Relationship between Science and Religion in the Modern Age
Prof. Dr. Nazeer Ahmed
Presented at Rossmoor, Walnut Creek, California on September 21, 2020
Thank you, Sara, for this privilege to speak once again at Rossmoor. Among the audience are distinguished men and women of arts and science, as well as inquisitive students. I am told there is also an international presence.
The classical approach to sharing knowledge is to ensure that it enriches the participant. We will apply that criterion to our association. I offer each of you a tree to take home. It is the tree of knowledge with five branches, the empirical, the rational, the emotive, the perceptive and the infusive, namely, the knowledge that is acquired through the body, the mind, the heart, the soul and the spirit.
The title of today’s presentation is “The Relationship between Science and Religion”. It is indeed a profound question. As it is with all intellectual pursuits, the answer is implicit in the question. Seven hundred years ago, Mevlana Rumi answered it this way: “You ride your horse from village to village, asking everyone: “Have you seen my horse?”.
Modern man is like that rider on the horse. So engrossed is he with the physical and material that he has lost touch with his own soul, the horse that he rides. In the Islamic tradition, the word for the soul is the Nafs.
Let us start with a little reflection about the sublime insignificance of the human
As far as we know today, there are two trillion galaxies in our own universe, each galaxy has two billion stars, and there may be other universes that we do not know about. Tucked away on the fringes of our own midsize galaxy, the Milky Way, is our star, the sun and our earth, a speck of dust circling around it. And on this speck of dust there are seven billion of us each one with an ego stretching from San Francisco to New York.
Insignificant as we are in the grand scheme of physical universe, we dare to ask: Who am I? Why am I here? We rose from stardust, were lit up with the light of consciousness and started to ask: Where did I come from?
The summary of my presentation is this: Science and Faith are two mighty oceans. Whereas science is based on observation, measurement and reason, faith is based on awareness and conviction. These two oceans meet within the human soul. The human is a microcosm of the universe and the mirror through whom God reveals the majesty of His creation. The junction of science and faith is within each of us, not out there among the stars or the jungle of fuzzy and obtuse ideas.
I start with a parable. It is called “The parable of the Candle and the Shaikh”
Mevlana Rumi (d 1273 CE) was one of the greatest poets to grace this planet. People in the East as well as the West consider him to be a spiritual master and a consummate exponent of the deepest longings of the human soul. Rumi had a teacher. His name was Shaykh Sinai. One evening, Shaykh Sinai was walking back home from the mosque after evening prayers. Darkness was fast approaching. The alleys of the town were narrow and constrained as they used to be before the advent of the automobile and the freeway.
As he walked, Shaykh Sinai saw a little girl walk towards him with a candle in her hand to help her see in the approaching darkness. The great Shaykh approached the child, bent down and asked her in a gentle voice, “Please tell me where this light came from?”
The child looked up at the Shaykh. Her sharp, penetrating eyes saw a great man of wisdom looking benevolently at her. His shiny white beard glistened in the light from the flickering candle. His furrowed face radiated the wisdom of the ages. The little girl paused for a moment, blew the candle out with a single breath and asked the Shaykh:
“Tell me where the light has gone and I will tell you where it came from?”
This sublime parable, so pregnant with layers of meaning, is a useful preamble to our discussion about the nature of knowledge. Knowledge is a supreme gift. It cannot be destroyed in an earthquake or burned in a fire as the ones raging in California. It cannot be stolen by a thief or packaged in a container. It cannot be bequeathed from father to son as a piece of property. The branches of the tree of knowledge are vast and cover the heavens and the earth. The body, mind, heart, soul and the spirit bask in its light.
The propensity towards knowledge separates man from the beast. Animals do not ask questions. They do not gather data, build computers and sift through the data to build the tree of knowledge. Man is thus a knower.
The Senses and the Mind – Basis of Scientific Knowledge
Empirical and rational knowledge are the first two branches of the tree of knowledge. Empirical knowledge is based on observation and measurement. It is the basis of physics, chemistry and biology. Rational knowledge is based on reason and is the privilege of the mind. It is the basis of mathematics, logic, computer science, geometry and architecture. These two categories, namely the empirical and rational, can be expressed in words or symbols and can be taught. We write scientific papers, give seminars, teach at Stanford and Berkeley, hold Zoom meetings such as this one to share and build upon this knowledge. Empirical and rational knowledge form the basis of science and are the foundation of our modern technological civilization.
