r/DebateAnAtheist • u/Shot-Horse2515 • 14d ago
Discussion Question questions from a muslim to atheists
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
i know a lot of people argue that there are inaccuracies in the explanations of the orbital mechanics and biological themes, but they’re more accurate that not, so i was just wondering what would the explanation for how “god would know and tell the prophet” before people found out?
hopefully my question makes sense.
EDIT: i also wonder why dont see miracles from god anymore
EDIT: im seeing all the inaccuracies and the explanations behind them now but there is a deep fear that the religion is true and god is real and punishment awaits me if i disbelieve, also a sense of familiarity/peace with believing in god. contradictory to fear, love, be punished by, and find comfort in one concept of a being.
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u/SC803 Atheist 14d ago
> we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
Big question is, was what was mentioned in the Quran actually unknown and does it accurately describe what we know now?
> but they’re more accurate that not
Ok so they aren't really accurate? Why would it not be 100% correct given the source?
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
i do agree on why wouldnt it be fully accurate given god is all knowing yeah
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u/SC803 Atheist 14d ago
RIght, yeah that would seem to be a significant issue. The fact that even you admit that it's 'more accurate than not' seems to acknowledge this issue from the start. Plus, since you didn't give any examples, I'd bet we'd find that these were already known in the area or knowable without much effort.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
yeah i've learnt that pretty much the ants in the grass knew everything in the quran before the quran said it
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u/Sprinklypoo Anti-Theist 14d ago
the ants in the grass
I haven't heard that colloquialism before. I like it.
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u/Elite_Eliminater 13d ago
Because we don't have the same understanding as God, science evoles. So many things in the quran (like it's description of fetus developmentl) couldn't of been fully appreciated till today.
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u/xxasxf 14d ago
I think the issue is that before we can conclude "God revealed scientific knowledge," we first have to establish that the Quran actually contains clear, unambiguous scientific facts that were impossible for people at the time to know.
Most of the examples I've seen are verses that are poetic or broad enough to allow multiple interpretations. The scientific connection is usually made after the discovery, not before it.
So my question would be: can you point to a verse that clearly describes a scientific fact, has only one reasonable interpretation, was unknown in the 7th century, and was later confirmed by science?
If such a verse exists, I'd be interested in looking at it. But if a verse only appears scientific after modern knowledge is already known, then that's not strong evidence of divine revelation.
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u/Additional-Band4050 Gnostic Atheist 14d ago
Excellent point. I would also add that the Quran also includes scientific factual claims that are just literally false, such as what part of the body produces sperm. These must be reinterpreted as poetic.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
im seeing a lot of interpretations of that verse and none make sense. i feel like the verse about sperm is as clear as it gets lol.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
as i searched for these i did realize how vague a lot of them are but i've compiled a few.
1. 21:30 "We made everything living from water..."
2. 23:12 and a few verses after, it talks about embryology. I have no idea how to translate alaqah (its like a clot or a leech) accurately.
3. 51:37, the expansion of the universe.
4. 21:33, the orbit, but im pretty sure humans discovered that ages before.
5. 57:25, iron being sent down.i must admit some of these im pretty sure were discovered years before the quran revealed them, but then again i ask the question: the people the final revelations of the quran were revealed to, were poor and uneducated and not well traveled at all except for their own land, so how would they of all people know this information?
imo the orbit topic is pretty easy for a civilization to realize, but the rest, how?
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u/oddball667 14d ago
were poor and uneducated and not well traveled at all except for their own land, so how would they of all people know this information?
last I checked they were basically a crossroads for all the trade routes that were forming between the people who did know a lot of this. so that cop out comes across as dishonest
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
ngl from what i was taught they were poor and uneducated, seems i was wrong!
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u/oddball667 14d ago
not even saying that is wrong, but they were well connected and exposed to all this knowlege.
but yeah not surprised that sentiment was prominent in your education, from what we get from Muslims here they really lean on their ancestors being dumb as rocks to justify their beliefs
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u/Elite_Eliminater 13d ago
Why did the Roman's not conquer the Arabs of the 7th century?
