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Aaliyyah

Islam and the Big Bang

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Garnaqsi   

LOL! Harun Yahya should stop telling people gibberish and stick to what he really studied -- which was, wait, what? That's right, how to paint people's houses! It does my head in when people who wouldn't know what the limit definition of derivative looks like preach people about cosmology! You can get away with any crap though when your audience is largely ignorant of the concerned subject. I remember the one time when he (for brevity, perhaps) took a step forward and sent copies of his nonsense to biologists and got laughed at (mainly because he got almost everything wrong, even mistaking sea snake for an eel lol). He's the biggest joke around!

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Blessed   

Personally, I'm not a fan of HY, there are many scientific and Islamic fiqh errors in his books. His notions of creation being imagined is just odd and goes against the teaching of our deen. I advise Muslims to take the message in his writings / videos with a pinch of salt.

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Chimera   

^Apophis, without the conservation projects by the early Muslims most of these so-called discoveries would have disappeared with their civilizations, only a tiny fraction was preserved in Byzantium, so your statement is highly ironic. Secondly they are acknowledged in that same article:

 

This may contribute to the formulation of a judgment for the inquiring minds, probing whether the Quran is God’s revelation or not. We have, on the one hand, Muhammad in the desert, neither a philosopher nor a physicist, and, on the other hand, the assumptions of great thinkers and philosophers such as Aristotle, Ptolemy,Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, to name but a few. The greatest minds in history, basing their arguments on observations and formulas they had ingeniously devised, claimed either that the universe had its confines or that it was an endless space, but it occurred to none of them to think of a dynamic expanding universe, until the 20th century when Edwin Hubble, by means of a telescope, demonstrated that the universe was expanding. The theory of expansion of the universe was first advanced in the 1920s. Until the descent of the Quran no other source had made such an assertion!

Do you have an example of a pre-Hubble scholar with the theory of an dynamic expanding universe?

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Chimera   

You're employing verbal acrobatics, Apophis. If the Torah or Bible had a specific verse about a distant planet with an intelligent life-form (including descriptions of their phenotype and culture), and let's say in two hundred years time this planet and population was found by humans when space-travel has matured. The Jews and the Christians would have every right to refer to this discovery - mentioned thousands of years before the landing on the moon - as a miracle.

 

You're superimposing your own 'non-religious' view upon others.

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Garnaqsi   

Chimera;858073 wrote:
You're employing verbal acrobatics, Apophis. If the Torah or Bible had a specific verse about a distant planet with an intelligent life-form (including descriptions of their phenotype and culture), and let's say in two hundred years time this planet and population was found by humans when space-travel has matured. The Jews and the Christians would have every right to refer to this discovery - mentioned thousands of years before the landing on the moon - as a
miracle
.

But of course we would be skeptical of their claim if they had tweaked their translation after the actual discovery of the planet. Go and read Ibn Kathir or any other old commentary/translation of the Koran. You will find they say no such a thing. Forming a religious position (or providing a translation/interpretation yielding as such) to claim a credit for something after it's been established by some other means is not only wrong scientifically but it's morally pathetic as well. You can't just tweak the Koran's 'meaning' like that just to make it match modern science and then claim it as a miracle of sorts that demonstrates the Koran's validity as divine work! No!

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Garnaqsi   
To be honest, I find it strange that Muslims have no problem with the Koran's meaning being tweaked to match modern science. It seems people like Ibn Kathir are no longer considered as authorities on Koran's meaning and instead Harun Yahya and Zakir Naik brigade has taken over. Aaliyah's link says the Koran states that the earth is shaped like an ostrich egg. I remember this being posted on this website and I've challenged people to find a translation/commentary before the 20th century that says as such, as all the old ones (and even most contemporary ones like Shakir, Pickthall, Yusuf Ali) mention no egg or anything close to it (even the Somali one has the historical translation). Tellingly, no-one has met the challenge yet.

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guerilla   

Apophis;858109 wrote:
^^ The mystery disappears when you realise for the religious
FAITH IS A FACT!!

 

Surely a system lord would be ecstatic about that.

