The Detailed Creation In The Stomach

1. Muscle link around pylorus
2. Liver
3. Inner part of stomach

Every phase of the stomach’s very detailed creation is directed towards a particular end. Food enters the stomach through a narrow entrance known as the cardia. The muscles in this gap joining the esophagus to the stomach function as a kind of valve, preventing half-digested food from returning to the esophagus. Food then moves to the spherically-shaped top of the stomach and mixes with the stomach acid there, before taking a sudden turn to enter the stomach’s widest part, known as the body.

In this area, which is shorter than the upright part above it, the stomach narrows once again and opens onto the 12 finger intestine through a passage known as the pylorus, or stomach gatekeeper. This passage at the bottom of the stomach also serves as a kind of valve, ensuring that semi-digested food leaves the stomach and moves on to the intestines. The rhythmic wave motion of the powerful stomach muscles, sited in three layers, ensures that food moves correctly from the mouth of the stomach to the pylorus. At the same time, this wave motion helps rinse the food, grinds it into smaller particles and eventually turns it into the semi-liquid mixture known as chyme. The necessity of these detailed processes will become clear in the later stages of the digestive process.

Powerful Stomach Acids Can Digest Even Razor Blades— How Are They Neutralized?

The digestive system in the stomach is very different from that in the mouth. As soon as food descends from the esophagus, cells on the stomach’s inner surface begin secreting a powerful substance known as gastric acid. Together with this substance, fluids known as pepsin and hydrochloric acid (or HCl) are also secreted, powerful enough to be able to dissolve a razor blade. But their presence is essential if such hard-to-digest substances as protein are to be assimilated. But the stomach itself consists of proteins. How is it that this powerful acid does not damage the stomach itself?

Mucus secretion protects
the stomach from acids. 

This is one of the countless examples of the creation in the human body. The stomach does not actually digest itself, because there are cells within the deep troughs in the stomach’s rough wall that possess very different properties. Maintaining a very delicate balance, some cells in the stomach secrete HCl acid, while others next to them give off a sticky fluid known as mucus, which lines the stomach wall and shields it from the acid, preventing acids and enzymes from harming the stomach’s cells. Mucus also prevents ingested viruses and other micro-organisms—which cause infections—from entering the cells, and also lubricates the passage of food through the alimentary canal.

But how do all these processes take place? How does this protective environment form within the stomach? Could the stomach cells decide on their own to produce these substances, or discovered or learned the formula for this protective mucus coating?

For cells to be able to do such a thing and for the production of the necessary substances for digestion, a number of cells must first become aware that food needs to be digested. Those same cells must also know that a substance like acid is needed for digestion to occur. Then those cells must discover the formula for HCl, the most suitable acid, and begin producing it. At the same time, for the production of the protective coating, various other cells need to establish that this acid—so powerful that one drop of it can burn a hole in a carpet—could harm them and then analyze the acid and develop a formula to neutralize it. Any error in that formula would doom the stomach to being dissolved by its own acid.

Of course, the emergence of mutually complementary substances in the stomach is by no means as simple as this summary may suggest. The determination of the formulae alone is a major phenomenon, and it’s quite impossible for any cell to arrive at a chemical formula and then use it to generate a substance. A cell consisting of unconscious atoms does not possess the necessary intellectual capability.

Above is shown a cross-section of the stomach wall.
Cells in the stomach wall, which is made up of several layers,
all have different functions. Such a detailed creation could
obviously never have come into being by chance.
It is Allah, the Omnisicent, Who creates the stomach.

Even if we transgressed the bounds of logic and assumed that human stomach acid did actually come into existence this way, still we could not expect the complementary protective substance to emerge over the course of time. It is out of the question for acids strong enough to dissolve razor to remain for as long as the 2 to 3 days they would take to destroy the stomach itself, let alone for millions of years.

Bearing all this in mind, we are confronted by one evident truth. The co-existence of hydrochloric acid, together with the mucus that protects the stomach from it, is one of the countless instances of the order in Allah’s creation. Allah has created the human body as a whole, using a flawless creation.