’s crit­i­cism falls apart ; except a few last dash’s of aber­rant, sense­less and unadul­ter­at­ed false­hood. First of all Var­go com­plete­ly pre­var­i­cates the Islam­ic view of cre­ation ; allow me to out­line the account real quick Insha’Allah.

    1. Cre­ation of the uni­verse from noth­ing. (Surah al Anaam, Holy Ayaah 101)
    2. The heav­ens and the earth were mixed or blend­ed in the incep­tive con­di­tions of the uni­verse. This is after the uni­verse’s ini­tial instant of cre­ation (Surah al-Anbiyaa, Holy Ayaah 30)
    3. Fatq” the cleav­ing asun­der of the elec­tro­mag­net­ic and weak inter­ac­tion ; which then anni­hi­lat­ed all of the anti-mat­ter as well as most of the mat­ter, except a small rem­nant thus the first ele­ments came about. (Ibid.)
    4. The uni­verse remains noth­ing but vapor i.e gaseous ele­ments as the earth is cre­at­ed. (Surah Fussi­lat, Holy Ayaats 9 – 12)
    5. Stars are beau­ti­fied and the rest of the cos­mos con­tin­ue to change by the Will of Allah Sub­hana Wa Ta’alaa. (Surah al Imran, Holy Ayaah 109)

And yes stars can exist in the gaseous stage ; the Ara­bic word used for smoke in the Holy Ayaah is dukhan” which can mean smoke”, mist” or vapor”. Smoke in clas­si­cal seman­tics can mean fly­ing par­ti­cles as well as a mist or vapor accord­ing to the Mac­quar­ie dic­tio­nary. Mist can mean a cloud of par­ti­cles resem­bling a fog or a cloud like enti­ty, and vapor is just a sub­stance in the gaseous state. All of which can describe the uni­vers­es ini­tial con­di­tions after baryo­ge­n­e­sis, infla­tion (expo­nen­tial increase in R), the fun­da­men­tal par­ti­cles, and the cleav­ing asun­der of the elec­tro­mag­net­ic and weak inter­ac­tion. All stars are huge balls of gas, most­ly hydro­gen held togeth­er by grav­i­ty.“Ibid., p. 126

Keep­ing in mind that grav­i­ty is mere­ly a dynamism and is in fact the weak­est of the four fun­da­men­tal forces and it is car­ried by a pure­ly hypo­thet­i­cal mass­less boson the gravi­ton, which has not yet been detect­ed. Now the gas that makes up a star is held togeth­er by two com­pet­ing forces, keep­ing in mind that dukhan can be trans­lat­ed as vapor as dis­cussed before ; which is in turn mere­ly a sub­stance in a gaseous state. Stars can thus be count­ed in the uni­ver­sal stage that is described in Surah Fussi­lat Holy Ayaah 12 as stars are mere­ly gas held togeth­er by their hydro­sta­t­ic equilibrium.(Keeping in mind that the major­i­ty of the Galaxy is still filled with clouds of gas). Hence all of Var­go’s objec­tions with regards to the order of Cre­ation are silenced.

So we now con­front the pla­gia­rism hypoth­e­sis, Car­ri­er and Giron pro­posed sim­i­lar if not iden­ti­cal argu­ments indeed the tau­tol­ogy is rather frus­trat­ing. Any­way Var­go writes :

    The Hin­du Rig Veda says that the uni­verse was cre­at­ed when the gold­en cos­mic egg” was split.

The point is that in the cre­ation myths, none of the them explain that the heav­ens and the earth were mixed or blend­ed”; on the con­trary they assume that either there was a sol­id cos­mic egg (as Var­go points out) or that the the heav­ens and the earth where two sol­id objects that some­how got intertwined.

All of the myths con­tain necro­man­tic aspects from thau­matur­gic wind coil­ing like a mas­sive ser­pent ; to phys­i­cal beings breath­ing in space. The Holy Qur’an con­tains none of the afore­men­tioned flaws/​errors rather, Allah Sub­han Wa Ta’alaa explains that the heav­ens and the earth were once mixed or blend­ed ; and then split asunder.

