Does Koran contain the Big Bang Model as the Origin of the Universe? part 2
FFI Contributing Editor Dr Radhasyam Brahmachari
Creation by God and Allah:
In the first part of this article, we have observed a few controversies regarding the Koranic description of the Universe and the Big Bang (BB) model of its origin. Firstly, the Koran says that Allah has created the earth and the seven heavens from nothingness. but the Big Bang model speculates an initial fire-ball, containing the entire matter of the Universe and the creation began with an explosion of that fire-ball. secondly, according to BB model, the explosion of the initial fire-ball took place 14 to 16 billion years ago, but Koranic Allah and Biblical God have created the heaven and earth only a few thousand years ago.
So, the creation ex nihilo by Allah and the Christian God and the BB theory of creation are mutually exclusive. The devout Muslim scholars may argue that, Allah is the creator and none else and He accumulated entire matter of the Universe for creating the initial fireball and then initiated its explosion. but they will fail miserably to find evidence in the Koran – they will not find even a single verse in the Koran that says that Allah had collected the entire matter of the Universe to produce a fireball. The argument also applies for the Biblical God. Christian pundits would also fail to produce a single verse in the Bible that says that God collected the entire matter of the Universe for producing the initial fireball which He then exploded. then comes the question of antiquity of the explosion of the fireball.
James Ussher, (4 January 1581 – 21 March 1656) was the Archbishop of Ireland between1625–56. He was a prolific scholar, most famously published a chronology, based on Biblical facts, that purported to establish the time and date of the creation of the heaven and earth by God. In fact, the Holy Bible clearly says that from the first man Adam to Abraham, there were 19 generation [Exo 5:1–32,11:10–32] and from Abraham to Jesus 42 generations [Mat 1:1–17]. so, Jesus was the 61st descendant of Adam. His calculations, based on these Biblical data, Ussher concluded that God finished the creation on Sunday, 23 October, 4004 BC, according to the Julian calendar. so, the Christian theology says that God created this heaven and earth 6015 years ago from today.
The Islamic scriptures say that Allah started his creation on a Thursday and finished His creation on the next Friday. on that day, after the Asar (Evening) prayer, He created Adam with clay. and Prophet Muhammad was the 90th Descendant of Adam [1]. there are several incoherent descriptions of creation of heavens and the earth by Allah. one of them says that at first Allah created water and spread soil over the water. but the land mass He thus created became very shaky and unstable. so, He created mountains as pegs to fix the land. some versions say that He created the mountains in the heaven and threw them on the earth. so, the mountains, according to Islam, are made of extra-terrestrial matter.
According to another version, Allah created water first and at the center of water surface appeared a large bubble. then Allah created the land mass taking the bubble as the center. Today’s Kaaba in Mecca stands exactly at the spot where the bubble appeared. so, Kaaba is at the center of the flat earth. Allah did the incomprehensive task of placing land on water to expose His extraordinary miraculous power or qudrah. then He created a solid roof, called the sky, over the earth and successfully fixed it without any pillar, also using His extraordinary miraculous power or qudrah. but He will destroy this solid roof on the day of last judgment (qiyamah) and the debris will fall upon the earth.
After that, Allah created the sun and the moon compelled them to rise in the east and set in the west. but on the day of qiyamah, He will raise the sun in the west. Just above the solid roof (sky), Allah created seven heavens and the center of the heavens lie just above the Kaaba in Mecca. at that central point of the heavens, Allah erected a divine Kaaba. so, if someone drops a plumbing chord from the divine Kaaba, its other end would touch the mundane Kaaba at Mecca. If anyone starts climbing that plumbing chord, he will definitely reach the divine Kaaba, but it will take 200 years. Allah took two days to create all these things and for the rest six days He created means for human subsistence. [2]
We hope that the above description is more than sufficient to comprehend how scientific is the story of Islamic creation. From the above narration, it becomes evident that the seven heavens, created by Allah, above the solid roof sky, is nothing but a seven storey housing complex created by Allah to accommodate the Muslims, who will reside in that housing complex forever after qiyamah. In his article “Destination: Allah’s brothel”, this author has given a detailed description of Allah’s paradise and from that narrations it becomes evident that, Allah’s paradise is no more than a first class, five star super luxury brothel. but, it is really unfortunate that, a group of deceptive Western scientists, due to their greed for acquiring sweet gold of the Arab world, equated this Islamic heaven or paradise to the Universe and thus discovering modern science in the Koran. It is a world renowned paralytic scientist, who has done this mischief and presently he has deserted Christianity and embraced Islam.
