I am sorry, give me a minute.
…

You see, I easily lose my head. So, I need to use medications to balance my mood. Oh my God! That was supposed to be a secret, and it just slipped from my mouth to an admirer. Look, I suspect that once you learn my most-hidden aspects, my reputation with you will be ruined, and you won’t love me anymore. And it really distresses me to have failed your high expectations of an equation like me.

Nevertheless, it is such a heavy burden to suppress one side of mine while constantly showing the other. Yes, being an equation, I am well balanced and very clear about my views. I am one of those lucky theories that have a sound mathematical foundation, and this is why even the psychologists could not suspect a grain of problem due to my childhood. But I am telling you: I am bipolar….

Well, wait a minute! Who are you, and why would I share my secret with you? Go away with your own business, and leave me alone. I mean, I don’t want to disrespect you, but this is my private life, you know! …

No, no, wait, wait… Give me a second… Let me take my medication!

I know it sounds ridiculous if an equation complains of a disorder. How can you be an equation if you have a disorder, and how can you be in disorder if you are an equation? Well believe it or not, that’s exactly what I have been suffering from for such a long time. I am both orderly and disorderly; just like light is both wave and particle at the same time….

Hey, why are you looking at me like that? I told you to leave me alone. It was you who insisted on waiting and learning my secret. I don’t care if your designs are ruined or whatever. Actually, I’m the one who should be blamed. Why did I trust a person whom I met just a few minutes ago? I am like a fish that is eager to eat the worm on the hook. Such an idiot, I am…

Hello? Are you still there? I think I am losing my head again. Where are my pills?

Look, this is not easy for me to do, because in my routine life, people are obsessed with my equation aspect. And, they are passing this obsession from generation to generation. Every time I meet a young brain, my dream to finally meet an unconditioned mind fails. I am always too late to reach the fresh and eager minds. People always manage to find them before me, and instruct them to treat me as a well-established equation. No matter how much I want to show otherwise, they refuse to see my imperfect side, even if the experiments hit them in the face.

Why do they keep doing it? Much like a missionary, they are converting people into the belief of the Bernoulli Equation. I am telling you guys: I am bipolar, and I have imperfections, too!

What am I doing?! You are not going to believe me anyway. I am telling you my deepest secret, and making myself vulnerable as can be, but I still can’t wake you from a dream. You don’t want to wake up anyway; why would you? Do you have any other theory to believe in? Do you have another equation with which to orient yourself in an ocean of unknowns? Go on with your sleep, have nice dreams…

Unfortunately, I don’t have the same luxury as you. My continual tumbling between the two aspects of my reality never allows me to dream… Sometimes, I feel so energetic, so elated. I feel part of everything in the universe, and fall into an ecstasy by realizing that I contain everything in me. And the flow of time stops; we all become one and at peace with each other. No need to rush anywhere, no need to do anything… Just be…

But then my other side kicks in. I feel depressed under the burden of my duties and deadlines. I find myself in an ever faster pace of life, where there is no time to “just be”. There is always an action being commanded; there is always a motivation behind exchanges with others. The universe appears to be made of distinct individuals, like broken pieces of glass. Each is headed to a target of its own, unaware of any union. When life is filled with such a merciless momentum, what is more meaningful than getting rid of my life altogether?

Then, in that gloom, as my dizziness fades, my energetic side starts shining. By virtue of having been created in the same story, I focus on myself to read the universe. I realize that I carry the traits of anything and everything else around me. Once again, I start breathing the life that is gushing forth from me.

As I lose my conscience by getting high in life, I get stuck with the fact that losing my conscience defeats the purpose of being whole. You cannot hold onto the entities whose existence you fail to recognize. I start criticizing myself for disrespecting those around me. I blame myself for being such an addict and a loser; the shame of creation…

You see, there is no end to my ups and downs. As a remedy to these continuous head losses, I am using medications, but they have side effects. I am constantly growing fat, and losing my beauty. I hope one day, someone is going to be inspired with another equation that can take over my duties. Then I can retire from this bipolar life, and be mentioned in the scientific stories as a respectable grandparent…

The Bernoulli Equation given in its simplest form contains a pressure term (P) and a velocity term (1/2 (pV)^2), the sum of which is constant along a streamline:

P+1/2 pV^2=P_0

Thus, pressure and velocity work inversely with each other. As one increases, the other decreases.

