Researchers have discovered life in viruses that cannot be...

Researchers have discovered life in viruses that cannot be seen even with the aid of electronic microscopes that enlarge objects millions of times; despite their invisibility even to such sophisticated devices, they have the capacity of life, motion and reproduction. Although man is able to investigate life in such infinitesimally small worlds, he can never exhaust all forms of life.

He has not yet been able to establish the exact dimensions of the genes and the chromosomes by means of which he has inherited the attributes and characteristics of his parents and ancestors. Despite this, life emerges from precisely these relatively low organisms that border on the atom.

If life can take up residence within such invisible particles, safe from all hostile forces, in such a way that no type of change is able to expel it from its refuge and destroy it, what reason is there to think that it could not be preserved over a drawn-out period in the cells of the human body that have been turned into earth? Or, to use another comparison, why should those cells not come back to life like insects that sleep through the winter?

In short, is there any obstacle at all to life ultimately re-emerging from death? The Qur'an, which encompasses in its gaze the whole vast and moving arena of life and death, compares man's restoration to life with the resurrection of the plants: “Thus We bring back to life the dead earth, and the coming back to life of the dead on the day of resurrection shall be similar.” (50:11) Or, in another verse: “God brings you forth from the ground like the plants and He will then cause you to return to the earth.

Then He will bring you forth once again from the earth” (71:17-18). In these verses, God provides those who do not believe in the hereafter with proofs taken from the sensory and material life of the world (in which, of course, they do believe) in order to demonstrate to them the reality of a future life. He answers the unbelievers with clear evidence taken from the miraculous book of nature.

Nonetheless, foolish and obstinate people disregard the instructive phenomena that surround them and close the windows of their heart on the truth. Let us listen again to the summons of the Qur'an: “Look at the dry, barren earth and see how life emerges in it when We send rain Upon it. Plants spring forth of every type. This is all indication that God speaks the truth and will revive the dead; certainly He is capable of all things **” (22:5)**.