Another point on which human intelligence appeared to have arrived at a major scientific truth was that of the true nature of light. It was Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) who put forward the theory that light consisted of minute corpuscles in rapid motion, which emanated from their source and were scattered in the atmosphere. Owing to the extraordinary influence of Newton, this corpuscular theory held sway in the scientific world for a very long time, only to be abandoned in the middle of the nineteenth century in favour of the wave theory of light. It was the discovery of the action of the photon which delivered the final blow to Newton's theory. "Young's work convinced scientists that light has essential wave characteristics in apparent contradiction to Newton's corpuscular theory."

It had taken only 200 years to prove Newton wrong. The Qur'an, on the contrary, gave its message to the world in the 7th century, and even after a lapse of 1400 years its truth emerges unscathed. The reason for this is that it is of divine, not human origin: the absolute truth of its statements can be proved at all times - an extraordinary attribute that no other work can claim.

Einstein's theory of relativity declares that gravity controls the behaviour of planets, stars, galaxies and the universe itself, and does so in a predictable manner.

This scientific discovery had already been developed into a philosophy by Hume (1711-1776) and other thinkers, who declared that the whole system of the universe was governed by the principle of causation, and that it had only been when man had not been aware of this, that God had been supposed to control the universe. The principle of cause and effect was then thought logically to dispense with the idea of God.

But later research ran counter to this purely material supposition. When Paul Dirac, Heisenberg and other eminent scientists bent their minds to analysing the structure of the atom, they discovered that its system contradicted the principle of causation which had been adopted on the basis of studies made of the solar system. This theory, called the quantum mechanics theory, maintains that at the subatomic level, matter behaves randomly.

The word 'principle' in science means something which applies in equal measure throughout the entire universe. If there is even one single instance of a principle failing to apply to something, its academic bona fides have to be called in question. It followed then that if matter did not function according to this principle of causation in an exactly similar manner at the subatomic level as it did in the solar system, it should have to be rejected.

Einstein found this idea unthinkable and spent the last 30 years of his life trying to reconcile these seeming contradictions of nature. He rejected the randomness of quantum mechanics, saying, "I cannot believe God plays dice with the universe." Despite his best efforts, he was never able to resolve this problem, and it seems that the Qur'an has the final word on the reality of the universe. The fact that the universe cannot be explained in terms of human knowledge is aptly illustrated by Ian Roxburgh when he writes:

The laws of physics discovered on earth contain arbitrary numbers, like the ratio of the mass of an electron to the mass of a proton, which is roughly 1840 to one. Why? Did a Creator arbitrarily choose these numbers?

Science seems to recognise the fact that the universe can never be encompassed by human knowledge. The Universe it must be conceded is the awesome manifestation of the will of the Almighty. Hence no true explanation can be arrived at unless it is based on, the concept of the Will of God.