What is Science?
What is science? It is a rigorous method to understand nature based on observation and measurement. As nature is complex, we make assumptions in the process of unlocking its secrets. Therefore, science may also be defined as an empirical method to find the natural truth based on certain assumptions.
There are two fundamental assumptions that underlie the pursuit of natural science: The principle of objectivation and the principle of before and after. The principle of objectivation states that man is the subject and the cosmos is the object that man can study with detachment. The principle of before and after implies that the flow of time is linear and every effect has a preceding cause. A lack of time prevents me from going deep into the philosophical implications of these assumptions. Suffices it to state here that you and I are not separate from nature; we are a part of it. We are at once the subject and the object, the witness as well as the witnessed. As Mevlana Rumi said: “You are not just a drop in the ocean; you are the ocean in the drop”. The idea of before and after may be valid in everyday lives when short spans of time are involved but they break down for cosmic events. For instance: What was there before the big bang?
Allow me to share with you from my own experience. When I first entered Caltech as a graduate student in 1961, I had an Applied Mathematics professor who sometimes began his lectures with “Oh God! Make our world linear”. For those who may not know what linear is, here is an illustration: If we know that a car uses one gallon of gas to go ten miles, we calculate that it will take two gallons to go twenty miles. But is that necessarily true? What if the road conditions change, the road becomes bumpy and has pot holes? What if you go up a hill on a curved road, or a traffic jam slows you down? Our calculations break down. Similar is the case with scientific predictions. The fact that the earth has avoided a major collision with a big asteroid in a thousand years is no guarantee that we may not be hit with one tomorrow.
The Mystery of the Senses
The body is the means of interaction with the physical. It is the vehicle for observation and measurement. The mind is the instrument for reason, a vehicle for rational and extensional thought. It is the nursery for mathematics, logic, geometry, language and thought synthesis. It processes the information generated by the senses, connects it with logic into a rational whole and seeks to make sense of the cosmos. Indeed, it even ponders the possibility of heaven.
It may come as a surprise to many that there is a mystery to the senses. The speech is not in the tongue, the sight is not in the eye, the hearing is not in the ear and the touch is not in the skin. They are all attributes of the soul, the Self, the I as in I am. Let me explain.
Consider the sensation of color. Where is the sensation of color? We offer the following example first advanced by Nobel Laureate Sherrington. Consider a beautiful yellow rose. If you ask a physicist, he may state that electromagnetic waves from the sun hit the rose. The petals of the rose absorb all wavelengths except a wavelength of about 0.6 micrometers. Wavelengths around 0.6 micrometers are reflected by the rose, travel through the air and enter the eye where they register on the optic nerve. The optic nerve sends an electrical signal to the brain where it registers its color.
In this “scientific” description, the sun is there, wavelengths are there, absorption and reflection are there, the optic nerve and brain cells are there. But where is the color yellow? Is it in the sun or the eye? We will immediately recognize that it is neither in the sun nor in the eye nor even in the rose. The sun merely radiates the light. The rose merely reflects waves of light. The eye merely receives and registers the light waves. Each of them participates in the process of recognition. But none of them determines the color yellow.
The answer quite simply is that the sensation of color is an attribute of the soul. We cannot find the yellow color out there in the physical world because the soul is not “out there”. It is with us. The senses are like “windows” to the soul so that the soul can witness a moment of light.
Natural science does not answer questions of color and feelings. In the world of natural science there is no color, no pain, no happiness, no joy, no suffering. It is a cold, empty world, totally devoid of human qualities. In it the rainbow does not exist, only the dispersion of light. In it, love does not exist, only changes in body chemistry. In it tears do not exist, only droplets falling from the eye. This is so because the seat of love and hate, of color and feeling, namely the soul was taken out in the very beginning through the Principle of Objectivation.
The fact that sensual qualities, love, compassion, joy and sorrow, beauty, enchantment, music and melody are absent from the complex picture built up by “science” does not convince us one bit that they are not there. The rainbow exists because we see it. Men and women love because they feel and they cry because they suffer. There is a deep mystical quality to our sense of sight, touch, sound and taste, a quality that cannot be described using the methods of empirical science.
In summary, the senses do not belong to the material world. There is a deep mystery to them.
