The Secret Of Life
A review of Islam Between East and West book by Alija Izetbegović
Probably all of us thought about this, where we are come from? And How we are alive?! Simply What is the secret of life?
I have been always thinking, What is the source of life? I mean How we became alive? the reason why a fetus can live and another die without a clear reason? Why do we get to live without clear reasons? And why may we die without reasons also?!
In the Islam between East and West book, I had a very good and satisfying answer to my questions that, I thought that I need to share it with you. This book has a deep sight in the human being that I never thought about before.
Creation And Evolution
A man is not tailored according to Darwin, nor in the universe tailored according to Newton.
The author demonstrates the contradiction between science and religion about humans. According to science, man is nothing more than an intelligent animal; according to religion man is an animal endowed with personality.
Science considers man’s human being is determined by external material facts: walking upright, making tools, or communicating through articulate speech. Here, man is a child of nature and remain part of it.
On the other hand, all religions and all art have created the version of a man thrown into the matter, of his fall to earth, and the antagonism between man and nature, of man’s clash of strange and unfriendly world.
But if the man determined by external materials and is a child of nature why all kinds of art, ancient and modern, all art is a continuous story of man’s foreignness in nature.
The fail of biology to explain life is a fact which can not be passed over in silence.
In 1950, André George put only one question to biologists, doctors, and physicists: What is life? All answers he received were indefinite and cautious. we may take the answer of Jean Rostand as an example. “ So far, we don’t know what life is. we aren’t even able to give a complete and exact definition of the phenomenon of life.”
Life is a miracle rather than a phenomenon if we look for instance at the eyes. The human eyes sit in two bony cavities called the orbits, which are present in the skull. Six extraocular muscles attach directly to the eyes to assist with movement. The front visible part of the eye is made up of the whitish sclera, a colored iris, and the pupil. A thin layer called the conjunctiva sits on top of this. The front part is also called the anterior segment of the eye.
The eye is not shaped like a perfect sphere, rather it is a fused two-piece unit, composed of an anterior (front) segment and the posterior (back) segment. The anterior segment is made up of the cornea, iris, and lens. The cornea is transparent and more curved and is linked to the larger posterior segment, composed of the vitreous, retina, choroid, and the outer white shell called the sclera. The cornea is typically about 11.5 mm (0.3 in) in diameter, and 0.5 mm (500 μm) in thickness near its center. The posterior chamber constitutes the remaining five-sixths; its diameter is typically about 24 mm. The cornea and sclera are connected by an area termed the limbus. The iris is the pigmented circular structure concentrically surrounding the center of the eye, the pupil, which appears to be black. The size of the pupil, which controls the amount of light entering the eye, is adjusted by the iris’ dilator and sphincter muscles.
Light energy enters the eye through the cornea, through the pupil and then through the lens. The lens shape is changed for near focus (accommodation) and is controlled by the ciliary muscle. Photons of light falling on the light-sensitive cells of the retina (photoreceptor cones and rods) are converted into electrical signals that are transmitted to the brain by the optic nerve and interpreted as sight and vision.
The Swiss physicist Charles Eugène Guye has tried to make a probability count of the accidental creation of one molecule of protein. It is known that a molecule of protein consists of at least four different elements. To simplify the count, Guye assumed that a molecule of albumen consists of two elements of 2000 atoms with the atomic weight of 10 and the molecule dissymmetry of 0.9. With this simplified preconditions, the probability that protein could be created accidentally amount to 2.02 x 10^-231 according to Guye’s calculations.
If we consider this result within the age and size of our planet, the creation of such a molecule should take 10243 billion years under the condition of 5.1014 vibrations per second. Consequently, there is no possibility that life could have been created accidentally during the 4.5 billion years the earth supposed to have existed.
We cannot explain life by scientific means only because life is both a miracle and a phenomenon. Wonder and admiration are the highest forms for our understanding of life.
