Signs in creation: reading the verses beside the science

The Qur’an keeps asking us to look. At the camel, and how it was made. At the sky, and how it was raised. At the mountains, and how they were set firm. At the earth, and how it was spread out (Qur’an 88:17–20). These are not trick questions. They are invitations to notice what God has made, and to let the noticing turn into gratitude.

Today we can look further than any generation before us, with telescopes, microscopes and radar. This post reads a handful of verses about creation beside what science has established about the same things: water and life, the widening heaven, the mountains, the honeybee, and the date palm. It is just as clear about what the science does not show, and it ends with why Awwab deliberately avoids “scientific miracle” claims.

How to read a sign

The Arabic word āyah means both a verse of the Qur’an and a sign in the world. The Qur’an puts the two side by side on purpose:

The next verse describes these people: they remember God standing, sitting and lying down, and they reflect on creation and say, “Our Lord, You did not create this in vain.” The aim of looking is that last sentence. The Qur’an calls itself guidance (Qur’an 2:2), not a textbook of physics, and its signs point beyond themselves.

Science is a different kind of knowledge. It is careful, testable and always open to revision; a good theory today may be refined or replaced tomorrow. So throughout this post, the verse comes first, the classical reading is given honestly, and the science stands beside it as a reflection, never as a proof the verse needs.

Water and every living thing

The second half of the verse is one of the most quietly accurate sentences you can say about biology. NASA’s astrobiologists describe water as one of the essential requirements for all life as we know it on Earth. Inside us, water is the most abundant molecule in our cells, making up around 70 percent or more of a cell’s mass, the medium in which the chemistry of life takes place (Cooper, The Cell). No living thing we know of is independent of it.

The first half needs more care. Classical commentators gave more than one reading of the heavens and the earth being “closed” and then “split”. One, reported from Ibn ʿAbbās, is that they were once joined and then separated. Another, also reported from early authorities, is that the sky was closed and gave no rain, and the earth was closed and grew nothing, until God opened the one with rain and the other with plants, which fits the verse’s turn to water. Ibn Kathīr records both. Many modern readers hear an echo of the Big Bang, the scientific picture of a universe that began hot and dense about 13.8 billion years ago (Planck Collaboration, 2020). That echo is real enough to reflect on, but the verse doesn’t describe the physics, and we shouldn’t pretend it does.

The widening heaven

The key word is mūsiʿūn, from a root that means width, vastness and capacity. It can be read as “We are the ones who make it vast” or “who keep widening it”, and it can just as properly be read as “We are vast in power” or “We give abundantly”. Many classical scholars took it in those senses of ability and generosity. The wording carries several meanings at once, and an honest reading keeps all of them.

In 1929 Edwin Hubble showed that distant galaxies are moving away from us, faster the further away they are (Hubble, 1929), the first strong observational evidence that the universe is expanding. In 1998 and 1999 two teams studying distant exploding stars found that this expansion is speeding up (Riess and colleagues, 1998; Perlmutter and colleagues, 1999), work recognised with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. When a believer reads “and We are surely making it vast” after learning this, the resonance is moving. It is still a resonance. The verse invites awe at the scale of what God built; it isn’t a cosmology paper, and it doesn’t need to be.

The verse comes first. The science stands beside it, as a reflection, never as a proof the verse needs.

Mountains set firm

The Qur’an asks, “Have We not made the earth a resting place, and the mountains as pegs?” (Qur’an 78:6–7), and says the mountains were set firmly on the earth so that it would not sway with people (Qur’an 16:15). A peg is mostly hidden: a small part shows, and the rest holds from below.

Geology has its own version of that picture. In 1855 the astronomer George Airy explained a puzzle in surveying measurements by proposing that great mountain ranges are supported by deep “roots” of lighter crust, floating in the denser rock beneath, much as an iceberg floats with most of its bulk below the water (Airy, 1855). This balance, called isostasy, is now a basic idea in earth science: large ranges sit on crust that is far thicker than average.