Eminent scientists have grappled with the question of how the mind interacts with the physical but they arrived at an impasse. Here is what Sherrington has to say in his book Mind and Matter:
“Mind, for anything perception can compass, goes therefore in our spatial world more ghostly than a ghost. Invisible, intangible, it is a thing not even of outline; it is not a “thing”. It remains without sensual confirmation and remains without it forever”. (Man and His Nature, Sir Charles Sherrington, Cambridge University Press, 1940, page 357).
The helplessness of secular thought springs from the very assumptions that are made in building the edifice of secular science. These assumptions exclude the soul from the world at the outset. It is like the first gambit in a chess game. Having excluded the soul at the very beginning we cannot locate it later when we go searching for it. As a consequence, knowledge that is acquired through “scientific” thinking is cold and logical, without color, without feeling and without love.
The mystery deepens until we arrive at the confluence of the mind, the body and the heart. They do meet and the meeting takes place in the soul, the Self, the I that defines each of us uniquely.
The Heart, the Stage for Manifestation of Love and Grace
If the empirical and rational were the limits of human knowledge, then where do love, compassion, forgiveness, mercy and grace fit in? Love cannot be measured with a ruler, weighed on a scale or calibrated on a thermometer. Yet, the vista of love is vast. It embraces the entire universe. It has the power to make the oceans boil, icebergs melt, the sky and the earth to kiss each other. I am sure each of you have felt the pangs of love somewhere, sometime, and the scars may still be there.
The fact that we cannot measure love with a wooden pole does not convince us one bit that it is not there. It resides in the inner recesses of the heart. In all of God’s creation, there is nothing as sublime as the heart for it alone has the capacity to love and to be a stage for manifestation of divine grace.
Emotive knowledge is the third branch of the tree of the knowledge. It is the knowledge of the heart. This kind of knowledge is felt but it cannot be taught.
Some Attributes of the Heart
- The heart is the stage for the emotive life of the human. It is where love and hate, compassion and mercy, charity and greed, forgiveness and vengeance find their resolution.
- The heart possesses a powerful electromagnetic field and has its own nervous system, with a network of 40,000 neurons. The neurological centers store data that enable it to think and accumulate wisdom. It releases hormones that send messages to the brain and influence behavior. Hence the saying of Prophet Muhammed (pbuh): “There is in the human a piece of flesh. If it be sound, then the entire body is sound”.
- For the discharge of its higher responsibilities, the heart has the capacity to turn, not physically but emotionally. On one side it looks at the life of this earth and its dazzling riches, reaches out with greed to possess them. On the other, it turns to gaze at the Spirit, contemplate its grandeur and its beauty and bask in its light. For this reason, it is referred to in the Islamic and Sufi traditions as the Qalb, namely, that which turns, like a gimbal in a spacecraft.
- Importantly, the heart is the throne for revealing Divine Grace. It alone has the capacity to ponder the majesty of divine love, to contain it and exude it to the body and the mind. For this reason, it is compared to the throne of God. Indeed, it is the fortress of faith.
The Soul, Mirror of the Invisible World
Let us now turn our attention to the Soul wherein lies the junction of the two seas. What is the soul? In Eranos Jharbuch, Karl Jung wrote:
“All science is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest of all miracles. It is the conditia sine qua non of the world as an object. It is extremely astonishing that the Western world, apart from very rare exceptions, seems to have so little appreciation of this being so. The flood of external objects of cognizance has made the subject of all cognizance withdraw to the background, often to apparent non-existence.” (Eranos Jahrbuch, 1946, p 398)
The soul, is the horse that we ride, going from place to place, asking everyone: “Have you seen my horse?”. Never mind that sometimes this horse behaves like a mule or a donkey. At other times it stinks like a skunk. Occasionally, it is a winged angel that lifts us up to the heavens.
The term “soul” is a composite term. It may be compared to a large house which has a living room, a family room, a kitchen and bedrooms. In a similar sense, the senses, the mind and the heart are parts of the soul. The knowledge possessed by the soul is the fourth branch of knowledge, the perceptive branch.
I will enumerate here some attributes of the Soul:
- First, the soul is universal. All men and women, irrespective of their race, color, nationality are endowed with it.
- Second, the Soul is endowed with a free will and it is born free.
- Third, the soul is the cognitive element for all inputs from the body, the mind and the heart.
- Fourth, it perceives beauty, order and proportion.
- Fifth, the soul has a sense of justice and right and wrong.