The Bernoulli Equation can be derived in two independent ways. First, one can start with the conservation of energy (1st law of thermodynamics), and then follow some assumptions to end up with the Bernoulli Equation. Energy has a scale but no direction, and can be transformed from one form to another. Therefore, everything in the universe can essentially be converted into each other, just like the pressure and velocity terms in the Bernoulli Equation.

The second way to reach the Bernoulli Equation is based on the momentum equation (Newton’s second law). Again using few assumptions, one can achieve the nice and simple Bernoulli Equation. Unlike energy, momentum has both scale and direction. Any changes to this directionality require a forceful interaction between two objects.

Having its base on two fundamental laws of physics, hence reflecting both energy and momentum, makes the Bernoulli Equation one of the strongest and most beautiful equations of science, but not perfect!

The underlying theory of the Bernoulli Equation requires that the density (p) of the fluid be constant – in other words, incompressible. Therefore, the Bernoulli Equation fails to accurately explain the flow of gases at high speeds, which involves density changes. Similarly, the effects of viscosity are neglected in the foundations of the Bernoulli Equation. This means that the variation of pressure and velocity near a solid object cannot be explained by the Bernoulli Equation.

As a result of these imperfections, the Bernoulli Equation describes a fluid as a pile of metal sheets, and explains a flow as the sliding and bending of these metal sheets around each other. Clearly, this is not what a fluid is and not what happens in a real flow. Therefore, predictions of the Bernoulli Equation are inherently wrong, especially when there are sharp turns or obstructions in the way of the fluid.

In order to compensate for some of these deficiencies, a concept known as head loss (hloss) is introduced. Head loss is experimentally measured and then artificially added to the Bernoulli Equation, which then becomes:

P+1/2 pV^2+pgh_(loss,turns)+pgh_(loss,obstructions)+pgh_(loss,wall shear)=P_0

The final result is an equation that is useful but repulsively oversized, and it is certainly not well-established in theory.

We give it life and We bring forth from it grain, so from it they eat.(36.33)

There are a number of points in this verse which can bear explication from a scientific view-point.

1-Use of the expression dead ‘earth’ (rather than dead ‘soil’), indicates that the soil of the whole earth is implied.

2- One meaning of ‘for them is a sign’ is Divine portent. The occurrence of the phrase at the outset of the verse alerts us to the fact that the verse will encourage us to understand a very important family of natural phenomena.

3-We are informed that in its initial state, the earth was devoid of life. In this way, the lifelines of the earth when it was first created is expressed as a geological fact.

4-We learn that the soil, which appears dead is actually alive. Even this one observation affirms the miracle of wisdom contained in the verse. For it is only a hundred years since it was discovered that there are organisms in the soil, while it is scarcely forty years since the discovery that 80% of soil consists of bacteria, and thus is a community of living organisms.

5-‘We quickened it and brought forth from it habba.’ According to the latter part of the verse, habba signifies seeds of a vegetable nature or, specifically in this context, grain. However, habba in general denotes small, uniform particles, and we shall discuss the verse’s inner meaning also from this angle.

6-The verse declares that life is transferred via the soil to plants and thence to us, a chain of events singularly important from the standpoint of biochemistry. While the verse uses the word habba in the general sense, particularly mentioned is what is eaten from it in the form of vegetable food.

In order to comprehend this verse in all its subtleties, one needs first an up-dated grasp of the concepts of life and vitality as scientists now understand them. For the concept of vitality has changed greatly in recent years, and come closer to its inner truth. The biological knowledge of the past has been left far behind.

Life is a mathematical programme encoded in a giant chemical molecule. The Qur’an indicated this reality, discovered only in recent years, fourteen centuries ago in the statement (80.19): We created him from a drop of liquid; we shaped and programmed him.