However, if we consider 30 years to be the age difference between two generations, one finds that Allah created the heaven and earth only 4141 years ago. but it has been mentioned in the previous article that the Big Bang occurred 14 to 16 billion years ago. This shows that Allah is extremely lazy. He started the creating heaven and earth after 16 billion years; He initiated the creation through Big Bang. as a matter of fact, the pastoral and illiterate people of the place, where Islam and Christianity originated, were unable to contemplate, count and write mathematical figures larger than thousands. that is the reason, Muhammad could estimate that the number of his followers would be, at best, 70,000 and hence the Islamic scriptures say that, Prophet Muhammad would be the first man to enter the Allah’s paradise, with 70,000 followers.
Why these people so crazy to discover science in the Koran?
In the modern era of developed science and technology, a few Muslims who have the opportunity to study modern science, have been able to comprehend that their religious theology is not only shoddy, but ridiculous as well. so, they have frantically started to find any clue in their holy book that could match with modern science. but if they themselves propagate such scientific discoveries in the Koran, that would not cut much ice. so, they have engaged famous scientists of the West to propagate the lies of discovering science in the Koran, in exchange of fabulous money.
So, they engaged a famous embryologist to discover human embryology in the Koran. In the entire Koran, Allah says that He creates a human baby from a clot of blood or “alaq”. but a translator, according to his knowledge and experience, wrote “a leach like thing” within bracket, after the word “alaq”. The scientist immediately grabbed this opportunity and equated that comment “a leach like thing” to the human embryo. He could also find a few other verses in the Koran and treacherously twisting those verses could develop a full scale theory of human embryology in the Koran. Similarly, another scientist, by twisting or deducting the first as well as the second derivative of a verse in Koran, discovered mentioning the speed of light in the Koran. By adopting similar method, another scientist discovered mentioning the black holes in the Koran. at last, these despicable scientists claim to discover the Big Bang model of the creation of the Universe. but these scientists do not care, how dangerous could be the consequence of propagating such lies.
It is well known that most of the Muslims gather in the mosques during the midday prayer on Fridays, called Jumma prayer. after the prayer, they listen to the “khutba” or the religious lecture of the clerics or imams. When the imams tell these blockheads that such and such scientists have discovered such and such scientific theories in the Koran, it adds fuel to their supremacist notion of Islam. there is no doubt that this supremacist attitude would emboldens and encourages them for carrying out jihadi or terrorist activities. there is no doubt that the day is coming when these scientists, who are propagating such lies in lieu of money, would have to feel the heat of these jihadi attacks.
The risk of molding religious theology for accommodating science:
Common people, who are not intimately connected with science, generally believe that science can do everything and explain everything. but they will be amazed to know that modern science is an outcome of the efforts of the scientists to manage somehow the observed experimental facts. a few examples would make the point clear. The real nature of light is still unknown to the scientists. sometimes they treat light as a stream of electromagnetic waves and sometimes they treat it as a stream of tiny corpuscles of energy called photons, and they accomplish their tasks by considering it either a stream of waves or a stream of corpuscles as and when they feel it necessary.
So, according to John Dewy, the American philosopher, the traditional notion of truth is nothing but instrumentalism and there is nothing like truth that is static and final, perfect and eternal. He derived this view of truth from science which, according to him, has no fundamental basis and said that, scientists generally take a proposition to be true if it is found to work. If it does not work, they reject it outright and start looking for a new truth. one finds this view of John Dewy absolutely correct.
When Newton succeeded to explain the planetary motion with the help of his theory of gravitation, scientists readily took it as a fundamental truth of nature, even though it failed to explain the complex motion (or perihelion) of Mercury. at the beginning of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein, by his General Theory of Relativity, could show that nobody attracts any other body and when a body moves with constant acceleration, it seems that it is being attracted by another body, and with the help of his new theory he could succeed to explain the planetary motion including the said complex motion of Mercury, scientists at once rejected Newton’s theory and accepted Einstein’s theory as a fundamental truth of nature.