The Will of God is realized in nature by necessity. It is realized in humankind by choice. The sense of justice is a uniquely human attribute. It is not an attribute that is found among the animals.
Summarily, the excellence of humankind lies in the attributes of the soul. The soul is “the mirror of the invisible world”. In it, all of God’s creation is reflected. It is endowed with the capacity to “know” what it “sees” and to act upon it as the anointed regent of Divine Will.
The Spirit – Source of Life, Knowledge and Power
Lastly, let us ponder over the Spirit that animates life.
In the Islamic tradition, the word for the Spirit is the Ruh. The Spirit is the life-giving source of the universe. It animates all creation. It is the light of existence. It is not the body that contains the spirit. It is the spirit that contains the body inside and out.
The light from the Spirit is reflected in many shades:
At the most elemental level is the Spirit that animates all things, trees, birds, animals, the stars, the universe, the heavens and the earth. It is not a dead universe we live in; it is alive. It reflects the light of God although it perceives it not. In the Sufi tradition, it is called Ruh e Haywani (the basic Spirit that animates all creation).
The Spirit that animates humankind is of a higher order. It has a heart. You and I are made of the same stardust that the planets are made of. But we are stardust which has become conscious and is aware. We as human beings see, hear, touch, speak, reason, ask and act and we are responsible for our actions. The Sufis call it Ruh e Insani (The Spirit that animates humans).
There is yet a higher spirit, which in its sacredness animates the souls of the Prophets, elevates and ennobles them to listen to the voice of the heavens and transmit the eternal truths to humankind. Moses spoke to God. Not everyone has this privilege. This spirit is called Ruh ul Quds, the Holy Spirit.
The knowledge of the spirit is the fifth branch of knowledge, the infusive.
Thus, the tree of knowledge has five branches, the empirical, the rational, the emotive, the perceptive and the infusive. The empirical and the rational define the domain of science. Faith is all inclusive; it embraces all five branches of knowledge.
Humankind is unique in the heavens and the earth, provided with senses steeped in mystery, a noble mind crowned with reason that probes the deepest secrets of the cosmos, a sublime heart which is illuminated with heavenly light, a soul that is perceptive of divine presence and a spirit that bestows upon him life, power and knowledge.
I conclude with a reiteration of what I stated at the outset of my presentation: Science and faith are two mighty oceans. Both are in search of the Truth. Science is based on observation and reason but it hits an impasse due to the assumptions it makes and it stops there. Faith is based on awareness and conviction. It attaches no preconditions to its position and embraces the empirical, the rational, the emotive, the perceptive and the infusive. These two oceans meet within the human soul.
In the search for the truth one must not be blind to the boundaries that our limitations impose. Let us recall the parable of the four blind men who approached an elephant to find out what it looked like. The first one embraced the elephant’s foot and said it was like a pole. The second one stroked the belly and said it was like a massive wall. The third caught hold of the tail and said it was like a serpent. The fourth one felt the tusk and said it was like a smooth rock. Truth is one and indivisible. There is no scientific truth and a separate religious truth. The search for a meeting of these oceans is an individual search and the path one takes to reach that junction is predicated upon one’s journey in life, one’s capacity to learn and ultimately on the Grace of God.
Comment by Dr. Abullatif Aljibury, Danville, California
The Compatibility of Science and Faith,
Received December 28, 2020
There is mounting evidence in many fields of science that bring us closer to the realization of the preponderance of a superpower who designed and is in control of the Universe, where He put everything in its functional position and placed everything in balance.Applying reason and using our God given intellect, we are led to discern the compatibility of the observable facts in our natural world with the many statements, verses (that refer to these observables) in the Quran, whose authenticity as the word of God, the superpower the Creator of the Universe, has been proven beyond any doubt. That the statements described there-in some fourteen hundred years ago regarding various aspects of our lives and the world around us are in total agreement with the scientific facts that we know them today.
If one looks closely to the world we live in, one cannot but notice the evidence in support of a created system and a balanced universe that is essential for the propagation and the continued existence of the life forms on our planet. One is struck by the uniformity and similarity of the elements of the basic building blocks of the life forms. Everything we look into points to a system that is conceived and created by a super human.
Looking around us, we are made aware of this balance and the preponderance of a system everywhere we look. From way above in the skies, the galaxies and to our own terrestrial system all in dynamic equilibrium. The sun, the moon, the night and the day, all are subject to a mathematically tight and exact measure, day in and day out. The flow of the seasons, the temperature, the pressure, the winds and so on all happen and vary seemingly according to a predetermined plan.
