Solo

Well, I don't like Islam the way Karen Armstrong or John L. Esposito or you like Islam, that is for sure.

As for the difference of being a Moslem or being an Arab, I gave you a pretty good resource.

Jiri

Malachi151

Look, no one here is saying anything bad about Muslims or Arabs.

We are simply stating the facts about where their knowledge came from, and why it is that there are some ideas in the Koran that seem very "modern".

All people basically have aquired knowledge from some other group of people, built on the shoulders of others.

The OP had a specific question: "What about this into in the Koran that Muslims claim proves that the Koran was inspired by God because it had 'advanced knolwedge' that is compatable with modern science".

No is one saying "Arabs are stupid", we are just saying that the ideas in the Koran about things like "evolution" and "atoms", gravity, etc., have clear precedends in ancient knowledge.

Muslims today are claiming that this information in the Koran "came from God".

The Koran was written in the 7th or 8th century, yet these idas pre-date that time by almost 1,000 years, and we KNOW FOR A FACT that the Arab world of the Muslims was introduced to these ideas, which came from the Greeks origionally (which may have come to them in part from some others, Carthagenians or something), by people who were fleeing the Christian persecutions in the Roman Empire.

Islam is really a sort of branch of ancient "heretical" Christianity mixed with various elements of "pagan" philosophy and some elements of Arab tribal laws and culture.

The Muslims who want to claim that "the ideas espoused in the Koran prove that it was inspired by God", have to deal with the historical facts, which clearly show that these ideas had existed in ancient civilization for around a thousand years before the Koran was written.

What makes the Muslim claim appear to be true is that Christianized Western Civilization "forgot" (banned, destroyed, and covered up) the ancient knowledge of the civilized world, so it seems to Western eyes that ideas like atomic theory, evolution, inheritance, an expansive universe, etc., are "new ideas", but thery aren't, these are ideas that have been around for thousands of years, long before Christianity and long before Islam, and long before modern science.

The pre-Christian world was essentially, modern. The modern world is built on ancient pre-Christian ideas.

If you are not aware of this, then it can seem like ideas in the Koran were "advanced and ahead of their time", but in reality they were not, and we have very solid explanations for where these ideas in the Koran came from, and "God" is not the anwser.

Roger Pearse

The term for these people is 'Christians.'

Well, we have seen them in this thread, copying all the works of Aristotle and translating them into Syriac, and then into Arabic; translating the Isagogue of Porphyry, the works of Galen; preserving 95% of all ancient literature that survives, including all the histories and all the pagan mythology, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod, Petronius, most of the works of Julian the Apostate and Porphyry and Plotinus, etc etc.

I was looking at a discussion of Syriac manuscripts in the British Library, drawn up by Christian-hater Ernest Renan in 1852 in the Journal Asiatique in the days when he was still an honest orientalist, and it contains page after page of literature on philosophy and science, both extracted from the past and developed.

This idea would surprise Christians like Severus Sebokht greatly, since he writes against pagan astrology -- astronomy could hardly come into existence while people were worshipping the stars. Likewise he writes on why it was that the pagans supposed the planets and stars to be beings with a personal intelligence.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Malachi151

Some called themselves Christians, some did not. Both "Christians" and non-Christians played roles in this transfer of knowledge.

The ones who called themselves "Christians", however, have virtually nothing in common with modern Christian or the liniages of Christianity that survive to this day, because, of course, they were wiped out by the lineages of Christianity that are ancestral to modern Christianity.

The Christians that are ancestral to modern Christianity are the ones that presided over the tragic loss of knowledge and learning in the Western world.

What's your point? The vast majority of ancient works and knowledge was destroyed or lost by Christians. Talking about Christianity is like talking about Communism. Chrstainity became an official monopoly. Eventually, virtually every person in the Western world operated under its banner and every institution operated under its banner.

Yeah, some of the stuff that was eventually preserved by the Muslims was origionally translated by certian groups of people, some of which called themselves Christians, under types of Christianity that would eventually become banned in the Empire becuase they were too open to "pagan" ideas.

Some stuff was translated and saved by Irish monks who operated outside the jurisdiction of the Roman Church and had little knowledge of the political and ideological movements going on in Contenential Christianity.

You may as well talk about some isolated group of "Communists" who practiced market principles in their remove enclave in the Soviet Union and try to argue that Communism was responsible for preserving free market practices in the Soviet Union.

Look at Hungary, for example. The Hungerians never fully adopted Soviet Communism and continued market practices instead of the command economy. Are you now going to extoll the virtues of Communism in "preserving market practices"?

Oh boy, big surprize, another Christian apologist who completely misrepresents the ancient world and promotes the myth that Chrisntianity contributed to science and worked to rid civilization of "superstition".

The Roman Empire was as diverse in ideas as modern America, actually it was more diverse, much, much more diverse.

Were there people in the ancient world who worshiped the stars and thought that planets were beings? Yes. Was this the only view, or even a dominate view? No.

