God Arises The Challenge of The Qur’an
sign, the unbelievers turn their backs and say, ‘Ingenious magic!’24 THE QURAN EXPLAINS GEOLOGY
Geology is another field in which the Quran is truly the forerunner of modern scientific discovery. In several parts of the Quran, it is stated that the mountain were raised in order to keep the earth in equilibrium, “He raised the heavens without visible pillars and set immovable mountains on the earth lest it should shake with you” (31:10). Fifteen hundred years ago, at the time these words were recorded, man had no understanding of the importance of the mountains. It is only recently that geographers have formulated the concept of isostasy, which is defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as the “theoretical balance of all large portions of the Earth’s crust as though they were floating on a denser underlying layer, about 110 kilometers (70 miles) below the surface. Imaginary columns of equal cross-sectional area that rise from this layer to the surface are assumed to have equal weights everywhere on Earth, even though their ~ 364 ~