“And the skies He raised high and has devised [for all things] a measure: Quran (55:8) so that you [too, O men,] might never transgress the measure [of what is right): Quran (55:5) The sun and the moon run according to a definite reckoning.
Wherever we look around we see this balance manifest everywhere. The Earth, the plants, the animals are all living together within our ecosystem from a time immemorial. Each and every one of these systems can be seen to exhibit remarkable qualities and properties that bring out its unique function and shows how it fits into the overall dynamic balance of the world we live in.
To demonstrate the measure of perfection in the design of our living universe and as a starter, let us take water as an example, being one of the simplest, most common of and most abundant on earth, which makes up 60 or more percent of our body weight, and see what a profound function it plays in the design of the system of all life forms, animals and plants, in our planet.
The Quran 21:30 says:“Are, then, they who are bent on denying the truth not aware that the heavens and the earth were [once] one single entity, which We then parted asunder?38 – and [that] We made out of water every living thing? Will they not, then, [begin to] believe?3 That is very clear that according to the above verse that the origin of every living form is aquatic, that is, it originated from water. This statement is completely compatible with scientific evidence, that life started from or in water.And in 24:45 “God created every animal from water. And many more verses throughout the Quran that specifically states how water is an essential in the creation and workings of all living matter from plants to animals.We are so struck, in awe, as to how and why such a common and universal material as water is so essential to life and that without it life cannot exist. To begin with, let us see, how and when life had started on our planet to follow up on the evidence in support of the statement in the verse above.
- The earliest recorded time of appearance of water on earth and filled up the oceans was some 4.41 billion years ago.
- The estimated amount of water on earth is 1.4 billion cubic Kilometers.
- Since water has been designed to sustain all life forms and keep THE BALANCE, it turns out that the total amount of water within our planet including the water vapor for miles up in the atmosphere is constant.
- Water fills about 71% of the outer surface of the earth.
- It fills lakes, rivers and reservoirs and it
- made its way down underneath the surface to form big water reservoirs called aquifers.
- In the cold regions of the Arctic regions and on higher elevations, water covers vast areas in the form of snow and ice.
The lower mantle of inner earth may hold as much as 5 times more than the above (surface water.) The Quran: 55:10 says: “and the earth He has shaped for the living creatures.” The Creator has made sure the constancy of the total amount of water so as to maintain the balance necessary for the survival of His Creations that is the plants animals and other life forms on this planet.
In accordance with the verse that “We made every living thing from water”, the first appearance of living forms did indeed take place some hundreds of million years after water first appeared on our planet. This proves the necessity for the existence of water prior to the emergence of life on our planet. The life forms were very primitive such as algae and then some microbial life forms which were recorded to have appeared some 3.7 billion years ago, that is some 700 million years after the appearance of water on earth signifying the necessity for water to precede life on earth.
The Quran: 24:45 “God Created every animal from water.”Let us begin to look at water’s special make up and properties that have made it so essential to the existence of life anywhere in our universe. The simple molecule of water is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. Hydrogen is the simplest element in the universe and was the first element to come into existence after the big bang some 12 billion years ago. Each hydrogen atom is joined by a covalent bond to the oxygen atom and the two bonds form a v shaped structure with an angle between the two bonds of around 105 degrees.
Oxygen, along with other simple elements such as carbon, nitrogen, were formed in the atmosphere a billion years after hydrogen. Water, then, began to form when the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen met. water started to accumulate in outer space and eventually made its way to our planet earth some 4.5 billion years ago.The Quran: 30:53 says: “God is the One who had sent water down from the sky and thereby He brought forth pairs of plants each separate from the other.’ As the water, to live up to its name as a universal solvent, comes down as rain and brings down with it, as a bonus, some of the atmospheric gases that it dissolves like nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide and some nitrate fertilizer as a result of the lightening that may sometime accompany the rain storms. The fertilizer, together with water and mixed with the soil enable plants to produce food to feed itself and other plants and animals of the whole planet.
