The Miraculous Atom: The Building Block of All Things

When a living thing dies, its atoms disperse and become components of something else, such as a tree, a bacterium, or a raindrop. These fundamental building blocks of absolutely everything are so minute that 500,000 of them laid one on top of the other could still be hidden behind a single hair. In other words, it is next to impossible to imagine just how small one atom is. The following comparison may be cited to allow us to understand this:

A millimeter is a line this long “- ”. Let us imagine that you have divided that line into 1000 equal parts. Each one of these parts is 1 micron long. This is the size of micro-organisms. A typical paramecium is 2 microns in size. In other words, it is really minuscule. If you wanted to see this organism inside a drop of water you would have to magnify the drop so that it was 12 m (39.4 ft) or so in diameter. Yet if you wanted to see the atoms in that same drop of water you would have to make it 24 km (14.91 miles) in diameter. To put it another way, atoms exist on an entirely different size dimension. In order to go down to the atomic level you would have to take each one of these 1-micron slivers and further subdivide them 10,000 times. The size of an atom is this: One 10 millionth of a millimeter. The following comparison will help us understand this better: The size of an atom compared to a line just 1 mm(0.0393 in) in length is equivalent to that of the thickness of a piece of paper compared to the height of the Empire State Building, one of the tallest buildings in the USA. (Bryson, A Short History, p. 135.)

By His will, everything that exists is made up of atoms of this incredible size. Even more amazingly, 99.9999% of each atom is actually empty. The only reason why atoms combine to form molecules is the presence of electrons, which take up only a minute space inside this mass that is 99.9999% empty. That is what lies behind the existence of the universe, suns, lions, rabbits, mountains, skyscrapers, planes, human beings, and everything else.       

Is there any possibility that a scientist who investigates his own cells and his own atoms in the laboratory could produce a single atom? Of course not, for scientists are still very far away from discovering all of the details of subatomic particles. That being the case, the sublime might and creative artistry of Allah, Who creates galaxies billions of kilometers in size out of components just one 10 millionth of a millimeter in size, is clear for all thinking people to see.

Almighty Allah creates entities by telling them to Be! and bestows miraculous details upon them. Everything constituted by atoms, meaning all that exists, is a great proof of this wondrous creation:

It is He Who created the heavens and Earth with truth. The day He says ‘Be!’ it is. His speech is Truth. The Kingdom will be His on the Day the Trumpet is blown, the Knower of the Unseen and the Visible. He is the All-Wise, the All-Aware. (Surat al-An‘am, 73)