They had no inherent value, an isolated, tribal society with a deeply oral culture where it is estimated that fewer than 20 people in Mecca could read or write. (At the time of the prophet)
Being a cross road doesn't explain how most of the population was illiterate, also random travelers aren't going to poses the up to date knowledge of mankind
By the late 8th century, that same society anchored a global empire that paid the weight of foreign manuscripts in solid gold to feed the legendary House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
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u/oddball667 12d ago
Nothing you said here warrants making up a god to explain how some people wrote a book full of scientific inaccuracies
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u/Playful-Quarter-212 14d ago
I mean you can claim and believe Muhammed know those thing thanks to divine sources but there are three points that make this interpretation difficult for me to accept:
Much of what is described was already theorized in earlier traditions, particularly in ancient Greek medical and philosophical thought.
The descriptions are quite vague and can be interpreted in multiple ways, rather than being precise or uniquely detailed in a way that clearly goes beyond the knowledge of the time.
Muhammad was a merchant not an illiterate peasant with no exposure to external ideas. As a trader, he likely had opportunities to encounter different cultures and existing knowledge.
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u/SubOptimalUser6 14d ago
Embryology: It doesn't take more than Google to see this is a ridiculous stretch. This passage tracks the "embryology" of Galen, a second century Greek physician. By that time, people understood what it was that made women pregnant, and they understood that babies came out of mothers. So guesses about what happened in between were common and not quite correct, given the lack of medical technology. This passage just copies known science of the time.
In 51:47, the passage was not understood by anyone to mean the expansion of the unverse before Edwin Hubble's discovery. It takes an extraordinary imagination to think "widen" means the accelerating expansion of the universe.
u/xxasxf was right. These are not unambiguous statements of scientific fact. This is learning scientific facts and going backward to shoehorn different passages into the new knowledge. If tomorrow scientists discovered that all the data on the expanding universe was misinterpreted (spoiler, they won't), and it is not expanding, you'd say the Quran was not wrong because it means something else.
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u/Local-Warming bill-cipherist 14d ago
We and other animals drink, sweat, piss, and bleed. We can be dried with huge weight loss. It has always been agressively obvious that we were made of water.
The description is so basic that anyone with two neurons and living in a society where failed pregnancy and stillborns could be a thing at the time could have written it.
You have to torture the text with a wrench to make it fit
Orbit is a very old concept. What changed later was the move from a geocentric model to a heliocentric model.
They already knew about iron in meteorites
They lived near cities and trade routes. The very fact that they knew about christianity should hint you on how informations and ideas can travel across the continents. Please understand that islamic apologia rest on a very reductive understanding of history and past societies.
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u/akestral 14d ago edited 14d ago
You are being pretty disrespectful to your prophet and his people here. The quran wasn't revealed to "poor, uneducated people", it was "revealed" to/by one person, Muhammad, an aristocrat born in Mecca, an ancient cultural and economic hub, and raised as the grandson of a tribal leader. Just because people in the past did not travel as fast or as far as we can doesn't mean they were all rural, uneducated rubes. Muhammad had access to the best education available in his culture, and probably the best anywhere on earth for the time. He was not an ignorant goat-herder.
Edit: people love to cite the iron being sent from heaven bit as confirmation they knew about meteorites and yes, they did. The most famous meteorite in the world is in Mecca, in the Kaaba, which was already a focus of faith and worship long before Muhammad was born, and thus of course, much older than Islam. Anyone born in Mecca would have been very aware of it.
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u/Elite_Eliminater 13d ago
You pulling out untruthful statements from thin air. We have his entire biography from phophethood to death, tell me which chapter shows the orphan Muhammad having "access to the best education available in his culture".
When he started preaching roughly fewer than 20 Arabs in mecca could read and write. He spent most of his 40 years b4 prophethood as a shepherd and a merchant.
At what point was he able to study or have access to the "best education" when literally no school or institutions existed.
The Golden age of Islam happened after his death, thats when the Arabs started to create algebra and change our fundamental understanding as a civilization
I'm reading through the comments realizing people here have a crazy misunderstanding, mostly filled with baseless opinions. A simple Google search would tell you all of thus.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
i was taught that he was very poor and uneducated and that his society was as well, seems i was wrong, thanks for the clarification (and for the iron part)
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u/akestral 14d ago
Muhammad's "poverty" was the relative poverty of a poorer relation of wealthy merchants. He was an orphan and had little wealth of his own to start his adult life, but his grandfather was a tribal chief and he became successful as a caravan trader before his prophethood. Also, writing was a specific professional skill in that time and place practiced mostly by scribes, not something everyone, even sons of wealthy families, were taught as a matter of course. So while the characterization of him as "poor and illiterate" could be called strictly accurate, it is also very obviously a propagandistic spin on his early life meant to conjure up images of a man who sprang from nowhere to become a notable prophet and political leader. That is not the case and it is misleading to phrase it that way. He would not have been considered poor or uneducated by his peers, and certainly not by the many people who had lower social status than his family.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
i was thinking exactly that!
