we have so far explained allah's creation of living things. now, it is time to examine the universe at large. allah also created the universe in which you, the earth, the sun, the solar system, planets, stars, galaxies and everything else exists. however, as well as those who oppose the fact of the creation of living things, there are also some people who deny the fact that the universe was created. these people assert that the universe came into existence spontaneously. moreover, they suggest that it has always existed. yet, they never offer an explanation for this irrational claim. their claim is similar to the following example: imagine that you set sail one day and reached the shores of an island. what would you think if you came across a highly developed city with skyscrapers, surrounded by beautiful parks and greenery? furthermore, this city was full of theatres, restaurants and railroad lines. you would certainly think that this city had been planned and constructed by intelligent people, would you not? what would you think about someone who says, "nobody built this city. it has always existed, and at some time in the past we came and inhabited it.

here, we have all our necessities, and they all come into existence spontaneously"?

you would doubtless think him insane, or else you would think that he has no idea what he is talking about. but never forget that the universe in which we live is incomparably larger than that city. the universe contains an almost uncountable number of planets, stars, comets and satellites of various sorts. that being the case, the claims of a person who says that this flawless universe was not created but has always existed must not remain unanswered. do you not agree?

after reading the section below, you yourself will be able to provide

the best answer. now, let's expand on the subject of the universe and save

the answer to the end.

everything started to form in a big explosion

during the times when people did not have telescopes to make observations of the heavens, they had very little, and very unreliable, information about the remote universe, and they had very different ideas about it. with advances in technology, they attained accurate information about outer space. in the mid-twentieth century, they discovered

something very important. the universe has a date of birth, which means that the universe has not always existed. the universe—in other words, the stars, planets and galaxies—started to form at a specific date.

scientists calculated the age of the universe to be 15 billion years.they named the moment the universe was born the "big bang," because 15 billion years ago, when nothing existed, everything suddenly emerged with an explosion from a single point. in brief, matter and the universe, which people assumed to have always existed, had a beginning.

at this point, the question arises, "how did they come to understand that it had a beginning?" that was quite easy; the matter that scattered and sped away from other particles of matter with the big explosion is stil moving away. think for a moment! the universe is continuing to expand even at this moment. imagine the universe as a balloon. if we draw two small spots on this balloon, what happens when you blow it up? the spots on the balloon move away from one another as the balloon expands and its volume increases. as in the case of the balloon, the volume of the universe is also increasing, and everything within it is racing away from everything else. in other words, the distance between the stars, galaxies, stars and meteors is continually increasing.

imagine that you are watching the expansion of the universe in a cartoon film. how would the universe look if we rewound the film back to the beginning? it would reduce down to a single point, would it not? that is exactly what scientists did. they returned to the beginning of the big bang and realised that the ever-expanding universe had initially been a single point.

this explosion, called the big bang, became the initial point of the existence allah had predetermined for the "universe." with this explosion, allah created the particles that made up the universe, and thus matter emerged. it scattered around at tremendous speed. during the initial moments of the explosion, this environment was almost like a soup of matter made up of different particles. but in time this great chaos started to transform into an ordered structure. allah created atoms from the particles, and eventually stars from the atoms. allah created the entire universe and everything in it.

let's give an example to clarify all this:

think of a huge space. it is utterly unlimited. there is only a bowl full of paint in it. nothing else exists. in the bowl, all sorts of paints are mixed up, forming unusual colours. imagine that a bomb explodes in this bowl, under the effect of which the paints scatter everywhere in the form of tiny specks. imagine that millions of paint specks move in all

directions in this space. meanwhile, during this voyage of the small specks, unusual things start to happen. instead of forming a chaotic mess and ultimately disappearing, they start interacting as if they were intelligent beings. the droplets that initially formed a coloured mixture start to sort themselves into their individual colours. blues, yellows, reds, and all droplets of the same colour groups collect together and continue to move away. yet even more unusual things continue to happen: five hundred blue droplets join together and, in the form of a bigger drop, continue their journey. meanwhile, three hundred red droplets in one corner and two hundred yellow droplets in another merge and keep scattering around together. these separate groups of colours move away from one another and form beautiful images, as if acting upon someone's orders.

some droplets come together and form images of stars, others become the picture of a sun, and some others form the planets around this sun. another group of drops form the image of the earth, while another forms the moon. if you ever saw such a picture, would you think that an explosion in a bowl of paint had accidentally formed this picture?

nobody would think that possible.

as the story of the paint drops shows, matter came together and formed the perfect picture we see when we look up in the sky, in other words, stars, the sun and planets. but could all these things have happened by themselves?

how could the stars in the sky, the planets, the sun, moon, and earth ever have come into existence as a result of atoms falling together by chance after an explosion? how about your mother, father, friends or birds, cats, bananas or strawberries…? of course, this is most unlikely to have happened. such an idea is as nonsensical as claiming that a house was not built by workers, but came into being by the free will of tiles and bricks, and by pure chance. we all know that bricks scattered around by a bomb explosion do not form little huts. they are reduced into stone and soil and, in time, mix back into the earth.

but one point deserves particular attention. as you know, paint drops are unconscious and inanimate matter. it is impossible that drops of paint could spontaneously come together and form pictures. here,however, we are talking about the formation of conscious and living things. it is certainly highly improbable that living things such as human beings, plants and animals could have come into existence from inanimate matter purely through random chance. to understand this better, we should consider our own bodies: they are composed of tiny molecules invisible to the eye, such as proteins, fats and water…these make up the cells, and the cells make up our bodies. the perfect order in our bodies is a product of a special design. allah created our eyes that see, our hands that hold this book and our legs that enable us to walk.

allah predetermined how we would develop in our mothers' wombs, how tall we would be and the colours of our eyes.