Where Rain Comes From

Ask a seven year old where rain comes from and you will get the right answer in about four seconds. Water goes up from the sea, makes clouds, clouds get heavy, water comes down. Easy.

It was not always easy. It was one of the hardest puzzles humans ever had.

For centuries the smartest people alive could not figure out where rivers got their water. Aristotle, who was nobody’s fool, taught that there were vast caverns underground where water somehow formed, and that rivers were fed by those caves. Others believed seawater got sucked inland through secret underground channels, had the salt squeezed out of it somewhere along the way, and popped up as springs. Descartes still had a version of that idea going in the 1600s.

The first person in Europe to describe the water cycle more or less correctly was a French potter named Bernard Palissy, around 1580. A potter. Not an astronomer or a priest. A man who spent his life working with clay and water and paid attention.

That is how recent it is. Four hundred and fifty years, give or take.

The loop, laid out

Now here is the Qur’an, and the striking thing is not one verse. It is how many there are, and how they fit together into a complete circuit.

The water goes up. Chapter 86, verse 11 swears by the sky that returns. Whatever goes up from the earth is sent back down again. That is the whole cycle in four words.

The wind does something first. Chapter 15, verse 22 says Allah sends the winds as lawaqih. That word is a plural, and it comes from a root that means to fertilise, to make pregnant. Winds that fertilise.

Stop on that one. It sounds poetic. It is actually mechanical.

A cloud does not form just because there is water vapour in the air. The vapour needs something to condense onto. Tiny particles, dust, salt crystals lifted off the sea, specks of this and that, all carried up by the wind. Each speck becomes the seed of a droplet. Without them you can have plenty of moisture and no rain at all. The wind carries the seeds up, and the cloud is what grows.

Wind that fertilises. That is exactly what is happening.

The clouds are driven and stacked. Chapter 24, verse 43 describes Allah driving the clouds along, then joining them together, then piling them into a heap, and then you see the rain come out of the middle of it.

Driven. Joined. Heaped. Then rain.

That is the life story of a thunderstorm cloud in the right order. Small clouds get pushed along by the wind, they merge, the merged mass builds upward into a tower, and the rain falls from inside the stack. Watch a storm build on a summer afternoon and you can tick the stages off as they happen.

The same verse then talks about mountains in the sky carrying hail. If you have ever looked out of an aeroplane window at a big cloud system from above, you know precisely why. They look like mountains. Great white ranges with peaks and valleys and shadowed sides. From the ground a cloud is a smudge. From above it is a landscape.

The clouds get broken up. Chapter 30, verse 48 says Allah sends the winds, which raise the clouds, and He spreads them in the sky as He wills and breaks them into fragments, and then the rain comes out from inside them.

Raise, spread, fragment, release. Again, in order.

The water lands and is stored. Chapter 23, verse 18 says Allah sends down water from the sky in due measure and settles it in the earth, and He is able to take it away.

In due measure. Not a random amount. A quantity.

That turns out to be one of the more astonishing facts about the planet. The total amount of water circulating through the earth’s system stays essentially constant. The same water, round and round, for billions of years. Some of what you drank this morning has been inside a dinosaur. It really has.

And “settles it in the earth” is groundwater, which is the part nobody could see and everybody argued about. Rain soaks down through soil and rock and collects in aquifers, and that is what your well is drawing from.

Then things grow. Chapter 39, verse 21 draws the whole line in a single sentence. Water sent down from the sky, running into springs in the earth, then crops of different colours coming up, then those crops ripening and turning yellow and crumbling away.

Down, in, up, out, gone. Full circle, in one verse.

Rain on dead ground

There is one more image the Qur’an keeps coming back to, and it is worth sitting with.

Chapter 30, verse 24 speaks of Allah sending water from the sky and bringing the earth back to life after it was dead.

If you have never seen a desert after rain, find a video of it tonight. A place that has been bare cracked dirt for months, nothing living, nothing moving. Then it rains. Within days the whole valley turns green, and then it turns into a carpet of flowers, colours you would not believe were hiding in that dust.

The seeds were there the whole time. Waiting. Dry and hard and looking completely finished.

The Qur’an uses that picture on purpose, and it usually follows it with the same line. In exactly this way, the dead will be raised.

You were not convinced by an argument. You were shown a desert.