Pillars You Cannot See Ar-Ra'd

Quran 13:2 opens: «Allah is the One who raised the heavens without pillars that you see.» The wording is careful. It does not simply say 'without pillars,' it says 'without pillars that you see.' Classical commentators noticed this. Ibn Abbas, Mujahid, and Qatadah read the phrase to mean that there are supports, but invisible ones, holding the heavens in place. For most of history there was no way to know what such an unseen support could possibly be. Then came Isaac Newton in 1687, and later Einstein, describing gravity: a force that reaches across empty space with no visible structure of any kind, holding the moon to the earth, the planets to the sun, and the stars within their galaxies. The heavens really are held in place, suspended and governed, by something powerful and entirely invisible. The verse pointed to an unseen support for the heavens a thousand years before science found one.