Here is the honest limit. You will often read that mountains “stop earthquakes”. They don’t. Mountain ranges are raised by the same slow collisions of the earth’s plates that cause earthquakes, so we don’t repeat that claim. The image of pegs is a fitting one; the rest is overreach.

The honeybee

A whole sūrah, an-Naḥl, is named after the bee, and two of its verses describe her life:

Several details sit beautifully beside what entomologists know.

• The workers are female. In a honeybee colony, the bees that build the comb, care for the young and fly out to forage are all female workers (USDA). The verbs addressed to the bee in these verses are feminine in form. Arabic grammar can explain that by the collective noun alone, so it isn’t proof of anything, but it is a lovely fit.
• Ways made easy. A forager that finds good flowers returns and performs a “waggle dance” that tells her sisters the direction and distance of the food, a discovery for which Karl von Frisch shared the 1973 Nobel Prize. Tracking bees by radar later confirmed that recruits fly straight towards the place the dance described (Riley and colleagues, 2005).
• From their bellies, in different colours. Bees carry nectar home in a honey stomach, and inside the hive they pass it on, add enzymes and evaporate its water until it becomes honey (Seeley, 1995). Its colour, taste and make-up vary with the flowers the nectar came from (da Silva and colleagues, 2016).

And “healing for people”? There is real evidence, and it has limits. A Cochrane review found that honey probably relieves children’s cough symptoms better than no treatment or a placebo, while making little difference compared with one common cough medicine (Oduwole and colleagues, 2018). Another found that honey appears to heal partial-thickness burns faster than some conventional dressings, but judged most of the evidence low in quality (Jull and colleagues, 2015). Honey is not a cure for everything, and it must never be given to babies under 12 months old, because of the risk of infant botulism (NHS).

The Prophet ﷺ once told a man whose brother had a stomach complaint to give him honey. The man came back more than once to say it hadn’t helped, and the Prophet ﷺ answered that God had spoken the truth and his brother’s stomach was the one at fault; he gave him honey again, and he recovered (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5684, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2217). Scholars read this as a lesson in trust and persistence, not as a medical protocol, and it doesn’t replace seeing a doctor.

The date palm and the fertilising winds

The Qur’an says, “And We send the winds to fertilise” (Qur’an 15:22). Ibn Kathīr explained the word as winds that make the clouds heavy with rain and make the trees bud and bear fruit. Botanists today know that many plants, from grasses to a great number of trees, rely on the wind to carry their pollen (Ackerman, 2000).

The date palm is a special case. It has separate male and female trees (Chao and Krueger, 2007), and growers have long carried pollen from male flowers to female ones by hand, because relying on the wind alone gives a poorer harvest (FAO). The people of Madinah were doing exactly this when the Prophet ﷺ passed by. He remarked that he didn’t think it helped, so they stopped, and that year the harvest was poor. When they told him, he said, “You know better the affairs of your world” (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2363). In another narration he explained: when he commands something of the religion, take it; when he speaks from his own opinion, he is only human (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2362).

That short report is one of the clearest lessons on this whole subject. Revelation guides us in faith and worship; how to pollinate a palm is learned by observation and experience. The Prophet ﷺ himself drew the line, and he did it with humility.

What science can and can’t show

Science is very good at telling us how things work: how fast galaxies recede, how a bee tells her sisters where the flowers are. It is not designed to tell us why there is a universe at all, or who is behind it, or what we owe in return. Those are the questions the Qur’an asks. God says He will show people His signs on the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth (Qur’an 41:53). A sign can deepen faith that is already looking. It was never meant to be a laboratory result that forces belief.

Why Awwab avoids “miracle” overclaims

Popular videos often go further than this post does, and say a verse “predicted” a discovery. We don’t, for four reasons.

