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We are all too familiar with the entrenched lines of creationists and evolutionists. Stated below for the first time is the Islamic view on this argument which you will find different from both the above stated viewpoints.
In the pages of Noble Quran, we read:
"Moreover (tumma) God turned to heaven when it was smoke and said to it and to the earth: come willingly or unwillingly! They said: we come in willing obedience."
(41: 11)
We infer from this that the entire creation has come into being by the "free act of creation". The creation creates itself for the love of the Creator under its own conscious enlightenment by "Free Act Of Creation" and the Creator uses His free will and selects from what creation has created an ideal that is closest to His ideal (will) and bestows upon it higher consciousness. To whom He bestows this consciousness is now ready for further creative activity and the cycle continues.
Following this cycle we have achieved this Self-conscious State starting from the moment of Big Bang in stages. The nucleus mass of the universe was a living substance and its chaotic agitation was nothing but its inherent "feeling" of its separation from its source.
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Creation, whether divine or human has to pass through various stages before its completion. During each of its creative stage, the state of in-discipline and lawlessness, which prevails in the beginning, continues to turn into discipline and harmony as the creative stage progresses towards completion. The question arises why the creation has to pass from chaos to discipline and disorder to order. To understand the significance of this, one has to study the relation between the Creator and the creation. Creation, is not the act of duplicating some thing, which already exists.
The foremost and basic urge behind creation is to seek the love (ideal) as desired and willed by the Creator through free choice. The creative activity is; therefore, a free act of the creation- Creator will not accept any compulsion. Free act; can only be exercised if we have more than one choice before us to choose from. In other words, many avenues of attraction are always open before the creation to choose the one for reaching his ideal. The urge of creation is also reflected in itself, as it is conscious or aware of its Creator. Thus the creation creates for the love of the Creator, according to the level of its consciousness and exercises free choice in selecting the values determined by its love or desire.
Now, if the Creator is not free to seek His ideal that would imply that the Creator has no will or desire of His own, and hence any activity which is devoid of will and desire can never be called creative activity. The Creator also manifests His love in different angles and forms and then whichever is nearest to His love from what the creation has produced by "free act of creation", He selects that for His further creative activity and bestows upon it higher consciousness, and so the cycle continues.
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Starting from Big Bang the universe created itself for the love of Creator following the principle of attraction and repulsion, which also signifies the free will and God only provided the laws and guidance from within and not from top. The behaviour of the universe can only be described in the form of movements of celestial bodies with respect to each other. This behaviour can be called stereo-typed and can be expressed in mathematical equations i.e. so many light years, earth take 24 hours to rotate, 365 day in year and so on. Behaviour is an attribute of life no matter how stereotyped; it is still an essence of consciousness. Life at this stage was in an unconscious state or material state of life - the state in which bodies played consciousness under the stimulus of attraction and repulsion caused by external processes.
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Earth can be understood on an analogy of living organism. It started its journey from gaseous state and created itself by free choice following the principle of attraction and repulsion. Acting in unified order it harnessed infinite number of substances (minerals). The behaviour of these substances can be expressed in chemical equations. This can also be called acted or played form of consciousness, a degree higher than that of the universe, as evident from the soil of the earth, which is different from the rest of the universe.
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The vegetable life recast the behaviour of matter processed at the physical Earth in the form of various species of vegetables under higher rational (conscious) plan of the Vegetable Stage. If we take the physical laws as the elementary measurements with which the Planet Earth fashioned itself and developed its atmosphere, we could see these measurements recast with greater intelligence at the higher Vegetable Stage in the form of beautiful flowers, their delightful colours, sizes and shapes of plants, proportion of tender branches and their leaves as well as in the kinds of fruits and their juices. All these artistic manifestations are based on complete mathematical equations in so harmonious proportions that they decorated the Earth like the paradise.
