By Ali Abubakar Sadiq
The entire history of the Human Race is a testimony of oral and documented ignorance. God had been telling us this for 14 centuries
Q31:27 "And if all the trees on earth were pens and the oceans were ink with seven oceans behind it to add to its supply, yet would not the words of God be exhausted"
Let me clarify what this verse implies: in the bygone ages humans thought a child is formed in the womb as a miniature adult until about the 2nd half of the 1800s. We thought the earth is flat (some still do), the spontaneous emergence of microbes on rotten meat, the Sun moves while earth is stationary, that the eclipse phenomena is the anger manifestation of the gods or as a portent of calamities or heralding the birth or death of great peoples and many more.
This metaphorical verse is telling us that knowledge, as far as human beings are concerned is a continual process, incremental and sometimes even relative, it is only with God that it is absolute. Present day scientists had been trying hard to establish the possibility of an extraterrestrial life. But up to date all they were able to is show the possibility of conditions to harbor life. In the recent past, beginning in February of 2007, NASA Scientist has discovered a planet orbiting a star about 190,000 billion kilometers away deep in space. The star emits light that is about 1/4 of our sun's intensity, which enables the planet temperature range between 0-40 degrees. At this temperature water could exist in liquid form on the planet and theoretically life like our own could find the place habitable. By 2023, thanks to newer technologies like the Kepler Space Telescope, we have now discovered more than 5,500 exoplanets orbiting other star systems. In 2015, an exoplanet 452b, was discovered which, due to its similarity with our own planet is even dubbed “Earth 2.0” because conditions there were so similar to our own and the possibility to habor life is the best we have so far discovered.
This universe, that up to date with all our technological advancement, could not determine its limit is certainly too vast for us alone. Our solar system, which is only a speck in the order of our own galaxy, is several billion kilometers in diameter and the observable universe we know is roughly 92 billion light-years in diameter containing 2 Trillion galaxies. All things considered we are just occupying something less than drop in the ocean, a speck of dust and we must not be alone. God in the Qur'an said we are not alone in this vast universe in support of the fifth Century BC Greek philosopher Anaxagoras who introduces the idea of Panspermia (that life pervades the universe). The Drake equation (the probabilistic argument in finding communicative extraterrestrial intelligence) which led to the emergence of the field of Astrobiology itself, for half a century now, is still propelling scientist towards the quest in finding intelligent life in the Universe. But as our quest, scientifically continues, the All-Knowing declares authoritatively
Q42:29 "And among his signs is the creation of heavens and earth and the living creatures that he has scattered through them"
And closer in our home planet he also said
Q15:27"And the jinn’s we created before man with fire of a scorching wind"
Who are they? The jinn’s throughout history of human civilization are believed to be supernatural spiritual beings. All cultures have a variation of their own belief in the jinns. In the above verse God said they were created out of fire, we may well ask which kind of fire is he talking about? In surah Rahman he gave the answer
Q55:14 " From fire that is free of smoke"
Which kind of fire is free of smoke? Certainly not the ordinary earthy fire we know of. The only fire that fit this description is the solar fire because it is free of smoke and its heat and other properties are transported by radiation (the scorching wind). The Sun is composed of various things of variable characteristics ranging from light, heat, ultraviolet, infrared, X-rays etc. All of these exhibit unique qualities which if not properly understood could lead people attribute these qualities as supernatural or spiritual, let me clarify with examples.
The electromagnetic radiation energy is the fastest moving thing we know because light travel at 186,000 miles per second, the heat could cook any material as temperature at the surface of the sun begin from 5000 kelvin. The X-rays can penetrate almost all solid surfaces and the Infrared can penetrate dark objects and light them up and the Ultraviolet’s can penetrate materials and influence chemical reactions. Looking very carefully one could realize that all the qualities exhibited by the solar properties are echoes of what people associated with the jinns like the ability to move in great speed, transforming things they came into contact with ability to change into other things, cause disease or possessed bodies etc.
Science today is yet to comprehend many things not only because it is beyond its ken but because more data and research are needed. There are conventional and unconventional approach to many things, take for instance the infrared eye glass used by the military which could enable one to see clearly in pitch darkness, today this is very conventional but suppose one could be transported back in time, say 200 years ago, and shown to people of that time. What will they consider it? A technological achievement or miraculous feat? Today we consider whether forecast as part of our daily news, would people of the 18 century think so?
The influence of the Sun on our lives is beyond our present knowledge, consider the Aura or Halo of electromagnetic waves that surrounds our individual bodies, their fluctuations is mainly determined by the ejected energetic particles from the Sun. The Halo/Aura in turn determines so much of our personality and psychology, as there is natural cause of interaction between two body aura's which could be positive, negative or neutral. That is why sometimes you automatically like or dislike someone or something without any apparent reason because your aura's repel each other just like the magnet. One of the newest sciences, parapsychology, is now working hard towards the understanding of things that are not really empirical like clairvoyance, telepathy, pre-cognition, out of body experience etc. The fields of parapsychology and paranormal are slowly creeping up into orthodox science despite the hurdles thrown at them.
In conclusion we should understand that the Universe, our world and even our own bodies are controlled by powerful forces of seen and unseen forces or we can say science and spirituality. And there are several spiritual realities that our present knowledge in science is yet to catch up with. Science is still an infant and as it grows, must tread with caution, the reason why we see great strides such as Newtons gravitational laws being overtaken by Einstein’s Relativity. These are two of the greatest scientific laws that changed us and our planet but they are not holistic still.
For now, the uncertainty principle in the quantum world had, despite rubbishing the reductionist stance, supported the existence of consciousness and will into the scientific realm of how matter is structured in the universe. Quantum entanglement (a process where when two particles are entangled and separated by long distance, no matter the distance they are found to be correlated) shows further the relationship between objects and reality through the popular EPR Paradox which the great Genius, Einstein himself considers the entanglement behavior impossible as it violated the “Local Realism”.
A few decades later, in 1972 Stuart Freedman at UC Berkeley gave the scientific world the first proof of entanglement with his experiment that exhibits the behavior of entanglement of two particles separated by 10 feet apart. Most recently, in 2023 a team of researchers from University of Ottawa and Sapienza University of Rome have demonstrated a novel technique that allows the visualization of entangled particles. This quantum reality now appears ahead of Einstein Relativity which set the speed of light which also set the limit for transfer of information, as it now shows the interaction between entangled particles works faster than the speed of light. Meaning, if two particles are entangled and placed at the opposite ends of the universe, a change in one will instantly reflect on the other despite their distance apart.
Folks, lets keep in mind that we are not only atoms and molecules but spiritual beings AND semi-ignorant. The reason why God asked the prophet
Q20:115 “…Pray (thus) Lord! Increase me in knowledge”
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