Up to the end of nineteenth century, Newton’s laws of motion found to be absolutely true and the scientists believed that Newton’s Laws of Motion and Maxwell’s Electro-magnetic field equations were sufficient to explain any physical phenomenon. but later on, it was found that, although they were capable of explaining crude facts, failed miserably to explain microscopic phenomena like structure of the atom, its interaction with energy and so on. In 1920s and 1930s, Heisenberg with his Matrix Mechanics and Shrodinger with his Wave Mechanics could attain partial success in explaining atomic phenomena but at the expense of the notion of causality, which had so far been considered the essence of science.
About fifty years ago, scientists used to believe that an atomic nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons, commonly known as hadrons, and they also believed that these hadrons were elementary particles. but to satisfy some theoretical considerations, M. Gellemann and G. Zweig in 1964, postulated that hadrons are made up of still smaller particles called quarks. They also predicted the existence of six types of quarks in nature which were said to be a thousand times smaller than the hadrons. but nobody has yet been able to isolate a quark. Today, some of the nuclear scientists apprehend that quarks are made up of still smaller particles because some theoretical investigations lead to such a possibility. To explain some nuclear phenomena scientists are in need of a very small particle called neutrino. but the real nature of this particle is awfully perplexing to them as a neutrino must have to possess angular momentum but no mass.
So, there lies a great risk to mold one’s religious books to accommodate science. For example, Muslim and some other scientists are trying to twist the so called divine words of Allah to accommodate the Big Bang model of the origin of the Universe. but there is a good chance that the scientists, in future, reject the Big Bang model and accept another model instead. In such a position, the religious theologians would have to remold their divine books to suit that new truth.
Problems of the Big Bang model:
The cosmological theory of Big Bang discussed above have some serious shortcomings. as mentioned above, the Big Bang model says that this Universe began as an intensely hot and extremely dense mass that began to inflate very rapidly. but the infinitely high values to which the density and temperature of the primordial fire-ball are speculated to have reached are simply incomprehensible. The proponents of the model have no plausible reply to the questions like: What was the physical state of the primordial fire-ball just before the expansion had started? Why and how the entire mass of the Universe could concentrate into a single fire-ball? how was the matter created before the Universe was born? and finally, what triggered the explosion at a particular instant of time?
These difficulties arising out of the initial singularity or Big Bang are collectively known as the ‘singularity problem’. It has been mentioned earlier that the existing physical laws are believed to be operative only when the Universe was 10-43 seconds old.
Though the field equations of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (GTR) are consistent with an expanding Universe, they forbid any local motion and hence local heating. Moreover, according to this theory the temperature of the Universe should have been as low as 0 degree Kelvin (or -273o Celsius) for all time. so the question arises, how did the initial Universe become so intensely hot? even if we accept the initial Universe to be very hot, the ordinary laws of physics predict that the high pressure resulting out of high temperature would have been subsided by the tremendous gravitational pull. so, instead of expansion, the initial Universe should have undergone contraction. then why did it start expanding? For these reasons, a section of cosmologists consider the era of cosmic inflation entirely speculative.
Both Special and General Theory of Relativity state that no causal agent can move faster than light. so, one can imagine an edge or horizon of the Universe from beyond which no light or any other particle has yet been able to reach our eyes. This horizon distance is also going on increasing with the passage of time as the Universe is expanding. According to the Big Bang model, this horizon distance is simply the age of the Universe multiplied by the speed of light. The portion of the Universe lying within the horizon distance is called the Observable Universe, since only this portion of the Universe can be studied by our astronomers.
The cosmologists have divided this observable universe into 100,000 equal parts of more or less equal volume with radii varying from 100 to 1000 million light years. It is really surprising that almost all such volumes so far examined have been found to contain almost equal number of galaxies and hence almost equal amount of matter. so it can be said that the distribution of matter in the Universe is perfectly isotropic and homogenous except having some small-scale fluctuations. This means that the Universe does not possess any privileged position or direction. This isotropic distribution of matter is further evidenced by the isotropy of the CMB discovered by Penzias and Wilson as mentioned earlier.
Such an isotropic Universe has been predicted by a few other scientists, e.g. Milne, Bondi, Gold, Hoyle and Lemaire. In fact, the isotropy of distribution of matter in the Universe is believed to be of the order of 1 part in 105. It is really inconceivable that such a precisely isotropic Universe has originated from an initial singularity like Big Bang. It is really surprising how the different portions of the Universe are so isotropic and similar even when they are moving away from each other at high speeds. The problem is generally known as the ‘horizon problem’.