 

Sincerely

 

Jaffa

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Chimera   

Garnaqsi;858103 wrote:
But of course we would be skeptical of their claim if they had tweaked their translation after the actual discovery of the planet. Go and read Ibn Kathir or any other old commentary/translation of the Koran. You will find they say no such a thing. Forming a religious position (or providing a translation/interpretation yielding as such) to claim a credit for something after it's been established by some other means is not only wrong scientifically but it's morally pathetic as well. You can't just tweak the Koran's 'meaning' like that just to make it match modern science and then claim it as a miracle of sorts that demonstrates the Koran's validity as divine work! No!

That's illogical, its tantamount to dismissing Hero's early steam engine because two thousand years ago the world didn't understand the complexities of steam-power that was perfected by the British. Hero had no idea he was messing with the concept of 'steam' as we know it, instead his understanding was limited as was his device. In the Quranic verse, the revelation is direct to the point but at the same time limited, anymore than that was not necessary, because the followers of Islam - inspired by their religious literature - in their own right would make ground-breaking discoveries, the almost perfect circumference of the earth is a good example.

 

What you and Apophis demand however is an entire green board explanation about the sphere of the earth in that same verse, which is silly, because the literature in the end is a guideline on how to best worship your Lord, not a science class. Yet, a simple description of the shape of the earth in an ancient book will most certainly have ramifications on 'modern science', and this isn't something you can just dismiss as 'nothing'.

 

You say no one has met your challenge, but can you read Arabic? or Latin? Many early medieval Islamic geographical works have not yet been translated but are referenced only in name. The likes of Ibn Rustu (10th century), did refer to the world as being spherical or egg-shaped, when most thought it was flat. Is it a coincidence that he would come to that conclusion? Not at all, the Quran inspired him along with ancient literature, the same way eventually early modern scholars would pick up Islamic literature and the preserved Greco-Roman sources that ushered in the renaissance and enlightenment periods.

 

Nothing morally wrong about a religious group feeling proud about their concrete contribution to human civilization.

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Garnaqsi   

Chimera;858209 wrote:
That's illogical, its tantamount to dismissing Hero's early steam engine because two thousand years ago the world didn't understand the complexities of steam-power that was perfected by the British. Hero had no idea he was messing with the concept of 'steam' as we know it, instead his understanding was limited as was his device. In the Quranic verse, the revelation is direct to the point but at the same time limited, anymore than that was not necessary, because the followers of Islam - inspired by their religious literature - in their own right would make ground-breaking discoveries, the almost perfect circumference of the earth is a good example.

 

What you and Apophis demand however is an entire green board explanation about the sphere of the earth in that same verse, which is silly, because the literature in the end is a guideline on how to best worship your Lord, not a science class. Yet, a simple description of the shape of the earth in an ancient book will most certainly have ramifications on 'modern science', and this isn't something you can just dismiss as 'nothing'.

 

You say no one has met your challenge, but can you read Arabic? or Latin? Many early medieval Islamic geographical works have not yet been translated but are referenced only in name. The likes of Ibn Rustu (10th century), did refer to the world as being spherical or egg-shaped, when most thought it was flat. Is it a coincidence that he would come to that conclusion? Not at all, the Quran inspired him along with ancient literature, the same way eventually early modern scholars would pick up Islamic literature and the preserved Greco-Roman sources that ushered in the renaissance and enlightenment periods.

 

Nothing morally wrong about a religious group feeling proud about their concrete contribution to human civilization.

You have missed the point by miles and miles! Whether the Koran inspired Muslim scientists or not is altogether a different matter as to whether there is truth to these alleged scientific miracles. My point was that all these interpretations came after science, and hence are guilty of hindsight bias, and therefore one is justified in being skeptical about them. I'm not demanding for there to have been a complete and through explanation; it's just that there wasn't any in there at all, until these interpretations were devised after science. You have every right to be proud of whatever contributions Muslims have made to science, but there is nothing to be proud of giving Koranic verses a meaning that wasn't there for more than thousand years. It's just ridiculous and really morally abhorrent.

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