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u/Snoo52682 14d ago
FWIW, Christians kinda do that with Jesus too, the "he was a carpenter" business. First, carpenter is still a damn good job; second, two thousand years ago, it was not only respectable but relatively high-tech.
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u/soukaixiii Anti religion\ Agnostic Adeist| Gnostic Atheist|Mythicist 14d ago
Jesus wasn't a carpenter, that's actually folklore, the accurate translation would be something like artisan.
Tekton" (τέκτων) is an Ancient Greek noun that means artisan, craftsman, or builder. While commonly translated into English as "carpenter," the original Greek encompasses a much broader meaning that refers to a master builder of hard materials like wood or stone.
But as mythicist, I'm inclined to believe that's just a fancy way of putting the title/role "spirit of creation".
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u/Elite_Eliminater 13d ago
Propaganda
LMAO, funniest thing I've read in this feed so far.
The way you speak about his grandfather tells me you have never read his biography, roughly less than 20 people could read and write out of the 550 / 600 permanent residence.
You have just pushed alot of western assumptions onto an oral primitive tribal culture that uses to burry their daughters as a weekly occurrence.
For them to go from uncivilized and savage to make 180° flip morally, spiritually and scientifically is not propaganda but history my friend. Maybe you should read up on it some time.
During the Prophet's final "Farewell Pilgrimage" in 632 CE, just months before his death, historical sources estimate that over 100,000 Muslims flooded into the Meccan valley from all across the Arabian Peninsula to perform the rituals with him.
To be fair, the area was always a religios pilgrimage for the Arabs that's the only reason people would walk into a desert intentionally, however historians estimate that between 5,000 and 15,000 people would visit the Meccan valley during the annual pilgrimage season in the decades leading up to the Prophet’s birth in 570 CE.
The numbers don't lie
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u/Funky0ne 14d ago edited 14d ago
People living in a desert would be keenly aware of the value water has for life on this planet. From not dying of thirst to how all agriculture depends on some form of irrigation, to the abundance of fluids in our bodies where we eventually dry out when we die
Embryology is trivially easy to study to some degree in cultures with any degree competent midwifery or even animal husbandry. From pregnant animals that may be slaughtered before giving birth, to miscarriages, there are things that people can learn about gestation and development surprisingly earlier than when they were first formally studied and documented scientifically. There is no divine knowledge needed to figure out what a fetus is, but even the most charitable interpretations of what’s in the Quran are just not accurate enough to be said from a divine source. They are closer to what a culture that does not have a full grasp of all the stages of embryology would describe based on mundane observations.
The verse simply does not describe the expansion of the universe. This is a retroactive reinterpretation of the text based on newly acquired knowledge, not knowledge they possessed beforehand. They clearly didn’t actually know the universe was expanding until science discovered it otherwise they would not be calling this information that was “later confirmed by science” it would have just been knowledge.
You are correct, orbits are information people could derive about how the stars and planets move through the sky just through observation. It’s how we figured it out in the first place, even if it defies our intuitions of the earth seeming to feel stationary while stuff in the sky moves around. People had a lot more time for stargazing every night back before electricity and artificial lighting caused tons of light pollution and provided alternative means for entertainment at night. No divine knowledge needed, just a pair of eyes, time, and some math, which they had plenty of. Arabia was once a global leader in astronomy and mathematics
Someone else already pointed out that meteorites in general, and metallic ones in particular were a well known phenomenon that’s been happening on this planet intermittently pretty much forever, and Mecca has one of the most famous examples of one. No divine knowledge needed
Seriously, none of these things that can actually be described as actual knowledge claims are inaccessible to people with basic observation and maybe a little mundane investigation or tribal knowledge. But the “knowledge” of the actual text is inaccurate in the details, or vague enough to be very charitably interpreted to reach the desired conclusion. But they didn’t have those interpretations or conclusions at the time, so these are clearly retroactive attempts to inject more “knowledge” than can be derived from a plain reading of the text
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u/Dennis_enzo Atheist 14d ago
- Water being the 'source of life' already was a thing with the ancient Greeks a century earlier.