Allah first created bacteria which fix nitrogen in the soil. In chemical terms, these bacteria are laboratories of ‘synthesizers’; that is, they take nitrogen from the air and prepare compounds with negative valences. They reduce nitrogen by a method that we still cannot fathom, and convert it into a form in which it can combine with hydrogen. They require water and rain for this purpose–which is why we observe that life springs from the soil when it rains.

A second type of bacteria in the soil is what might be called the ‘analyzers’ after their particular role in the Divine programme. They break down whatever falls to the ground and so prepare the way for the ‘synthesizers’. Excluding water, the greatest part of any quantity of soil is found to be composed of microbes.

In botanic terms, soil is regarded as a totally living structure, and so it has been since the origin of life on earth, which is to say, in a modern scientific idiom, a truth that is directly expressed in the Qur’an.

It is in order to sow confusion in people’s minds that atheists distort the established facts about the emergence of various organisms on this planet. They maintain that all organisms have evolved in a gradual process (with some abrupt leaps) from a single cell, randomly becoming the various plant and animal species we see around us or discover in fossil records. This is the so-called ‘theory of evolution’. But the secret of ‘the Living’, giving life to the soil, as also to plants forming from seeds after the soil has come to life, is diametrically opposed to this theory. What is expressed in the Qur’an can only be the truth while any notion opposing it can only be falsehood.

The theory of evolution was propounded toward the end of the 19th century. As I have just explained, organisms were thought at that time to embody different chemical structures, the smaller organisms having a simpler chemical composition, while a more complex organism had a more complex composition. The mathematical programme within cells was wholly unknown.

An evolution of the most primitive structures could, of course, be conceived but as soon as we wish to understand organisms, distinct living entities, however simple, the assumptions of evolution simply break down. For, as we now know, the differences in the emergence of different organisms resides in the mathematical programming to which they operate. The perfection of these very diverse programmes is not open to question; nor is it possible to speak of evolution among them, as one being somehow ‘later’ than another. Compare, for example, a bile-producing cell in the body and a nitrogen-fixing bacterium of simpler countenance in the soil. Which of them performs the more difficult task? It is not hard to decide the question: chemically, binding nitrogen to hydrogen is undoubtedly the harder task. Again, bacteria are thought to be the most developed sorts of cell, not those which carry and enable human intelligence. While DDT, the notorious insecticide, was wreaking havoc with the environment, the common house-fly, a somewhat despised and lowly creature, developed such a prescription in the fluid of its nerve cells that it proved impossible to exterminate another fly thereafter using DDT. A neuron in the human brain could not produce this prescription and preventative if it were to labor at the task for a thousand years.

Well, now, which cell is the later development? Which is the primitive form and which the more evolved? Of course, man is the most perfect of organisms, but he cannot do anything outside of the programme within which all his life is contained, and, as the Qur’an says, can be defeated even by a fly.

Thus, once the concept of life is examined in depth, it can easily be seen that the theory of evolution is a human fiction. Fish with luminous organs were swimming at the bottom of the ocean millions of years ago, just as, at that time, bats equipped with radar were flying in the dark, whereas we are only now discovering these facts and starting to put them to use.

A most important question concerning life in modern biology is how skills are handed down. Grant that an organism inherits its entire constitution from its parents, how does it acquire the special skills it needs in order to continue its life? How does it learn, for example how to build nests or defend itself against other creatures? If a living organism may be likened to a mathematical computer programme, how is the learnt part of that programme transferred from generation to generation without slip-ups or distortions?

In seeking an answer to this question, biology has accepted that a certain programme called the genetic code is passed on. This explanation is for coarse, external similarities between cells, but not for embryonic cells or cells of the bone marrow.

Allah has said (41:47): Without divine science no woman conceives, no fruit separates from its rind. In scientific idiom, the meaning of this verse is: Every cell is given its mathematical programme in a continuous fashion.

Taking all the verses quoted above together, we begin to understand that vitality has two district aspects: the molecules that form the organism are its physical components, while the mathematical programme imposed on this structure is akin to the programming of a computer. This programme is, in a sense the individual organism’s individual destiny of fate. Ya Sin, verse 12 tells us that each creature is recorded In the Guarded Tablet in terms of its most minutely individual qualities (36.12) This declaration is an invariant law for life in general. Every living entity–a weed or a flower cell or a gall bladder cell will each perform what encoded is (inscribed) in its cellular computer, within the compass of Divine Omniscience, by the Divine Will.

