When Everything Was One Thing

Go back far enough and there is no sky.

No stars. No planets. No sun to go around. No dust floating in the dark, because there is no dark yet either, and no space for the dark to sit in. Everything that exists, every atom that would one day become an ocean or an elephant or the bones in your hand, is squeezed into one single thing.

Then it breaks open.

That is the Big Bang, and it is the standard scientific account of how the universe began. It is not a wild guess. Scientists worked it out from measurements, and about fifty years ago the work behind it earned a Nobel Prize. Before that, most people assumed the universe had simply always been there, sitting still, the way a room is there when you walk into it.

Now read this, from chapter 21, verse 30 of the Qur’an.

It asks the people who refuse to believe whether they do not see that the heavens and the earth were one joined mass, and that Allah then split them apart.

One joined mass. Split apart.

Fourteen hundred years before a telescope existed.

And that same verse ends with a second line we will come back to in a later chapter, because it says something about water that will make your eyebrows go up.

Then came the smoke

After the split, the early universe was not stars. Stars take ages. What existed first was an enormous hot cloud, glowing and turbulent, full of gas and tiny scattered particles of matter.

Chapter 41, verse 11 says that Allah turned to the heaven while it was dukhan, and told it and the earth to come, willingly or unwillingly, and both said they came willingly.

Dukhan.

Say it. It is the Arabic word for smoke. Not gas. Arabic has a perfectly good word for gas, and the Qur’an did not use it.

Why does that matter so much? Because gas and smoke are not the same. Gas is just gas. Smoke is hot gas with solid bits floating in it, which is exactly what that early cloud was. Hot gas, plus dust, plus particles.

If the verse had said gas, it would have been close. It said smoke, and smoke is closer still.

The universe is getting bigger, right now

Here is the fact that broke people’s brains in the last century.

In 1925 an astronomer called Edwin Hubble was measuring the light coming from distant galaxies. Light is a useful thing. It carries information about what it came from. And when Hubble looked, he found that the galaxies were all moving away. Away from us, away from each other, in every direction.

The universe is not a finished room. It is a balloon somebody is still blowing up.

Stephen Hawking, who spent his life thinking about this sort of thing, called the discovery of the expanding universe the greatest discovery of the century.

Chapter 51, verse 47 says that Allah built the heaven with power, and that He is musi’un.

That word, musi’un, comes from a root that means to make wide, to extend, to keep expanding. Some translations soften it into “we are expanding it” and some into “vastness”. Either way, the sense in the Arabic is of a thing being made wider, and not a thing already sitting at its final size.

Nobody on earth in the seventh century had any reason to say that. Every single person alive assumed the sky was fixed. It looks fixed. Go outside tonight and look at it. It absolutely looks fixed.

The stuff in between

One more, and this one is quieter.

Chapter 25, verse 59 mentions Allah creating the heavens and the earth and everything between them in six periods. People read that for centuries and thought, fine, that is a figure of speech. The space between stars is empty. Everybody knows that.

Except it is not empty.

Astronomers now know that the space between the stars has stuff in it. Thin clouds and long threads of matter that stretch across unbelievable distances. Much of it is plasma, which is a fourth state of matter beyond solid, liquid and gas. It is gas that has been heated so hard that its atoms come apart, leaving a soup of charged particles.

There are bridges of this material running through interstellar space. Not a vacuum at all. Something is out there between them.

Sit with this for a second

Three claims in a row.

Everything was joined, then it was split. The early sky was smoke. The heavens are being made wider.

Those are three of the biggest things modern cosmology knows, and every one of them was written down in a place where the most advanced instrument available was a pair of eyes and a clear desert night.

The man delivering these words could not read. He could not write his own name. He had never been to a school, because there was no school to go to.

Where exactly did he get this?

Keep that question in your pocket. It is going to get heavier.