Var­go needs to point out where the pre­sup­posed pla­gia­rism is with­in the Holy Qur’an and why it does not include the erro­neous aspects of the old­er cre­ation myths. Via Var­go’s flawed log­ic, when Dar­win pro­posed the the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion since the Greeks believed in an agnate the­o­ry of human ori­gins, he must have mere­ly been pla­gia­riz­ing from the Greeks who also pre­dict­ed that man evolved from a com­mon source. Need­less to say, Var­go’s asser­tion is ab absur­do. The ancients did indeed guess var­i­ous details with regards to nature that have been sub­stan­ti­at­ed, so if the Holy Qur’an men­tions a cor­rect phe­nom­e­na that was per­haps encom­passed in old­er cul­tures ; that is not grounds to claim that the Holy Qur’an is the accrue­ment of cul­tur­al borrowing”.

All in all, Var­go has made a bold claim yet pro­vid­ed noth­ing per­ti­nent to the fur­ther­ance of his the­o­ry ; alas, we see that Answer­ing Islam has no respect for schol­ar­ship nor the Truth.

And only God knows best.Endmark

Comments

7 responses to “Surah al-Anbiyaa:30 and the Mis­sion­ary Felix Culpa”

  1. Name * Avatar

    Bull­shit ! In 21:30
    Do the dis­be­liev­ers not real­ize that the heav­ens and earth were ˹once˺ one mass then We split them apart?1 And We cre­at­ed from water every liv­ing thing. Will they not then believe ?
    It only says it was one mass or one thing and that is sep­a­rat­ed and it does­n’t say why it sep­a­rt­ed and the ter­mi­nol­o­gy of one piece or one thing real­ly has no Sci­en­tif­ic appli­ca­tion and also it’s inac­cu­rate to say uni­verse exists in form of some­thing, rather it con­tains what makes up our uni­verse and evolved into our uni­verse and it’s so sim­ple to made things up like elec­tro­mag­net­ic force and tak­ing one inter­pre­ta­tion and stat­ing it is accu­rate is nonsense

  2. View er Avatar

    Bull­shit ! Clove then asun­der does­n’t mean elec­tro­mag­net­ic force or weak and it only means that allah sep­a­rt­ed what was joined (heav­ens) and it’s noth­ing like it was in that form or stars are in smoke form and there is no evi­dence that stars are in that form and stars are made of gaseous ele­ments like hydro­gen, heli­um and also o Sci­en­tists says that that gaseous ele­ments are in that form like some sort of stars.

  3. Patrick Maxwell Avatar
    Patrick Maxwell

    A good read…compelling and rich.

  4. Startucuus Avatar
    Startucuus

    Denis, I am amazed at your pres­ence at a lot of places on the web I’ve vis­it­ed. Nice to hear from you. Man, you have a good head on your shoul­ders. Your unique way of think­ing, your un-acci­den­tal sense of log­ic, your acute sense of find­ing where the action is.… How can such a Pack­age be a coin­ci­dence or an acci­dent of nature ?

    Apolo­gies but my inten­tion was not to praise or any­thing oth­er than that which I have con­clud­ed above.

  5. Denis Giron Avatar
    Denis Giron

    Greet­ings

    I am glad to see that Bis­mi­ka Allaahu­ma is pick­ing up Servi­dor’s won­der­ful­ly-writ­ten pieces. I just want to com­ment on one small portion…

    I looked at Var­go’s arti­cle, and he does not make any explic­it charge of pla­gia­rism, thus the last para­graph comes off as a bit of a straw man.

    Fur­ther­more, has it been demon­strat­ed that ratq nec­es­sar­i­ly means mixed/​blended” (as to be dis­tin­guished from inter­twined”?), and if so, mixed/​blended in what sense ? It seems to me that the only thing we can be cer­tain about is that the text is stat­ing that at one point the heav­ens and the earth were togeth­er, and then they were sep­a­rat­ed. That idea, as Var­go point­ed out, is not exact­ly a new idea, nor does it seem to be one which con­veys tremen­dous sci­en­tif­ic import.

    It is a bit unfor­tu­nate for a believ­er in a reli­gious text to demand that oth­ers show him alleged errors in the text (how does one do that to a suf­fi­cient degree?). It would be bet­ter to focus on the ques­tion of whether the essen­tial idea (that which we can boil the text down to with cer­tain­ty) is new, or con­tain­ing any­thing more detailed than what has appeared in pre­vi­ous cre­ation stories.

  6. Salman Abu Hamza Avatar
    Salman Abu Hamza

    Allahu AKbar
    Good article.
    Laa ila­ha ilal­lah muham­madu rassolullah

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