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At this stage life started in an insignificant organism of amoeba and then making its way through uncountable species of animals, it reached its completion at the start of the Human Stage of creation. It is very important to note that it was due to the higher conscious enlightenment of animal with which it differentiated the characteristics of various objects, such as darkness and light, remoteness and vicinity, coldness and heat, solidity and liquidity etc. In other words, the new conscious values developed by Animal stage were not known to the preceding stages. The Animal as a higher creative stage relevant to its higher conscious enlightenment determined these. The Animal detected only those properties, which were useful and necessary for onward march of life stages. The Animal ultimately perfected its sense perceptions in one of its leading species which appeared immediately before the emergence of Human Stage and which served as the physical organism for Man.
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"The creation of Adam is not his physical body but his attaining of the mental state of Self-consciousness, from there on, man exists in a non-material state, call it soul, in his mind and that where all new values will be earned."
The significance of Adam being that he was the first human being to cross the barrier of Self-consciousness. However, in time all similar species achieved Self-consciousness in a universal way. We are informed that Adam had two sons and so we can safely assume that there must be people around for them to marry and the question of them marrying their sisters as put forward by some groups is preposterous - lying is a sin today as it was yesterday and so is incest, the law of the Creator never changes.
It is because of soul that we developed a language because it retains every image it sees; records every word it hears; and every thought that you might have had remains preserved from within. In short it is a microchip within us. Self-consciousness (soul) being an attribute of the Creator will not die; it already exists beyond the barrier of time and space. The most important point to be noted is that in all the creative stages preceding the Self-conscious Stage of Man, the conscious values were preserved and passed on by each species in kind and not in "Person" or "Self". The values preserved at the human stage are "Personal" as implied in the words "Conscious Self". If we take away the "Conscious Self" no conscious values pertaining to the self or person can exists or survive. Life must protect those hard earned values in its minutest detail, as otherwise the process of creation cannot proceed.
From the day Adam achieved self consciousness we are in a state of mental evolution and the reality of life is constant progressive change -- that change in one direction towards higher and higher consciousness. If we analyse the entire creation we discover that rationality prevails in all previous conscious orders that is Universe, Earth Vegetation and Animal Kingdom. Having completed the creative process they have become immutable and just maintain themselves under the procreative process developed by them and the only order where the creative process is still active is the self-conscious man. However, man's direction is also rational but as his intellect is in the "making" (conscious mind is to sole / self what digestive system was to the physical brain) he cannot determine laws, values and direction on his own without prior understanding - that guidance has been provided in the form of law in Quran just as it was provided to every group of people on the face of this earth by various prophets from Adam to Jesus to Muhammad and it was also provided to all previous conscious orders under the principle of ":Emergent Evolution".
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- The development had taken place in stages. A stage of development when it had run its course got sealed, immutably fixing the values attained at the stage. Next stage, simultaneously starting at its lowest rung, dominated the earlier stages as it progressed. If this was not so, the book claims, and had the process of development continued unchecked at each stage (varieties kept coming up) there would have been chaos and higher forms of life would not have emerged.
- Each higher stage, which succeeds, appears at an infinite higher conscious level over all the preceding stages. The difference is not in degree but in kind as well, had this not been the case we would never been able to classify the stages.
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The reason of our failure to understand the universe as a creation is that we think the lower stages are responsible for raising the universe. (A misleading concept). There is always a purpose behind creation and if we do see the purpose working in the creation we could be sure of the Creator of the universe. Just as each soul or life lives in a unit, similarly the purpose lives in a unit. Identical to the surface of the earth which cannot be expressed as from where it starts and where it ends, the purpose also has no beginning or end. It is the purpose, which starts and not the lower stages as such which determine the purpose. The lower stages, independent of the purpose, can lead nowhere. If these stages appear to have proceeded towards the purpose, it proves that the purpose itself is working in these stages.
Let us, therefore, keep in mind, that when we say that on completion of the preceding stage, the higher conscious values of life emerge, we mean that these new values are not determined by the lower conscious stages, but these values appear from above, that is, these follow from the Purpose. These values do not evolve rather these descend from the Purpose, which always lives with the Creator in unit.
The creation of the universe in various stages vis-à-vis the purpose behind creation may perhaps be explained by quoting a simple example of the construction of a building.
