The Cynical Qu'ranic Revisionism of the Islamic Scholars

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Rx-nrn4NQ[/youtube]

Since modern discoveries of an expansionary Universe, a rather nasty tendency's developed among Muslim Qu'ran translators to rephrase Surah 51:47 (or "Sura" 51:47) as being about "growth" or "expasion" in respects to the Universe, while the historically precedented translation merely notes that the Universe is "vast".

I love the Islamic attempts to claim their holy book contains scientific truths only recently discovered. The mental acrobatics they have to perform to make their case are quite entertaining.

For instance, did you know the Koran describes the Big Bang? And also correctly states that all life is made out of water? (Which, incidentally, is not correct... it would be impressive if it said all life was made out of coal, but the claim made is a stretch at best) Oddly enough, the culture that was allegedly blessed with a book that practically spoon-fed them all the great scientific truths of the universe are still living like Medieval European peasants, and the West invented airplanes.

Also, before anyone credits the Muslims with inventing algebra: Christians invented calculus. Neener neener.

But there is Leibniz ....

I'll say this, learning Kali the Moro (Filipino Muslim) sword techniques are no joke. I'll give them full respect on knowing their way around a barong or kukri, I suppose the Muslims also had a great deal of scientific progress - per history - a little before the middle ages. The trouble is - Christianity decided to keep tracing the world that the creator created, or at least they phrased science in this way so thus it was acceptable, however for some reason Islam's desire to do so folded back on itself somewhere along the way. My best guess is that, for Islam not to have been the founding and currently the most progressive achievers with the sciences (jihad I'm sure would be quite a powerful tool there), they must have run into some very hard truths in the data about their own beliefs. For Christianity that took a bit longer and there's still enough debate in the direction that evolution and old earth/universe are not necessarily problematic.

You know, I am not sure the degree to which you can say that the puritans have just accepted the book as it is. Frankly, I have my doubts that they did. I also have my doubts that they ever could.

I dunno, I assume that this is your statement, and I also would guess that you are just asserting that Christianity is a harsh religion that sucks more than you really are making a deep theological statement.

The most favorite of the Greco Roman astronomers and cosmologists in the Islamic domains was none other than Ptolemy. The Arabic translation of Ptolemy's earth centered cosmology The Almagest was a best seller in the land of Islam (Al Magest was Arabo-Greek for The Greatest) back in the days, when the Islamic scholars were making genuine contributions to the knowledge of culture of mankind. The Muslims took great pride in how the Q'ran presaged and foreshadowed the work of the great Ptolemy complete with Earth as the center of the cosmos.

I am inclined to cut the Islamic scholars of that day some slack. They saved a great deal of Greek philosophy and culture from being lost and forgotten. It was the return of this legacy to Europe in the High Middle Ages (around the 12 th century c.e.) that seeded the fields for the Renaissance. We owe them for that.

ruveyn

Islam was in its golden age when Europe was in its dark age.
Europe began to emerge out of its dark age when Islamic civilization began to stagnate.

Europe's rise was largely inspired by knowledge transmited to Europe from the Islamic world
Knowlege preserved from the ancient Greco Roman World, knowledge from contemporay civilizations like Hindu India ( the decimal numbers system, and the concept of "zero"), and the moslems also did produce some innovations of their own- like algebra.

An Arab philosopher built on the ideas of the ancient greek philosopher Democritus.

Democratis suggested that all matter is made up of "atoms". The latter arab opined that if you could split an atom it would release a vast amount of energy. You could use the said energy to build a bomb that could destroy a large city " the size of Bagdad."

So the arabs were not scientific slackers by pre-20th centurey standards.
Indeed they played a part in paving the way for the 20th centurey.
But saying that modern science is all presaged in the Koran is a different subject.

Muslim fundies seem to take the opposite tack that christian fundies do.
Christian fundies go against the grain of modern science and fight against it by proposing theories that involve the Earth being cloaked in a layer of cosmic water balloons that all bursted on cue in time to cause Noah's flood and other imaginative mental constructs that they manage produce very little evidence to support.

The Islamic fundies seem to go with the grain of modern science, and then claim it was all in the Koran all along.
Although I doubt muslim fundies are anymore fond of Darwin than are Christian fundies.
I wonder if any muslim has read evolution into the words of Koran?

But I digress.

This putting modern science into the Koran thing is much like the prophecies of Nostradamus.
Nostradamus mentions the name "Pasteur" centuries before a scientist named "Pastuer" makes a major scientific breakthrough. A centurey after this latter Louis "Pastuer" we are all convinced that this famous man named Pasteur (who is now a houshold name) was "mentioned by name" centuries ahead of his time by Nostradums!
But if you read the actual Nostradamus passage it says something like "the lost object will be found". Its actually talking about a lost relic of a medeaval saint being found in a locale called "Pasteur".
The famous scientists discoveries had to do with microbes and health, and had nothing to do with finding any "lost object".

So this "prophesy" by Nostradamus is more in the eyes of modern beholders than it is in the actual words of Nostradamus.

Likewise if you tweek your translation of the Koran a little, and put a little bit of your own spin on intrepreting its words - you could shoehorn almost anything you want into the Koran- including any breaking scientific discovery on the cover of Scientific American.

And you can always find something in your day that resembles your daily horoscope.

Can we count how many people have been identified as the Antichrist?