The principle of life’s continuation is stated in the second part of the verse we are trying to interpret. After initiating life in the soil, and introducing to it organic materials indispensable for life, Allah created plants from it which in turn carry the basic structural materials necessary for other organisms.

The ‘grain’ mentioned in the verse can refer to the seeds of the plant but also to the constituents of a complete cell. All the organic nutrients for sustaining the life of organisms exist in grain. This fact was not accepted in earlier times: it was not known or accepted that, grain contains carbohydrates, protein, fats, vitamins and minerals all at the same time; on the contrary, it was thought that food derived from wheat and similar plants could not provide sufficient nutrition. But the habba (grain) actually represents all of the basic materials necessary for life.

That fact underlines another, namely that plant and animal cells have common building blocks. The difference lies in their programme or destines. One of the most important inner meanings of the verse is that the soil vitalized by Allah also serves as an incubator for organisms. This secret is imparted especially in the second part of the verse.

A fertilized egg develops in three basic ways: 1. beneath the earth (all plants); 2. inside an egg shell (most animals); or 3. in the mother’s womb (mammals).

From the scientific point of view, all three kinds of development serve the same purpose of instilling life into the organism. The fertilized egg needs a period of incubation and development in order to form the new organism. Biologically, this process is one in which the cells of the new organism form. The seed needs protection during this period, and must draw particular chemicals and ions (as yet unidentified) from its environment. In this way, it will be born into life as programmed. In this verse, Allah has emphasized that it is He who has given this characteristic to the soil. Taking only this property of the soil as an example, the vivification of grain is demonstrated.

Actually, this feature of the soil also provides an important insight into the nature of Judgement Day. When the command for resurrection is issued on the Day of Judgement– and this, too, is a mathematical programme–the secret of the verse will be revealed once again, and the dead will be restored to life in that instant.

The enlivening of the soil by Allah is no ordinary event, but a most profound wonder of biology; what is more extraordinary is the way that all different sorts of fruits and vegetables are presented to us from the same soil

This verse may also be regarded as bearing in two respects on the wisdom of Adam’s creation from soil. The Qur’an declares that Adam was created from soil with the texture of mud. We shall investigate that verse in detail in the future. In the meantime, the important thing to note is that Allah does give to the soil something from the secret of His Divine Name, the Living. It can be clearly seen from the expression comprising the two sentences of the verse that Allah has bestowed both life and vitality on the soil, and has made it the vehicle for propagation of other life forms (the secret of bringing forth grain).

Since verse 32 of the same chapter tells of the resurrection on Judgement Day, the verse we are considering points to a connection between the resurrection at the Judgement and the secret of life in the soil.

We have learned many things about soil biology in recent years. I would like to summarize this information also from the standpoint of the resurrection.

As mentioned earlier, all the preconditions necessary for the formation of an organism from a seed are present in soil. That is, the soil conveys a fertilized organism to life, just like the mother’s womb. Both the fertilized egg and the seed are quite similar in that they both represent a genetic code ready to reproduce. This genetic code is the life and character programme of the organism to be formed. (These genetic codes are a millionth of one centimeter in size–if, for curiosity’s sake, you were able to amass the genetic codes of all the human beings who have ever lived, they would not fill a drinking glass.)

It should not be doubted that, had Allah willed, He would have developed the human seed in the soil as we sell. Indeed, when Allah declares in the verse that the way in which We quicken the dead earth is a sign, He enables an understanding of an issue that science is hardly beginning to catch up with. The verse stresses how deeply the resurrections promised at the Judgement conforms with the logic of biology. The scientific conclusions to be drawn from the biological facts given in the verse may be summarized in three points:

1-The enlivening of the soil by Allah is no ordinary event, but a most profound wonder of biology. The chain of happenings we call life stems from the secret of the Living in the soil.