In 1922, Alexandre Friedmann has shown that, three types of solutions are possible if Einstein’s field equations are applied to the Universe and these are related to three possibilities of the curvature of space, positive, zero and nagative. furthermore, the said curvature of space is related to the average density of the Universe. If this average density exceeds a critical value, the curvature is positive and the resulting Universe is spherical. If the average density is equal to the critical valu, the Universe is flat and if the average density is less than the critical density, the resulting Universe is hyperbolic.
A spherical universe must have a finite volume and hence such a universe is known as a ‘closed universe’, while the volume of a flat or hyperbolic universe may become infinite and hence such a universe is called an ‘open universe’. It should be mentioned here that the Friedmann model assumes a universe that is isotropic and homogenous. Calculations show that a spherical universe should attain a maximum volume, then begin to shrink and ultimately collapse. It obviously means that if our Universe is spherical, the Big Bang should be followed by a Big Crunch, and if it is hyperbolic, it would continue to expand forever. a flat universe, on the other hand, is supposed to expand to a certain limit and then become stationary. Calculations also show that our Universe is extraordinarily flat.
On the other hand, had our Universe been hyperbolic, within 10 to 20 billion years after Big Bang, it would have expanded to such an enormous volume that it would have been more or less empty. If it was a spherical one, it would already have started to shrink and hence the galaxies would have come closer. so, the question arises – Why is our Universe so perfectly flat. The problem discussed above is called the ‘flatness problem’.
During the discussion of the horizon problem, we have seen that this Universe is perfectly isotropic and homogenous. but according to Sir James Jeans, such an isotropic universe would be highly unstable due to gravitational attraction. Any chance concentration of matter would attract surrounding matter and the process would continue forever and this is known as Jeans’ gravitational instability. so, according to Jeans’ instability, our Universe should contain much more larger clumping of matter than it is found today. This problem, pointed out by Peebles and Yu in 1970, is known as the ‘smoothness problem’.
A magnet has two poles, the north pole and the south pole, and in ordinary cases these two poles cannot be separated. An isolated north pole or south pole is called a molopole. The calculations predicts that quite a large number of monopoles were produced when the Universe was 10-35 seconds old and the subsequent process of expansion is supposed to have preserved that monopole population. so the abundance of monopoles would have been vastly large in the Universe than what is observed today. The problem is known as the ‘monopole problem’. It should also be mentioned here that, along with the above mentioned problems, the standard Big Bang model is also unable to explain the ubiquity of dark matter in the Universe.
Despite all the above mentioned failures, the hot Big Bang model has however achieved four outstanding successes. Firstly, its prediction of lighter elements produced during the cosmological nucleosynthesis agrees with observations. secondly, the CMB is naturally explained as a relic of the initial hot thermal phase. Thirdly, it obviously accounts for the expansion of the Universe and, finally, it provides a framework within which one can understand the formation of the galaxies and other cosmic structures.
Epilogue:
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST), conceived by the astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer of Princeton University in 1945, was put into space in 1990 and it started sending photographs of distant stars and galaxies in 1993. these pictures are at least ten times sharper than those obtained by telescopes stationed on earth. Most importantly, these pictures have served a death blow to the Big Bang model. Firstly, the HST has discovered some stars which are believed to be much older than the Big Bang. secondly, it has sent photographs of vast cosmic clouds extending over several hundred times bigger than our solar system and are believed to be made up of light neutral atoms and molecules.
The existence of these cosmic clouds prove that the ‘era of nucleosysthesis’ and the ‘era of recombination’ are still prevalent in those parts of the cosmos. but according to the Big Bang model, the Universe has undergone these phases billions of years ago, just after the primordial explosion. Surprisingly enough, these photographs provide evidence in favour of the continuous creation of matter predicted by the Steady State model. more importantly, these pictures of large cosmic clouds support Hindu conception of creation as described by the Samkhya School of Indian philosophy.
References:
[1] Hadis Sharif,(a compilation of Hadiths by Rafik Ullah) in Bengali, Haraf Prakasani, Kolkata. The author has also provided the names of the 89 ancestors of Muhammad. The author says that he has collected the list of ancestors of Muhammad from Sirat-Rasulullah by Ibn Ishaq.
[2] Koran: (7.55), (7.171), (10.3), (11.7), (13.2), (31.10), (32.4), (50.38), (57.4) Tafseer Hosieni (as quoted by Girish Chandra sen in his translation of the Koran in Bengali..
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