Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Allah alone is the Creator and Sustainer

Allah alone is the Creator and Sustainer
If man ponders only over the extremities of the enormous, ever-expanding universe created by Allah, the visible sky and all that is underneath it, that has been discovered by man through scientific breakthroughs, he will definitely conclude that the entire universe is not the handwork of any human being or any other creation but of Allah and Allah alone. If he ponders for a while over the beauty of the universe, the ever-so-successful system and it’s functioning which can mind-boggle anybody, his heart and conscience would surely be convinced of the fact that Allah alone is infusing life into the system functioning as a unified whole. Time and again, he would be astonished by the uniqueness, miraculous powers and superb craftsmanship of the Creator such that the irrational man-created twin concepts of Shirk and Kufr along with other illogical imagination shall vanish into thin air. Even in a latent state of mind, he would never even dream of including anybody else with Allah.
The vast expanse of universe
In the twenty - first century, the discoveries made by man because of scientific advancements and the mind-boggling information that has been gathered by him, presents an amazing picture, which makes the task of believing in the unity of Allah, His Omniscience and Omnipotence, a much simpler task than ever before.
First of all, we should know that the Earth, the world and the universe are three different terminology and each of them have a distinct connotation. ‘Earth’ is the planet on which we live. ‘World’ denotes all those things under the lowermost sky, which are visible to us. It also includes the sun, the moon, the billion of stars and galaxies as well as the myriad creations of Allah while ‘Universe’ refers to an agglomeration of all the creations of Allah, as a whole, which is inclusive of the seven skies, the earth, the heaven and hell and Allah’s empyrean among others.
The vast expense of the universe, the estimated of which has been put at no less than 50 billion years by the scientists, can be gauged from the fact that the earth, which is home of about 6 billion human beings and over 10 million species of flora and fauna, is comparable to a negligible speck of dust in the world itself, leave alone the universe. Let’s have a glimpse of the speck of dust – our earth that completes a revolution around the sun covering an orbital distance of about 190 miles. Its statistics are as follows; At a distance of nearly 150 million kilometres from the sun, rotating at about 1000 miles/hour around it’s axis, the surface area of the earth is of a magnitude of 510 million square kilometres. About 71 per cent of the earth, that is 360 million square kilometres of the earth’s surface is watery, which suggests that merely 29 per cent of the earth comprises of land. Startlingly enough, nearly 6 billion people and millions of species of animals are packed on just 10 per cent of the land which again points to the fact that the remaining 90 percent of the area consists of forests, deserts and mountains. There are five huge oceans on this planet. The description of one of them, the Pacific Ocean is itself worth mentioning. It’s total area is spread over 1652 million square kilometres, even more than the total land area. The average depth of the ocean is approximately 17 thousand feet, that is to say, a huge edifice of 17 hundred storeys can be made to stand on it to touch the sea level. The whale, a mammal that lives in these oceans itself is about 150 feet long or a 15 storeyed building. Such is the width of its mouth that 20 to 25 people can stand altogether easily. Millions of such creatures are fund in a single ocean only. A fair estimate of the number of such fishes is an ocean can be had from a fish - catching competition that took place in Scotland some years back, in which over a billion fishes were caught altogether. One can guess the worth of gold and other minerals lying on the ocean bed from the fact that over 50-lakh rupees worth of gold is available in the particles of sand in just one square mile of oceanic bed. It is worth mentioning that water is preset over 320 million square kilometers in the oceans. These oceans have close to 7 lakh islands. Greenland, just one of these numerous islands has a total area of 2.175 million square kilometers, that is over two-thirds of India can comfortably fit into this piece of land. This was a short description of our huge Earth. Now we shall see as to how small this is. The Sun, which is the nucleus of our solar system, is so enormous that about 1.3 million planets of the size of the Earth can get accommodated in it whereas the Sun itself is much smaller as compared to other Suns, such that over 1 thousand such Suns equivalent to 1.3 billion planets of Earth’s dimensions can fit into it. Till now, scientists have captured photographs of about 30 billions stars with the help of telescopes and sophisticated spacecrafts. It is noteworthy to mention that at one given time, man can see at the most 5 thousand stars and meteors with his naked eyes. Using an average telescope, one can see more than 2.2 million stars whereas our vision gets increased manifold using the American Hubble telescope by which we can see several billion stars in the open space.
Our solar system, which comprises the Sun, the Earth and other heavenly bodies, has a planet called Pluto, which is nearly 586 billion kilometers away from the Earth. There are a number of such solar system in the universe, the collection of which is known as Galaxy. Its vast expanse can be estimated from the fact that light, approximately 3 lakh kilometers per second takes nearly one lakh years to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. The average distance of this galaxy is nearly 800 billion kilometers. So far, about five hundred million galaxies have been discovered in the universe. Moreover, each of the galaxies has nearly a billion stars like our Sun. Another way of estimating the enormous expanse of our universe could be from the distance of the Earth from the Sun, that is 150 million kilometres, from where light takes about 8 minutes to reach the Earth. The Sun itself revolves at a speed of 6 lakh kilometres per hour. Also, there are certain other stars in our proximity whose light takes over 15 million years to reach us. The famous American expert of astronomy and mathematics, Einstein who had a German origin and died in 1955, revealed his thoughts about the expanse of the world discovered until 50 years back in the following words: The world is so gargantuan that if a place is built which has the speed of light, that in 3 lakh kilometer per second, it would take a billion years to circumambulate around the world. Even this was merely guesswork. The reality could be much more enormous than this revelation.
If the question keeps propping up with you as to how was the distance of these planets and stars known without man travelling to them, it should be mentioned that such powerful astronomical telescopes have been built which can measure millions of kilometres with tremendous accuracy. To cite an example, using these telescopes man could find out the exact distance from the Moon to the Earth, that is 364 thousand kilometres. Also, it was discovered that its diameter is 3475 kilometres wide; that is to say, it is 50 times smaller than the Earth. For the first time, when man landed on the moon on 16 July 1969 by the Apollo 11 spacecraft sent by NASA (National Aeronautics & Space Administration), the claims of measuring accurate distance between the two bodies were found perfectly true – not even a kilometre mismatching!

1 comment:

Joel said...

Regulus is coming into view, and the stars of Orion are fading into the West. Sirius shines brightly, and Aldabaran fades away.