The Qur'an and Science

Every age tests a holy book with whatever that age is proud of. Ours is proud of science. These ten chapters take the test seriously, walking from the first split of the heavens down to the pattern on your own fingertips, and setting what we have discovered beside what was written fourteen hundred years ago.

Simple enough for a reader of ten, and not watered down for an adult. Start from Chapter 1.Subscribe to this series (RSS).

1. Chapter 1

   A Book That Had to Survive Time

   Every age tests holy books with whatever that age is proud of. Magic tested Musa. Poetry tested the Arabs. Our age is proud of science, so science is the test now. Here is how the test works, and one rule we will follow the whole way through.

2. Chapter 2

   When Everything Was One Thing

   The universe started as one single mass and got torn apart. Then it was smoke. Then it began stretching, and it has not stopped stretching since. Three enormous discoveries, and three verses that were sitting there the whole time waiting for us to catch up.

3. Chapter 3

   The Lamp and the Borrowed Light

   For most of history, people thought the moon glowed by itself and the sun sat perfectly still. The Qur'an uses a different word for the sun's light than for the moon's, says both of them are swimming along their own paths, and mentions where the sun is eventually headed.

4. Chapter 4

   A Round Earth and a Roof That Guards It

   Night does not switch into day, it slides into it, and that only happens on a ball. The Qur'an goes further and uses a word for the earth's shape that means the egg of an ostrich. Then there is the sky above you, which is doing a job you have never thanked it for.

5. Chapter 5

   Where Rain Comes From

   Nobody worked out the water cycle properly until about 1580, and the clever people before that got it badly wrong. Meanwhile the Qur'an had already laid out the whole loop, step by step, including the job the wind does before a single drop falls.

6. Chapter 6

   Mountains With Roots, Seas With Walls

   A mountain is mostly the part you cannot see, like a tent peg driven into the ground. And where two seas meet they stay stubbornly separate, with an invisible wall between them. Two hidden structures, both named in the Qur'an long before anyone could check.

7. Chapter 7

   Everything Alive Came From Water

   Say it in a desert, where water is the rarest thing there is: every living creature was made from water. Then a second claim that nobody could have checked for another thousand years, that plants come in male and female, and so does almost everything else.

8. Chapter 8

   The Bee, the Ant, and the Spider

   A whole chapter of the Qur'an is named after the bee and another after the ant. The grammar says the worker bees are female, the ants are shown talking to each other, and the spider gets a description that turns out to be true in two different ways.

9. Chapter 9

   The Story Written Inside You

   How a human being is built, stage by stage, in words nobody could have chosen without a microscope. Plus the reason your fingertips get a special mention, why your skin is the organ that feels pain, and where the milk in your glass actually comes from.

10. Chapter 10

    A Book of Signs

    At the end of the talk a woman stood up and asked the sharpest question of the night. If a thousand verses are about science, then what is the Qur'an actually for? The answer is the reason this whole book exists.