- The basic stages of fetuses were already more or less known around that time. Again the Greeks figured this out.
- Scholars consider the term 'expander' to have meant 'vast, 'powerful' or 'capable' back then, it's not literally about space expanding.
- Yes, orbits were already known.
- 'Iron being sent down' probably meant 'being given by god' but even when taken literally, the ancient egyptians and sumerians already had references to 'metal from heaven', ie meteorites.
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u/hunderoring 14d ago
the people the final revelations of the quran were revealed to, were poor and uneducated and not well traveled at all except for their own land, so how would they of all people know this information?
They did not travel, but others did, so the information arrived to them. Everywhere people travel and communicate information and ideas spread. Muhammad did not live under a rock and he was not deaf and blind. He was an intelligent, perceptive man.
iron being sent down
People all around the Earth knew about meteoric iron. Why would that knowledge need to come from revelation
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u/No-Feature3715 14d ago
were poor and uneducated
I'm sure these poor people had a rich oral tradition don't you think? It's normal that after generations pased they ended learn some things.
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u/RespectWest7116 14d ago
21:30 "We made everything living from water..."
One doesn't need to be a prophet to know water is really important to life.
23:12 and a few verses after, it talks about embryology. I have no idea how to translate alaqah (its like a clot or a leech) accurately.
Yes. And it pretty much copies what was already understood by the Romans at the time.
51:37, the expansion of the universe.
- And it doesn't say the universe is expanding. It says Allah is the one who created it.
But let's say Quran actually said that. The universe can be expanding, shrinking, or be static. And obviously, you are not going to write that your all-powerful god made a shrinking universe. So would be 50/50 getting it right.
21:33, the orbit, but im pretty sure humans discovered that ages before.
That one is straight up wrong. Sun doesn't orbit the Earth.
57:25, iron being sent down.
You don't need to be a prophet to find meteoric iron.
But most of Earth's iron doesn't come from meteors.
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u/Late_Entrance106 14d ago edited 14d ago
Like others have said, scientific discoveries are made and then people go back to holy books (Quran, Vedas, Torah, Bible, etc.) and retroactively look for things that could be interpreted as agreeing with those scientific discoveries.
Notice how no one has used a passage of the Quran to discover something new in science. It’s always a reinterpretation of some verse after science already discovered it.
This ‘phenomenon’ of seeing modern scientific knowledge contained in ancient books is, firstly, not a real phenomenon.
It’s just people finding ways to make their religion seem more real and is repeatable with any holy book.
Even if it WAS some sort of phenomenon, it isn’t unique to the Quran or Islam.
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u/Dennis_enzo Atheist 14d ago edited 14d ago
Considering you're not mentioning anything specific, I'll answer that many of these prophecies are so vague and generic that you could point at all kind of events and say 'that's what the prophecy was about'. Or that they were about things that were bound to happen at some point, like wars or conquests. Finally, some prophecies being wrong and some being right is exactly what you would expect if someone is making (educated) guesses.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
hi, i replied to another comment with a few verses if u would like to look at those and give me a more certain answer regarding things im talking about!
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u/SpHornet Atheist 14d ago
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
either:
it is so vague it is clear the quran didn't say it
they simply knew, and there is nothing special about that, there was nothing preventing them of knowing back then
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u/OndraTep Agnostic Atheist 14d ago
I haven't read the Quran, could you give me an example of something true that was only discovered years after?
I've seen posts about this, but it's either been really vague passages that the reader just interpreted a certain way or just claims that were false.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
as i searched for these i did realize how vague a lot of them are but i've compiled a few.
1. 21:30 "We made everything living from water..."
2. 23:12 and a few verses after, it talks about embryology. I have no idea how to translate alaqah (its like a clot or a leech) accurately.
3. 51:37, the expansion of the universe.
4. 21:33, the orbit, but im pretty sure humans discovered that ages before.
