Why did God create everything? This is not a question that we can answer with any degree of certainty, but we can make an intelligent comment. It is in the nature of a ‘Self’ to express itself. God being a ‘super Self’ or ‘super ego’ expresses Himself by creating not only the physical world but by creating a ‘free will’, which He endowed on the human being. Scientists, by trying to create ‘artificial intelligence’, are in fact trying to replicate what God has already created. After art, architecture, and rapid advances in technology the human ‘Self’ is trying to express itself in a ‘godlike’ manner.
“God did not create the invisible world and visible world, including the human being, except to serve him in the order of creation.” [Verse 51:56].
“O people, fulfil your duty to the One who sustains you; the One who created everything from one Self, a single entity and created from it its mate, then evolved from the two many creations. ” [Verse 4:1].
“He is the One who perfected everything He created and initiated the life of mankind from clay.” [Verse 32:7].
When people are told that human beings were created from clay, creationists often imagine that God created man with the command ‘Be’ that instantly turned a mound of clay into a man (Adam) in the final finished form and then from his rib He created a woman (Eve) and they both reproduced and became the first parents of the whole of mankind.
This cannot be true, as evolutionary biology paints a completely different picture, and the Quran’s statement that God created humans from clay is consistent with this. However, we are not talking about the clay we see today, the clay that’s commonly used to make pots and other such things. The clay that life first started from is primordial, chemical-rich clay and the process took many billions of years. From this ‘clay’ emerged the first form of ‘life’ that started the evolutionary process of all living beings; animals as well as humans. God creates and directs his creation, but only within laws – all God’s creations are a process of His ordinance
Scottish chemist Alexander Cairns-Smith, in his study on how biological life first started, began by asking the question: What is one of the central qualities that defines life? For him, the answer was the ability to reproduce, or self-replicate. It is usually considered that the original self-replicator is DNA. Is it possible that there were self-replicating genes before DNA that would not have been so susceptible to damage by the early environment on earth? [1]
What was needed were genes that could acquire and retain information and use that information to interact with their environment. Cairns-Smith posed the question: was there something even simpler than DNA that possessed all these abilities? The answer was yes; that something was crystals. After further study, the theory was proposed that there was a crystalline form that not only interacted with its environment in a complex and ordered way but also possessed an innate tendency to evolve. That crystalline form was the colloidal suspension of quartz particles in water, more commonly known as clay. This type of clay is a fine-grained substance probably consisted of aluminum silicate, quartz and organic fragments.
What generated the ‘spark’ of life? Piezoelectricity is the ability of some materials, notably crystals, to generate an electrical potential in response to applied mechanical stress. The word is derived from the Greek piezo or piezein, which means to squeeze or press. The pressure some crystals may have experienced induced the necessary stress required to create the first ‘life’, in the crystals suspended in the clay. This colloidal suspension is the ‘primordial soup’ or ‘clay’ from which that first spark of life came. So the Quran’s statement that God created the human being from a clay is correct, albeit the process of evolution was over a very long period. The Quran gives the essence of this life-giving aspects of clay and it is the scientists who will discover the details.[2]
[1] Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith an organic chemist and molecular biologist at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He is most famous for his book, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life.
[2] Creation and evolution. The beginning of life: see verses and footnotes: 36:82 and 3:185; 4:1; 11:7; 32:9; 71:14; 76:2; 84:19. Creation: 3:59; 7:20; 38:27; 44:38; 75:4; 77:20; 79:27-33; 80:18-23. Displacement: 27:11; 35:20; 65:11.
