Hold up your hand. Look at the end of your index finger.

There is nothing visually spectacular about it. A little skin, a nail, flesh and bone.

Yet when the Qur’an challenges the human being who doubts resurrection, it chooses this seemingly insignificant extremity:

“Does man think that We will not assemble his bones? Yes. We are able even to proportion his fingertips.”

The Arabic banān refers to the fingers or their extremities. There is no need to force this into the familiar claim that the Qur’an predicted fingerprint identification.

The actual statement is more fundamental. The human being asks whether his body can be reconstructed after death. The answer descends all the way to the extremity: even his fingertips.

A famous statement attributed to Isaac Newton expresses a similar sense of wonder:

“In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.”

The quotation is widely attributed to Newton, but its authenticity is uncertain. It appears in nineteenth-century writing about the hand, without a traceable passage in Newton’s own works. It is therefore better understood as a traditional attribution rather than a verified quotation.

Newton’s documented reflections on creation, however, are unmistakable. In the General Scholium of his Principia, he wrote:

“This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”

Newton had described the mathematical laws governing celestial motion. Yet, in his own philosophical and theological understanding, explaining those laws did not eliminate the question of their ultimate origin.

The same distinction becomes fascinating when we examine the human hand.

What happens when you touch something?

Touch the table in front of you.

Subjectively, almost nothing happens. Biologically, an extraordinary cascade begins.

The skin of the fingertip deforms. Embedded within it are specialised mechanosensory structures. Merkel-associated afferents contribute to detecting sustained pressure, edges and form. Meissner-associated afferents respond to movement across the skin. Pacinian afferents are exceptionally sensitive to vibration, while Ruffini-associated afferents respond to skin stretch.

These sensory systems do not simply tell the brain that something has been touched. They provide different kinds of information about the interaction.

At the molecular level, mechanically activated ion channels, including PIEZO2, help convert deformation into electrical signalling.

Skin bends. Molecular channels respond. Ions move. A sensory neuron changes its electrical state.

The signals travel along nerve fibres, which are organised into bundles within peripheral nerves. Sensory information reaches the spinal cord and brain, where it is integrated with vision, proprioception and the intended movement.

Motor commands travel back towards the muscles. Muscles contract. Tendons transmit force. Fingers adjust.

Consider picking up a glass.

The nervous system must apply enough force to prevent slipping. If the glass moves against the skin, tactile feedback changes and grip force is adjusted.

Too little force and the glass falls. Too much and a sufficiently fragile object breaks.

Exactly enough, and nothing remarkable appears to happen.

A toddler can pick up a blueberry without knowing its mass, coefficient of friction or structural strength.

Now try building a machine capable of doing the same thing reliably across thousands of unfamiliar objects.

Elon Musk and the Optimus hand

That is one of the challenges Tesla encountered while developing its Optimus humanoid robot.

In a 2024 discussion, Elon Musk described how building a humanoid hand had made Tesla’s engineers appreciate the anatomical arrangement of the human hand.

Why five........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)