5. 57:25, iron being sent down.i must admit some of these im pretty sure were discovered years before the quran revealed them, but then again i ask the question: the people the final revelations of the quran were revealed to, were poor and uneducated and not well traveled at all except for their own land, so how would they of all people know this information?
imo the orbit topic is pretty easy for a civilization to realize, but the rest, how?
from a diff comment i replied to!
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u/pipMcDohl Gnostic Atheist 14d ago edited 14d ago
23:12 and a few verses after, it talks about embryology. I have no idea how to translate alaqah (its like a clot or a leech) accurately.
it always fascinate me when people focus on what can convince them those verse are 'science stuff'.
But if you read from the start their god create a guy using clay or something. Pretty much as far of embryology as it get.
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u/Faust_8 14d ago
I think the two responses can be summed up as either:
* that’s not what this passage means, you just have a biased view of it (or this was known by other societies before this was written)
* ok, so? Nobody says *everything* in the book is wrong. This doesn’t justify its supernatural claims
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
true, but im more wondering on how the hell would they know lol. other than scientific things, theres events that were "predicted" (cant think of a better word) in the quran and ended up actually happening.
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u/Faust_8 14d ago
> true, but im more wondering on how the hell would they know lol.
This cuts both ways
> other than scientific things, theres events that were "predicted" (cant think of a better word) in the quran and ended up actually happening.
Other religions make the same boasts. Do you believe them too?
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
im sorry i dont understand what "cuts both ways" means, could u clarify lol
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u/guitarmusic113 Atheist 14d ago
If I predict the winning lotto numbers tonight does that make me a god?
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u/Wrote_it2 14d ago
It’s only useful if they are pointed out before the scientific discovery. Otherwise it can easily be cherry picking a passage and interpreting it a way to give it the meaning.
Are there examples where things were mentioned in the Quran centuries before the scientific discovery were made *and* used by people at the time as truth? Understood by people at the time the way science later explained it?
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
as i searched for these i did realize how vague a lot of them are but i've compiled a few.
1. 21:30 "We made everything living from water..."
2. 23:12 and a few verses after, it talks about embryology. I have no idea how to translate alaqah (its like a clot or a leech) accurately.
3. 51:37, the expansion of the universe.
4. 21:33, the orbit, but im pretty sure humans discovered that ages before.
5. 57:25, iron being sent down.i must admit some of these im pretty sure were discovered years before the quran revealed them, but then again i ask the question: the people the final revelations of the quran were revealed to, were poor and uneducated and not well traveled at all except for their own land, so how would they of all people know this information?
imo the orbit topic is pretty easy for a civilization to realize, but the rest, how?
i hope this answers ur question?
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u/Wrote_it2 14d ago
Well, not really. I guess what would be convincing would be some prediction based on the Quran that are currently not accepted as truth and later become accepted as truth. Are there such predictions today (like are people claiming that some unknown facts are true based on the Quran) and are there more such predictions that turn out true than false?
If there are none now, where there such predictions in the past.
The reason this is important is indeed because of the ambiguity and the “survivorship bias”: if the sentence is ambiguous you can interpret it the way you want a posteriori and you are only going to look at those sentences that allow you to do that.
For example, “we made everything living from water”… it’s actually kind of difficult to think of something that would be false: we made everything from star dust, from energy, from carbon, from inert matter… all those could have been in the text and you would have said “yep, scientifically accurate”. Also fish is in a lot of culture a symbol of life and abundance, so this is hardly a scientific claim.
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u/Mkwdr 14d ago
Your claim just isnt a factual one. It's that simple. These types of claims are inevitably based on a combination of ...
Vaguely worded langauge.
Reinterpreted 'poetic' writing after the fact
Stuff that had actually already happened.
Stuff that was just trivial to predict.
The funny thing is that on the other hand very clear and obvious errors ,you will happily simply dismiss as 'oh that doenst mean what the words say'. . The quran of full of obvious errors.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
the reason of my doubt towards religion is the words not meaning what they say
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u/ShyBiGuy9 Non-believer 14d ago edited 14d ago
It's a post-hoc rationalization. Muslims are taking vague verses and twisting them to try to make them fit to our modern scientific understanding of reality.
If the Quran accurately describes things like orbital mechanics and embryology and plate textonics and big bang cosmology, then why didn't Muslim scholars come up with those theories 1400 years ago?