Let us now turn our attention to see what qualities or properties that makes such a common substance so unique that it has become the backbone of life on this planet: In the temperature range which covers most of the surface area of the planet, water is a liquid and acts as a very good solvent to a large number of many compounds (almost all to a small or large degree). This is due to a very important property which is its polarity, Water carries a small negative charge on the oxygen atom and a slight positive charge on the hydrogen atoms, the amount of charge on the oxygen atom is twice that on the hydrogen atom so that we end up with a neutral water molecule. Because of this polarity, water molecules can form hydrogen bonds within itself and with different molecules in the living cell that contain oxygen atoms and other atoms like nitrogen. This is in the main is what makes it the liquid of choice in the makeup of the living cells.
A very glaring fact about the basic make-up of all living cells, of plants and animals, is that they are more or less similar, (mainly a cell wall or membrane, a jelly liquid material called the cytoplasm and a cluster or nucleus), pointing to a system that is universal and designed by the same Supreme power.
Qualities of Water #1:Since all living forms are made up of cells where the cell is surrounded by a cell membrane, water is the ideal medium for transporting materials, essential for the livelihood of the cell, bringing food and minerals from outside of the cell membrane to the inside of the cell and throwing out waste products to the outside of the cell. As we shall see, the polarity of the water molecule is what gives water its amazing properties and makes it so vitally important in our lives and the lives of all other living forms.
Qualities of Water #2:Another feature that makes water such a viable material in our realm is that it can exist in three different forms within the temperature range of our climate earth. In the liquid form, water molecules are in constant motion forming and breaking hydrogen bonds. This gives the water molecules the property of sliding, so to speak, over each other which imparts the liquidity property to water or its cohesiveness that makes it a perfect carrier of molecules and ions that are necessary for the existence of life forms.
Qualities of Water #3:Water also exists at moderate temperatures as vapor. This is possible since the water molecules inside liquid water are in constant motion and some of them can escape from the bulk of the liquid and stay in the air as vapor where it rises and gathers to form clouds which precedes the condensation into rain to complete the water cycle and keep the amount of water constant. Because of the polarity of the water molecules and the resulting hydrogen bonds, water requires more heat energy to free the liquid water molecules and to escape into the atmosphere to the vapor phase. This heat of vaporization is essential to keep living species maintain lower body temperatures when the outside temperature becomes too hot. The Quran: 55:7-8 says:“And the heavens He has raised high and established dynamic equilibrium therein, so that you do not violate the equilibrium.
”Qualities of Water #4:Pointing towards a Creator who has set the system of breathing to apply to all living forms on this plant. Fish, other marine animals as well as plants and animals that are earth bound all use the same principle. When breathing all living forms take in oxygen and throw out carbon dioxide. Plants breath, just like us humans, by taking oxygen and giving out carbon dioxide. The plants, to stay alive, keep breathing day and night. To maintain a healthy environment and keep up THE BALANCE of oxygen in the environment, plants carry out, during daylight, a very important and essential function which is photosynthesis. This is a process whereby light energy from the sun combines with carbon dioxide and water to produce food, and at the same time oxygen is produced as a byproduct. The Quran 15:19-20 says: “And the earth we have spread it out wide and placed on it mountains firm and caused life of every kind to grow on it in a sustainable manner. And provided thereon means of livelihood for you O’ men as well as for all living beings whose sustenance does not depend on you.
”Although God’s grace is manifest at all times and under all circumstances, it is particularly apt when the temperature gets colder and water starts freezing. Due to the polarity of the water molecules, liquid water has the unique property that ice floats to the surface of the liquid mass as the water freezes allowing fish and other live forms to survive the cold seasons.
It is very clear, and in keeping with the Quranic verse: “We made out of water every living thing,” that water is where all life began. As scientific evidence has shown that water appeared on our planet many years before the appearance of some primitive life form.
It is amazing how water manifests itself all over the globe in so many ways. Its presence in all life forms has been made essential for their survival and without which life as we know it cannot exist.
Water is a simple molecule, yet it plays a major role in the structuring of all critical parts of the body of the life form in addition to being the carrier of the essential nutrients which the life forms need to get to the various body parts so that it can function properly.
In addition, water carries out many other vital functions throughout the body of the life form. In the human body, It is involved in carrying oxygen and carbon dioxide, it helps regulate our system and maintain body temperature.
Water takes part in the milliard of chemical reactions needed for the body to function properly and for us stay vigilant and alive. It is clear from all of the above evidence, that water is the precursor of all living forms on our planet which is in complete agreement with the Quranic verses mentioned above. Water is truly the backbone of Life on earth.