Islam & science

[omartarik2006]

Related to this Topic , I would like to discuss the relation between Islam and science .The confrontation between the Quran and scientific data has always provided me with food for thought.I always held the belief that corroboration between the scriptures and science was a necessary element to the authenticity of the sacred text .Since We cannot, after all, accept a "divine" Revelation making statements which are totally inaccurate.
I would like to start by these verses :"Alif, Lam, Mim. The Romans have been defeated in the lowest land ,but after their defeat they will be victorious within few years. The affair is Allah's from beginning to end. "(Qur'an, 30:1-4).
Historically ,we know that the Quran was revealed during approximately 23 years ( 610 -632 AD),the Roman -Persian wars , wich is the longest war ever between two entities in History occurred in Syria , parts of Mesopotamia and specifically around Jerusalem (= the Dead Sea Basin.)
Only recently , using topographic maps, science has affirmed this scientific truth: the Lowest point on land is the Dead Sea with −417 m, it was already revealed to an illiterate Prophet 1400 years ago.
Any comments or rectifications are welcomed.

[McCulloch]

Let me state another revealing verse quoted from Surat Yussuf/Joseph:
When Joseph said unto his father: O my father! Lo! I saw in a dream eleven planets and the sun and the moon, I saw them prostrating themselves unto me..

Isn't that amazing! An ancient writer agrees with a count of the planets using modern but arbitrary definition. Yes, so what?

[Goat]

Let me state another revealing verse quoted from Surat Yussuf/Joseph:
When Joseph said unto his father: O my father! Lo! I saw in a dream eleven planets and the sun and the moon, I saw them prostrating themselves unto me..

Isn't that amazing! An ancient writer agrees with a count of the planets using modern but arbitrary definition. Yes, so what?

But, has to combine two different classes of planets, planets, and 'dwarf planets'. Not only that, within the year, there should be several other 'dwarf planets' designated. Then it gets thrown off. Wheee.

[juliod]

The sad part about this thread, and I mean the really sad part, is that this insistance on finding scientific facts in the koran that aren't actually there ignores the important and substantial contribution the islamic world made to the development of western science.

I mean, the fact that the whole world uses arabic numerals (rather than greek, roman, or chinese) speaks infinitely more than these mistranslations of the prophet.

DanZ

[Cathar1950]

The sad part about this thread, and I mean the really sad part, is that this insistance on finding scientific facts in the koran that aren't actually there ignores the important and substantial contribution the islamic world made to the development of western science.

I mean, the fact that the whole world uses arabic numerals (rather than greek, roman, or chinese) speaks infinitely more than these mistranslations of the prophet.

DanZ

They also were the most learned in Medicine, Mathematics and Greek.
The Christians leaders were keeping Europe in the dark ages.
If they had not tried to take Palestine and stop the Turks the Europeans would still not know about soap.
Yet the desire to make the Koran scientific to prove it is divine is much like their Christian brothers and seems silly.

[MrWhy]

Related to this Topic , I would like to discuss the relation between Islam and science .The confrontation between the Quran and scientific data has always provided me with food for thought.I always held the belief that corroboration between the scriptures and science was a necessary element to the authenticity of the sacred text .Since We cannot, after all, accept a "divine" Revelation making statements which are totally inaccurate.
I would like to start by these verses :"Alif, Lam, Mim. The Romans have been defeated in the lowest land ,but after their defeat they will be victorious within few years. The affair is Allah's from beginning to end. "(Qur'an, 30:1-4).
Historically ,we know that the Quran was revealed during approximately 23 years ( 610 -632 AD),the Roman -Persian wars , wich is the longest war ever between two entities in History occurred in Syria , parts of Mesopotamia and specifically around Jerusalem (= the Dead Sea Basin.)
Only recently , using topographic maps, science has affirmed this scientific truth: the Lowest point on land is the Dead Sea with −417 m, it was already revealed to an illiterate Prophet 1400 years ago.
Any comments or rectifications are welcomed.

