by VorJack
We occasionally encounter a Christian who wants us to believe that the Bible predicted all the great scientific discoveries. The beginning of Genesis is compared to the Big Bang, and the order of creation matches the appearance of life in the fossil record, and Isaiah 40:22 states that the earth is a sphere:
It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;
Has anyone ever seen a spherical tent?
But I’ve noticed that we get the occasional Muslim commentor who has the same arguments about the Quran. Furthermore, those arguments seem a touch more developed. According to Nadeem F. Paracha over at Dawn.com, there’s a reason for that: writing such claims is an entire industry.
Many Arab as well as some western academics (who were paid large sums of money and perks) were continuously invited to the rich, conservative kingdoms and asked to scribble books claiming that the Muslim holy book was punctuated with scientific truths hundreds of years before the West discovered them in their labs.
And this industry has consequences:
ranian writer, Vali Reza Nasr, is right to mourn the trend today that though most Muslims are quick to adopt western science, they simply refuse to assume a rational scientific mindset. No wonder then, for example, most Pakistanis still don’t have a clue about what the country’s only Nobel Prize winning scientist, Dr Abdus Salam, got the award for, but many are quick to quote from books written by super cranks like Harun Yahya and Maurice Bucaille, explaining how things like the Big Bang and others are endorsed in the holy book.
In addition to such claptrap, there are already books out there claiming that electricity can be generated from jinns. A whole session was organised in Islamabad in the late 1980s during the Ziaul Haq regime in which fringe crackpots (disguised as scientists) were invited by the dictator to determine the ‘speed of heaven’, and how to overcome the energy crisis with the aid of jinns!
Do the mullahs quote the “good” book to justify the nuclear program in Iran? Does the Quran teach the scientists how to build the “bomb”? Why do they look to western technology to heal the sick, power their homes and build WMD? Maybe they really should depend on the Quran and generate electricity from “jinns”….what are “jinns”….a fruit?
Jinni, Djinn and Genie are pretty much the Quran version of Angles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie
I never heard the jinni referred to by my Muslim friends as angels, only demons. In the afterlife apparently, they will do things like pour molten lead into the ears of unbelievers and such.
Well, according to Wiki they can be good or evil, depending on the individual, because they’ve free will.
But I suppose most people would think ‘em demonic.
Grammatical question:
“because they’ve free will.”
To me the contraction of “they’ve” sounds completely wrong in this tense, BUT written out as “they have,” the sentence sounds ok. Is there something about using this contraction with the present tense that isn’t ok? Alternatively, I would’ve used “they’ve got,” (imperfect tense?) which sounds completely ok. Like the first phrase, I expanded it to “they have got,” and now the sentence doesn’t sound correct anymore.
Which phrase is used should only depend on the meaning we want to convey, because that determines which tense to use; each phrase should also be correct as the contraction doesn’t change the meaning and overall grammar, right?
It’s fine, it’s just not usual. You are used to the forms that sound ok to you and not used to this contraction. They’ve is a contraction of ‘they have’. Have can be a straightforward verb in this contraction as well as the auxiliary verb that you’re used to.
*non-native English speaker who never bothered to learn the language’s grammar beyond the basics is now curious* Will check!
“Native English speaker says it’s perfectly acceptable”
See number 4:
http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000136.htm
Yup……fruits…..just as I thought. The whole subject is fruity!
I have never seen a spherical tent. However, I camp every summer in a circular one (modeled after the Mongolian ger or yurt). If one were religious, one might argue that this corresponds very nicely to the “circle of the earth”.
But it is, after all, a Far East Asian tent design, and not one that would have been found in the Middle East of Isaiah’s time, as far as I know. And as I am not religious, I am not going to lie awake at night pondering the signficance of circular tents, other than to note that they are very well designed indeed to hold up against strong winds. Clever Mongols!
I have an igloo type tent and if you don’t anchor it properly to the ground and a wind flip it over then the bottom can sometimes bulge making it sort of kind of a sphere.
What about a human hamster ball?
The yurt weighs several hundred pounds, and requires only four small stakes at the corners of the roof canvas, and the presence of mind to close the door during high winds so that the wind does not lift the canvas from underneath or release compression on the rafters. Sure, it’s a lot of work to lug around and set up, but I camp for two weeks at a stretch (only once a year) and it’s worth it. The 200 square feet of unobstructed floor space is pretty sweet, too.
I know a guy in Vermont who lives year-round in a yurt in a sheep pasture. No it isn’t much of a house by some standards but it is comfy and rent-free.
I see no sphere in the description, only if I stretch my imagination then at best I would be half a sphere.
I guess that if you have a book with enough fairy tales, and enough fluffy, flowery language, then it won’t be hard to occasionally find a story – or a single phrase – that can be read to “predict” some later scientific discovery. With hindsight.
How many of those scientific discoveries were actually based upon or driven by the fairy story (ie, the scientist followed what the story said and identified something new and previously unknown) and how many stories were later seen to be “accurate predictions”?
I ask a similar question.
Is jinn power count as a renewable energy source. Do you think I can get the government to put some stimulus money into my magic desert spirit based get rich fast scheme?
Back in my days as a Christian 30 years ago I found myself, for a variety of reasons, friends with a number of Muslim students from a variety of different nations. Nearly universal across borders, however, was the belief and constant insistence on their part that the Koran was– in addition to being the greatest work of literature and poetry in the history of mankind (but only if read in the original Arabic)– the greatest science book ever written. They were also quick to point out the many contributions Islam actually had made to scientific advance over the centuries as well, though usually neglected to acknowledge that most of these contributions were built on an inheritance they had wrested from various pre-Islamic cultures in areas conquered by Muslim armies across Greek Asia, Syria, Persia, and Egypt.
One thing I will say for them– the Islamic nut is a hard one to crack.
Nut is right!….totally nutty!
Well michael, your previous comments have linked fruitiness and nuttiness, so if we can establish flakeyness then…
Granola O’ Akbar!!
Yum…I think…..as long as it isn’t made in China!
The science of the Quran is probably even more shoddy than the Bible. It states repeatedly that the Sun orbits the Earth. Sura 36:40: “It is not for the sun to overtake the moon, nor doth the night outstrip the day. They float each in an orbit.”
But of course it’s just meant to be allegorical and besides it’s technically correct in some roundabout way and blah blah…
… and Isaiah 40:22 states that the earth is a sphere:
“It is he who sits above the circle of the earth”
Note to the geometrically challenged: a circle is not the same as a sphere.
Once they’re done with history the Texas board of education can get around to rewriting geometry in the light of the buybull’s superior understanding.
If they don’t like your silly semantics of using actual definitions, you can always concede that they are the same… Doing so then allows you to talk about any n-dimensional sphere. It’s fun telling this to xtians who don’t know enough math for this, I like to see how long it takes for their eyes to glaze over. xD
Actually there is no “industry” around that. It went popular especially in the very late 70s and early 80s when the clergy tried to stop the “westernization” of the youth.
They feared that young people would discard religion and switch over to modern, scientific western world view. Hence they tried all to bring religion into agreement with science in order to have those folks stay with the religion.
I spoke and mailed several scientists that are often quoted in such sites and THEIR take on what happened in those times is quite different from the statements that they supposedly made at that time.
So according to the holy books, what is the mass of the Higs particle? The god particle must surely be described in there.
No doubt if it/they are discovered it will turn out that by constructing some formula using arbitrary numbers from the Bible you can find the Higgs’ mass. Though for some reason this formula will not be discovered until after the fact.
Actually that would be the “Allah Particle” under Islam…