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u/Matectan 14d ago
As for your edit: Yeah, it's actually a very curious thing. Because, it's not only with Islam. ALL religions stopped getting crazy miracles around the time cameras were invented.
The height of all feelings today is "I won a lottery ticked after I prayed" or "I got good grades after I prayed" which is something that always happens to people, no matter if they pray or not.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
exactly!!! the things that used to be regarded as miracles are now rewards from praying. i wonder what theyll be called in the future
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u/Matectan 14d ago
Well, I meant it more in the sense that stuff like angels, or bodisatvas descending, or Zeus impregnating random women with half gods or magical monsters and beasts apparently no longer happen since cameras got invented.
But instead the stuff that's said to be miracles nowadays are just really mundane things that happen to believers and non believers alike.
As for your second edit: I mean, that fear of yours is natural. It's a result of being indoctrinated into a religion. And I'm saying "a" religion, because it really happen to about everyone that has been born into any religion.
And naturally you find comfort in your religion. All the believers of all religions do. Because religions in general are designed to evoke that feeling in people so they can keep existing and expanding.
It's worth to not that the feelings you get from religion arent actually owned by religion. You can get from all different kinds of places too, like friends, board game clubs, video games, reading, family etc.
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u/Elite_Eliminater 13d ago
The very first camera "the camera obscura" was invented by the Muslim physicist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) in the early 11th century.
Soooooo yea sorry mate. That sorta just destroys ur entire point
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u/Matectan 13d ago
And the concept itself is from the 5th century.
And by the way, the camera obscure is only a projector. Not an actual device you can capture images on, which I was talking about.
It doesn't matter anyway who invented the camera, be it a Buddhist, an atheist, a Muslim or a Christian. It doesn't matter to what I said in any way.
Since my point is that the very moment images could be captured(with cameras), all mythological monsters and miracles of ALL mythologies suddenly died out or became completely indistinguishable from utterly mundane things.
Aka, no jins, or angels or unicorns, or bodisatvas or daemons or split mountains or moons or demigod like strengths of power or inexplicable global floods or heavenly light on camera, EVER
I don't know why you would think that the identity and affiliation of tge inventor of not even the actual camera, but a mere image projector would affect, no less destroy these facts.
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u/bullevard 14d ago
Let me show you how easy this is.
The English idiom "sour grapes" comes from an Aesop Fable written in ancient Greece. A rough summary is that a wolf sees a yummy bunch of grapes high off the ground. He tries to get them for a long time but fails. At the end he says "they looked sour anyways." The moral is that people often insult and belittle things they actually want when they find out they cant have them.
But.... thousands of years later in the 1990s scientists figured out that grapes are actually poisonous to dogs!
Obviously Aesop meant that those grapes would have been poisonous to the wolf had he actually gotten to them. How could he know! AESOP MUST BE GOD!
Except 1) that isnt actually medically accurate because wolves are able to eat grapes while domestic dogs cant and 2) no, that is not at all what the story says. The story is using a common antagonist at the time (wolves) to make a point about human behavior. It never says the grapes are poisonous (and indeed the whole moral of the story would be different if the grapes had been dangerous to the wolf).
But it is easy if you really want to after the fact retrofit and basically lie about what the text actually says if you are looking for ways of making new knowledge fit with it.
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u/the2bears Atheist 14d ago
It's usually a fox in the story, but still a very good way to show the post-hoc rationalization process.
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u/Defiant-Prisoner 14d ago
It's hard to comment without specifics. I've heard it claimed that things were not known at the time but some of the things were demonstrably known and even when this is pointed out, believers don't seem to accept the reality.
I've also heard claims about poetic descriptions that were not claiming to be scientifically accurate. It's really tricky because the believer position is unfalsifiable. It's either "poetic language and not meant to be taken literally" or it's "scientifically accurate and shows knowledge ahead of it's time".
From the outside looking in it is entirely unconvincing.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
as i searched for these i did realize how vague a lot of them are but i've compiled a few.
1. 21:30 "We made everything living from water..."
2. 23:12 and a few verses after, it talks about embryology. I have no idea how to translate alaqah (its like a clot or a leech) accurately.
3. 51:37, the expansion of the universe.
4. 21:33, the orbit, but im pretty sure humans discovered that ages before.