If there were no other interpretations for the words, and the text had said the lowest that exists, then you might have a small claim. Using the simplest explanation approach, I would say the text meant the lowest land the author was aware of, or the lowest in the area. Unless the text had said the lowest land that exists, or the lowest in our world, etc., we don't know if it revealed god-like knowledge or not. Unless the text also said the purpose was to reveal non-human knowledge, we should not read that into it. In choosing your interpretation you have selected the most complex mysterious explanation, instead of a more reasonable one. All scripture prophecies and supernatural info suffer from a common weakness. The absence of specific places, dates, names etc. Without specific information they cannot be validated. And this does mean scriptues contain no information that required divine revelation.

Is the part that said "they will be victorious again in a few years" true? Wouldn't that depend on which defeat we're talking about? After the last defeat they were not victorious again. If this was written after Rome had fallen, then they were not victorious again. Incorrect information. If it was written after some of the other Roman defeats, then a subsequent Roman victory probably had occurred before the scripture text was written. Something written after the fact is not a prediction.

One final comment. The fact that only Muslims and Christians believe in their scripture prophecies indicates how weak they are. No one but a Muslim will think this is foretold scientific knowledge. If they had specifics and detail they would be much less controversial. A solid valid prophecy would not be hard to sell.

[Rob]

Omar,

Perhaps you would find McMenamin's The Garden of Ediacara interesting.

In the final analysis, Bergson must be right. Intuition trumps reason.... As Paul Feyeraband pointed out in 1988, “Modern science survived only because reason was frequently overruled.” [See p. 7 in P. Feyeraband, Against Method (London: Verso, 1998).] (McMenamin 1998: 267)

My colleagues and I had come to the Pensacola Mountains of Antartica to study how the two geologic subdivisions--East and West--of the icy contenent relate to each other. East Antarctica is an old Precambrian shield lying to the south of Australia, India and Africa; West Antarctica is part of the geologically young and active volcanic "ring of fire" that surrounds the Pacific Ocean. The uplifted rim of the East Antarctic shield meets West Antarctica along the Transantarctic Mountains, of which the Pensocolas form a northern extension.... (Dalziel 1995: 58)

The boundary between the two rock types exposed in the Pensacola Mountains is one of the most fundamental in the earth's history. After the birth of the planet 4.5 billion years ago came the four-billion-year-long interval of time known as the Precambrian. Toward the end of this era--about 750 million years ago, while the first soft-bodied, multicellular creatures were developing--the brown sandstones of the underlying Patuxent Formation we had just sighted were deposited. The strata were laid down in a rift valley that opened within the continental shield. As the rift deepended, rivers poured in, dropping their eroded soils onto the valley floor. (Dalziel 1995: 58)

About 540 million years ago, an explosion of multicellular animal life ushered in the Cambrian period. Myriad cone-shaped skeletons of the creature Archaeocyatha collected in shallow seas that had advanced over the sandstone. These formed a reef along the rim of East Antarctica that was eventually transformed into limestone. (The cap on the Patuxent Formation is called the Nelson Limestone.) Because Archaeocyatha was a warm-water animal, what is now the western margin of the East Antarctic shield must have been situated in tropical latitudes during the Cambrian. (Dalziel 1995: 58)

The rifting even that led to the Patuxent sandstones' being deposited reflects the separation of East Antarctica from some other continental landmass. The divergence opened the Pacific Ocean basin about 750 million years ago. (Subsequently, igneous rocks from island volcanoes and material scraped off the subducting ocean floor accreted onto East Antarctica, forming West Antarctica.) This rifting occured long before the supercontinent Pangea--from which the present continents broke off--was formed. Pangea was assembled only at the end of the Paleozoic era, approximately 250 million years ago. It started to fragment during the Jurassic period of the Mesozoic era, approximatley 170 million years ago, creating the Atlantic and other young ocean basins. (Dalziel 1995: 58-59)

(....) Within Pangea there are some ancient continental margins that have no obvious counterparts. The Pacific margins of North and South America, Antarctica and Australia were all formed near the end of the Precambrian, between 750 and 550 million years ago. The Appalachian margin of Laurentia--the ancestral shield of North America--also rifted away from another continent at that time. Since Wilson asked his famous question, the counterpert to this margin has usually been assumed to ahve been western Europe and north-western Africa. But there is no firm evidence for such a juxtaposition. (Dalziel 1995: 60)