Let us suppose that our purpose is to construct a building. At the outset we will dig the foundation and then build it to the desired level. On completion of the foundation, the next stage will be the construction of walls on the foundation. Now for the construction of this new higher stage we cannot say that the foundation had itself known the purpose of this second phase of construction and, therefore, it is the foundation that has evolved the construction of walls. Similarly, in respect of the second phase of walls, we cannot say that the purpose for construction of the second phase of walls was the preceding stage of foundation. In fact, it is the overall purpose, which is the construction of the building that has brought about this second phase of construction. As the building continues to rise up step by step, the purpose continues to unfold itself. With the completion of the building the purpose stands completely unfolded and realised in the form of the building.
On the analogy of the above example, we can study the various phases of the creation of the universe. Digging up the elements, which are said to be the elementary construction blocks of the universe, completed the first phase of the universe. Aligning the infinite properties of these elements into a complete physical system completed the second phase; we call them the physical laws of the Earth. In this connection the most important thing which needs our attention is that just as each higher phase of construction fully observes and respects the limitations as laid in the preceding constructive phase of the building, similarly in the case of the creation of the universe, each higher creative stage which appears simultaneously on completion of the preceding stage fully observes and respects the values so fixed in the stage and without overthrowing them builds higher and new values as an independent creative stage over it.
Now again if we take the example of the building, we shall note that during the construction of each stage it seems that everything is in disarray. We see heaps of bricks and stones scattered at one place and at another place ditches are dug and the earth is piled along. And still at another place wood, cement and other construction materials are piled up loosely. All this shows that there is no order or discipline and that lawlessness prevails everywhere. But let us not forget that even in this state of lawlessness, the purpose continues to work and whatever the stage of construction it may be, purpose flows in each action. Accordingly, as the building continues to rise up step by step, we can see that lawlessness is replaced by order, in-discipline by discipline, and wear and tear by solid construction. Thus on completion of one phase, the second phase starts and passes through similar state of its construction and, then at the completion of the second phase, the third phase starts and so on. Now if someone takes the material and its constructive process as merely the activity of blind forces, and then as a result, when the construction appears in the shape of a beautiful building, he may consider it a mere chance or a "mechanics", he is mistaken because the lower stages are not even aware of existence of higher conscious order above it and so ignorance can never give birth to something of higher order.
The law of the universe is one -- same creative process by free will for the entire creation from particle to self-conscious man. Understand the creative process and you will understand the oneness of God. Observe how from tiny sub atomic particle to gigantic universe all are in submission to the will of God (without God lifting the finger) by free will -- those who deviate from the "Purpose" end up on extinction files.
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At whatever stage life may be, it must have consciously or unconsciously spiritual love for its Creator. At inorganic and organic stages, life satisfied this love by dividing itself into two complementary units of attraction from within. We call it polarity at inorganic stages and sex at organic stages. We should know that life is the art of the Creator and, therefore, insofar as it was not yet directly aware of its Creator, its love for itself from within through dividing its conscious attributes in two sex attraction, in fact, amounted to loving the attributes of the Creator. It is evident from the fact that it is aesthetic appreciation and love of beauty of its "own kind" which is ultimately replaced by the inferior kind of pleasure derived from the sexual act. This can be seen in the behaviour of birds and insects who are at first attracted by the beauty of colour, song, or plumage of their opposite sex. This indicates that sex instinct has been carved out of spiritual love. Had it not been carved out of spiritual love, life would not have procreated itself at all.
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Heaven and Hell are two states of the same soul, you are in hell by your own realisation that you lack the attributes which could have only be attained during your worldly stay by following God's commandments and you missed the boat.Similarly the Human Soul which comes as a clean state continue to preserve all the values and events from within and when the Self-conscious Stage as a whole reaches completion and enters a higher tier of life, every Human Soul would construct its universe under the higher enlightenment vis-à-vis the values earned by it during its worldly life. If a germ cell under the physical laws can act as a physical mind to reproduce values in minutest detail, we can be sure that Human Self or Soul which has inherent reflection of the Creator would not simply reproduce but in fact instantly bring forth events and values it lived and watch them as if played on the screen.
Last but not the least, in whatever society man may live, whatever culture he belongs to, the creative process of the Creator leaves no excuses for him that he has been deprived of the spiritual light, provided he cared to understand.
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