• Honesty is commanded. The Qur’an forbids following what we have no knowledge of (Qur’an 17:36). Saying a verse “proves” a theory claims more than we know.
• Science changes. If faith is tied to today’s theory, it is left exposed when the theory is revised. The verses don’t need that risk.
• Weak claims damage trust. When an informed reader finds one overclaim, they stop trusting the rest, including what is true.
• It misplaces the Qur’an’s purpose. The Qur’an is guidance. Its signs are there to bring people back to God, not to win debates.

So Awwab’s Knowledge game and Guidance Cards leave out claims such as Qur’anic embryology presented as scientific proof, which is academically contested (Bigliardi, 2017), the idea that mountains prevent earthquakes, or that the “two seas” of 55:19–20 never mix. They also leave out numerology. The full method is in Authentic by default, and the real numbers of revelation are in Numbers in the Qur’an and Sunnah. What remains is still more than enough to fill a lifetime of looking.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Qur’an references open the verse on quran.com and hadith references open the narration on sunnah.com, where you can read the full text. Narrations in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim are accepted as authentic by the scholars of hadith; for other collections the grading is given beside the reference.

1. Qur’an 88:17–20: look at the camel, the sky, the mountains and the earth.
2. Qur’an 3:190–191: signs in creation for people of understanding.
3. Qur’an 2:2: the Book as guidance.
4. Qur’an 21:30: the heavens and the earth parted, and every living thing made from water.
5. Qur’an 51:47: the heaven built with strength, and made vast.
6. Qur’an 78:6–7 and 16:15: the mountains as pegs, set firm so the earth does not sway.
7. Qur’an 16:68–69: the bee, and the drink of different colours from their bellies.
8. Qur’an 15:22: the fertilising winds.
9. Qur’an 41:53 and 17:36: signs on the horizons and within; not following what we have no knowledge of.
10. Qur’an 55:19–20: the two seas and the barrier between them.
11. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5684 and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2217: honey for the man with a stomach complaint.
12. Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2362 and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2363: the date palms: “you know better the affairs of your world”.
13. Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm, on 21:30 and 15:22.
14. NASA Science, Why is water so important for life as we know it?
15. Cooper G.M. (2000). The Cell: A Molecular Approach, 2nd ed., “The Molecular Composition of Cells”, NCBI Bookshelf.
16. Planck Collaboration (2020). Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters. Astronomy & Astrophysics.
17. Hubble E. (1929). A relation between distance and radial velocity among extra-galactic nebulae. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
18. Riess A.G. et al. (1998). Observational evidence from supernovae for an accelerating universe and a cosmological constant. The Astronomical Journal.
19. Perlmutter S. et al. (1999). Measurements of Ω and Λ from 42 high-redshift supernovae. The Astrophysical Journal.
20. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011, the accelerating expansion of the universe.
21. Airy G.B. (1855). On the computation of the effect of the attraction of mountain-masses, as disturbing the apparent astronomical latitude of stations in geodetic surveys. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.
22. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Isostasy
23. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Pollinator Week fact sheet, colony make-up: the workers are all female.
24. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1973, Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen.
25. Riley J.R., Greggers U., Smith A.D. et al. (2005). The flight paths of honeybees recruited by the waggle dance. Nature.
26. Seeley T.D. (1995). Coordination of nectar collecting and nectar processing. The Wisdom of the Hive, Harvard University Press.
27. da Silva P.M. et al. (2016). Honey: chemical composition, stability and authenticity. Food Chemistry.
28. Oduwole O. et al. (2018). Honey for acute cough in children. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
29. Jull A.B. et al. (2015). Honey as a topical treatment for wounds. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
30. NHS, Foods to avoid giving babies and young children, no honey before 12 months.
31. Ackerman J.D. (2000). Abiotic pollen and pollination: ecological, functional, and evolutionary perspectives. Plant Systematics and Evolution.
32. Chao C.T. and Krueger R.R. (2007). The date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.): overview of biology, uses, and cultivation. HortScience.
33. FAO, Date Palm Cultivation: pollination and bunch management
34. Bigliardi S. (2017). The “scientific miracle of the Qur’ān,” pseudoscience, and conspiracism. Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science.