I can find plenty of Americans who have all kinds of wierd beliefs, even in pretty large numbers in some cases.

There were huge schools of thought, that were widely desiminated and dominant in some regions, that were completely against astrology, completely against worship of anything, much less stars, etc. Materialism was widely adopted in the ancient world, and was completely rejected by Christianity. Materialism is the foundation of science and our modern understanding of the universe. The rejection of, and opposition to, materialism by Christians was the single greatest setback to knowledge and understanding in the Western world.

SkepticBoyLee

Actually the vast majority of the so called "miraculous science" in the Koran is simply a bunch of trumped up bullshit -- very vague short verses that an author pairs with a 5 paragraphs explanation on how this can only be some miraculous foretelling of some scientific phenomenon only recently discovered.

In the event that the Koran actually does get "science" correct, as pointed out it was something known a thousand years prior. One particular example is a verse that mentions something about everything containg water if Im not mistaken.

Richard Carriers Predicting Modern Science: Epicurus vs. Mohammed is probably my favorite. Epicurus must have been a prophet.

Roger Pearse

This post appears to merely reiterate a set of statements which I have already pointed out are either partly or wholly incorrect. As such, there seems nothing for me to say here.

I'm afraid you must forgive me if I prefer to discuss this subject only with people who either know something about it or are willing to admit their ignorance.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Funkytrip

Ah, forgot back to check back on the thread. I see a discussion sprung up which I didn't entirely intent to have.

My main question was: When did Muslims first start to use the 'The Kuran contains science we only recently discovered, thefore the Kuran is the word of God' argument.

My feeling is that is a spin-off argument from the creationist hype. When the Bible was supposed to contain scientific predictions/facts, some muslims started to browse through the Kuran and 'discovered' likewise facts which they started using in arguments. Did this way of defending the Kuran started like a century ago or is it more recent?

Malachi151

Okay, now you are just spouting off nonsense.

If you wish to address specific points then do so. I'm not even sure what your beef is?

The point of the whole thread is that any ideas contained in the Koran that seem to resemble "modern scientific concepts" had clear precidents in Greek/Roman/Egyptian/Indian, etc. science, which we also know for a fact was transmitted to Arab culture prior to and during the time that the Koran was written. Arabs also built on these ideas and added their own as well, but the main point is that there is no need to appeal to "Allah" as the "author" of whatever passeges there are in the Koran that may seem to have some element of "scientifc truth" to them.

That's the main point of this whole discussion. Do you have some argument regarding this or not?

The additional points are that many ancient ideas were lost in Western Civilization under the rule of Christianity. This seems to be where you disagree, because you want to point out that this or that "Christian" embraced ancient science or philosophy, such as Severus Sebokht.

Lets be clear, Galileo was a Christian, Darwin was a Christian (later dismissed the religion), Newton was a Christian, Copernicus was a Christian. The fact that these individuals were Christians does not change the fact that their views and ideas were in opposition to Christian theology, and Christian instutions and were opposed and taught against by mainstream Christianity.

The same was the case in the ancient world as well.

Besides, Severus Sebokht's big accomplishment was translating the works of Aristotle, but Aristotle's works were largely compliant with Christian theology, which is why they were nominall yaccepted by the Christian community initially, though even they later fell into the realm of heresy.

What about the works of Democritus, Epicurus, and the other atomists and materialists? Essentially nothing remains of their works, we have no translations of, not one single work of Democritus was preserved, and very little of Epicurus was preserved, really nothing. The only knowledge of these works that we have are the references to them by opposing works, such as the works of Aristotle or later Christians.

Aristotle was a teleologist, he espoused the view that "nature is designed by an intelligent creator for a purpose, and that purpose is to serve the interest of man, who is to serve the interest of the creator".

Democritus and Epicurus were in direct opposition to this school of thought, they were anti-teleologists, who stated that there was no purpose in nature and that nothing in nature was designed, but rather that the universe is eternal and is composed of atoms, the unguided interactions of which constitute the reality that we expierence.

Most of the ancient ideas that we recognize as correct or contributing to modern science come from this school of thought, the materialsits, i.e. atomists, the school of thought that was completely rejected by Christinaity an whose works were completely destroyed or left untranslated.

We've had to learn from this school of thought only by reading what its opponents have had to say about it.

Solo

It probably started with Jamal ud Din al-Afghani in 1870's-1880's.
http://www.cis-ca.org/voices/a/afghni-mn.htm It was Afghani who first defined pan-Islamic ambitions and Islam's historic opposition to the West. A friend of Ernest Renan, he publicly debated him on the virtues of Islam as a modern philosophy. His most influential pupil was Mohammed Abduh a distinguished scholar, and Grand Mufti of Cairo, who defined the philosophy of 'salafia' [a traditional way of Islam] from which practically all Islamic modernistic pretensions derive. I seriously doubt that either of the two made specific claims of Koranic science, but their thinking and opposion to the scientific materialism of the West clearly prefigured the modern claims of the salafists that they are Islam represents civilization superior to the West in all aspects.

Jiri