2-The Day of Judgement is also closely related to the secret of the Living. Whoever doubts the Judgement will find that his doubts are baseless if he contemplates the wisdom of Allah’s bestowing life on the soil together with the secret of living.

3-Life is, first and foremost, a preordained mathematical programme. The division of organisms into ‘primitive’ or ‘developed’ is based on quite arbitrary judgements. Every organism is the representative of a perfect programme. For this, as well as for other reasons, the theory of evolution should be regarded as fundamentally flawed, if not radically false.

All aspects of this life are a rehearsal for the afterlife and every creature is engaged in action to this end. In every struggle order is evident; in every achievement compassion is present. It is not possible that this effusion of compassion should go unnoticed.

Clouds hover above our heads on wings of compassion, from the centre of which rain comes down to our aid. Lightning and thunder bring us good tidings of rain with an uproar from the secret domain of compassion. The whole universe with every particle of its being ceaselessly sings the praises of the All-Compassionate. The whole of creation extols compassion all together with voices peculiar to each.

Consider the worm; it is in much need of compassion being under foot, but itself displays compassion. Affectionate soil enfolds it, in turn it deposits thousands of eggs in each handful of the earth. The soil through this operation is aerated, swells, and reaches a state propitious to the sowing of seeds. While the soil is a means of compassion for worms, worms are a mercy for the soil. Words fail us to describe such careless ones who burn grass and roots to obtain manure. Poor man! He is unaware of being merciless to both soil and worms. Consider the bee approaching flowers, or the silkworm burying itself in its cocoon! What difficulties do they not encounter to take part in the symphony of compassion. Is it possible for us not to notice the pains those creatures suffer in order to provide man honey and silk?

That is not all. Have you ever considered how heroic the chicken is that allows its head to be bitten off by a dog in order to save its young, and how praiseworthy the wolf is which, forgetting about its own hunger, offers its young the food it has found?

Everything speaks of compassion and promises compassions, because of this the universe can be considered a symphony of compassion. All kinds of voices proclaim compassion so that it is impossible not to be aware of it, and impossible not to feel the wide mercy encircling everything.

How unfortunate are there souls who do not perceive this.

Man has a responsibility to show compassion to all living beings as a requirement of being human. The more he displays compassion, the more exalted he becomes, while the more he resorts to wrongdoing, oppression and cruelty, the more he is disgraced and humiliated, becoming a shame to humanity.

We hear from the Prophet of Truth that a prostitute went to Paradise because she gave water out of compassion to a poor dog dying of thirst, whilst another woman was condemned to the torments of Hell because she left a cat to die of hunger.

Mercy begets mercy. If one is compassionate on earth, then many good tidings come from heaven.

Having perceived this secret, our ancestors founded a great many homes of compassion everywhere including foundations for protecting and feeding animals. A man of compassion was so deeply touched by a bird with broken legs, and a stork with damaged wings that he established a sanctuary for injured birds; this kind of behaviour was entirely usual with Ottoman Turks.

We ought to be as compassionate to human beings as our ancestors were to animals. Alas! Just as we have not been compassionate to ourselves, so too, we have ruined the next generation by showing complete indifference and pitilessness to the earth. We have actually caused the deterioration of the environment, in which it is ever more difficult to live.

We should point out, however, that abuse of the feeling of compassion can be harmful or even more harmful than being devoid of compassion altogether.

Oxygen and hydrogen, when mixed in the proper ratio form one of the most vital of substances. On the other hand, when this ratio changes, each element resumes its original combustible identity. Likewise, it is of great importance to apportion the amount of compassion and to know who deserves it. ‘Compassion for a wolf sharpens its appetite, and not being content with what it receives, it demands even more.’ Compassion for a rebel makes him much more aggressive, encouraging him to offend against others. It is not fitting to have compassion for the one who takes pleasure in poisoning like a snake; compassion for such a one means leaving the administration of the world to cobras.

Compassion for a bloodstained, bloodthirsty one is tyranny of the most terrible kind to all the oppressed and wronged people. Such an attitude is like being neglectful of the rights of lambs out of compassion for the wolves; it causes the whole of creation to sigh and moan, however much it might please the wolves.