In 1989 I led another field trip to Antarctica, as part of the International Geological Congress hosted by the U.S. The object of the trip was to help bring Antarctic geology, long the private domain of a very small group of especially hardy souls (even among geologists!), into the mainstream of global earth science. Experts on the Himalayas, the European Alps, the Appalachians, the Rockies and many other regions participated. (Dalziel 1995: 60)

Soon after, one of these scientists, Eldridge M. Moorres, was browsing in the library of the University of California at Davis when he came across a short article by Richard T. Bell and Charles W. Jefferson of the Geological Survey of Canada. They pointed out similarities between Precambrian strata in western Canada and eastern Australia and concluded that the Pacific margins of Candada and Australia might have been juxtaposed. Sensitized by his recent trip, Moores realized this would imply that the Pacific margins of hte U.S. and Antarctica had been juxtaposed, a thought similar to my own. After some quick library research, he sent me a map highlighting the structural parallels in interiors of the Laurentian and East Antarctic shields. "Is this crazy?" he asked. (Dalziel 1995: 60)

Similarities in the internal structures of displaced continents can be powerful evidence of former juxtaposition. (Dalziel 1995: 60) [Alfred Wegner noted this fact too!]

-- Dalziel, Ian W. wip. Earth before Pangea. Scientific American. 1995 Jan; 272(1):58-63.

Abstract:

In recent years, two end-member models for the formation of supercontinents have emerged. In the classical Wilson cycle, oceanic crust generated during supercontinent breakup (the interior ocean) is consumed during subsequent amalgamation so that the supercontinent turns "inside in" (introversion). Alternatively, following supercontinent breakup, the exterior margins of the dispersing continental fragments collide during reassembly so that the supercontinent turns "outside in" (extroversion). These end-member models can be distinguished by comparing the Sm-Nd crust-formation ages of accreted mafic complexes (e.g., ophiolites) in the collisional orogens formed during supercontinent assembly with the breakup age of the previous supercontinent. For supercontinents generated by introversion, these crust-formation ages postdate rifting of the previous supercontinent. For supercontinents generated by extroversion, the oceanic lithosphere consumed during reassembly predates breakup of the previous supercontinent, so that crust-formation ages of accreted mafic complexes are older than the age of rifting. In the Paleozoic Appalachian-Caledonide-Variscan orogen, a key collisional orogen in the assembly of Pangea, crust-formation ages of accretionary mafic complexes postdate the formation of the Iapetus Ocean (i.e., are younger than ca. 0.6 Ga), suggesting supercontinent reassembly by introversion. By contrast, the Neoproterozoic East African and Brasiliano orogens, which formed during the amalgamation of Gondwana, are characterized by mafic complexes with crust-formation ages (ca. 0.75-1.2 Ga) that predate the ca. 750 Ma breakup of Rodinia. Hence, these complexes must have formed from lithosphere in the exterior ocean that surrounded Rodinia, implying that this ocean was consumed during the amalgamation of Gondwana. These data indicate that Pangea and Gondwana were formed by introversion and extroversion, respectively, implying that supercontinents can be assembled by fundamentally distinct geodynamic processes.

-- Murphy, J. Brendan and R. Damian Nance. Do supercontinents introvert or extrovert? Sm-Nd isotope evidence. Geology. 2003 Oct; 31(10):873(4).

Current paleomagnetic data usually only allow testing of Rodinia paleogeographic relationships between two or three continents at discrete time intervals (11). However, for 750 million years ago, data exist from at least seven continents or microcontinents. Recent Rodinia models show a more dynamic planet at 750 million years ago than previously realized. If Rodinia formed 1100 to 1000 million years ago, the demise of the supercontinent probably occurred before 750 million years ago. Disruption likely began with the opening of an ocean between western Laurentia and Australia-East Antarctica (right panel). The East Gondwana landmass could not have been a coherent block 750 million years ago

-- Trosvik, Trond H. The Rodinia jigsaw puzzle. Science. 2003 May 30; 300(5624): 1379(3).

Other major examples [of rifting supercontinents] include aulacogens and related rifts developed in North America shortly after the breakup of Rodinia at ~800-700 Ma. (Rogers et al. 2004: 97)

Separation of blocks in Rodinia probably occurred mostly between 800-600 Ma. (Rogers et al. 2004: 103)

-- Rogers, J. W. and Santosh M. Continents and Supercontinents. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2004; p. 97; 103.