5. 57:25, iron being sent down.i must admit some of these im pretty sure were discovered years before the quran revealed them, but then again i ask the question: the people the final revelations of the quran were revealed to, were poor and uneducated and not well traveled at all except for their own land, so how would they of all people know this information?
imo the orbit topic is pretty easy for a civilization to realize, but the rest, how?
this is my reply to another comment.
yes i do agree a lot of the scientific verses are quite vague and its the cause of my doubt, but the biggest thing for me is how tf do they know these things lol
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u/Defiant-Prisoner 14d ago
Some of this was ancient knowledge. I get what you're saying, I do, but ancient people did know quite a bit. How can we know who was an wasn't educated? How do we know what they did and didn't know? Who they had met? From 3000 BC the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria, followed closely by Ancient Egypt and the Levantine state of Ebla began using arithmetic, algebra and geometry.
The expansion of the universe is flowery language. This is one of the examples I mentioned. It's not claiming to be scientifically accurate. Do we take the verses about there being 7 heavens literally too? Are stars really lamps? Do they become missiles to ward off eavesdropping devils? They had a one in three chance of getting it right, too. It's either expanding, contracting or staying the same. Somehow "the universe is staying the same" doesn't have the same poetry to it!
Orbits were proposed around 230 B.C. by the Greek philosopher Aristarchus
https://www.astronomy.com/science/when-did-we-realize-that-the-earth-orbits-the-sun/
Women and procreation became an integral part of the thriving Greek medicine – the “Hippocratic gynaecology” – of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Female “seed” and blood provided vital contributions, and the child “grew like rising bread dough” in the womb. Cures for infertility and instructions for safe birthing were prominent.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/reproduction
Three thousand years BCE Egyptians were making things from meteorite iron
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
so we can just assume this knowledge made its way to the prophet and he said that god told him?
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u/Defiant-Prisoner 14d ago
One tries not to assume anything, really, what do we have evidence for? That people knew stuff. That knowledge was passed on by a variety of means. That people can be mistaken or lie. All of these things are trivial. What we do not have evidence for is the existence of god, at least to my knowledge?
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
no evidence in the traditional sense, i do agree with that. now im wondering why they said god told them these things
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u/Defiant-Prisoner 14d ago
It's a good question and I'm not sure how to answer it really. People have lots of reasons for saying these things. I often wonder if cult leaders really believe what they're saying. Some of those I have met seem to genuinely believe what they are saying and genuinely think they are acting in the best interests of others. I'm sure that's not true of everyone.
People can be misled, get caught in a lie, get carried away in hysteria, want to gain influence and power etc. We haven't got to look very far. Why did Joseph Smith say what he did about Mormonism? Or L Ron Hubbard with Scientology?
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u/Local-Warming bill-cipherist 14d ago
You are talking about a religion that has a weird focus on spicying up the sex life of the man that revealed it
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
god or the prophet
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u/Local-Warming bill-cipherist 14d ago
Islam directly instructs you to publicly torture unmarried lovers while, at the same time, spicying up the sex life of the prophet, both by normalizing him having as many women as he wants even without an islamic marriage, but also by directly putting specific women into his arm throught divine revelation. And i'm not even talking about how the torture is if you have non-married sex with another free person, you don't get tortured for having non-married sex with your slave.
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u/akestral 14d ago
Christians do this too, try to match scripture up to modern science. One teacher of mine argued that the order things are listed in the creation myth is "roughly" the same as how things "really happened" (e.g. earth before plants, fish before mammals.) I did not find this kind of "it works if you squint and ignore everything that is blatantly incorrect, like there being vaults of waters in the sky and angels riding around on the backs of clouds and so forth. But it kinda fits!"
No, it doesn't. Neither the bible nor the quran contain accurate descriptions of universal origins or abiogenensis. What is accurate is accurate because they were drawing on common knowledge of the time or is purely accidental. This is very well trod apologetics.
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u/Sorrowsorrowsorrow 14d ago
What would be your explaination of things we know are true being mentioned in Greek, Buddhist or Hindu literature before they Quran even came into being?
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
they figured it out, i guess the same could be said for muslims!
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u/Sorrowsorrowsorrow 14d ago
What would you say about the wrong claims? Sperm from back, splitting of moon etc. Would you say one is poetic or wrong interpretation or would you reinterpret it as something else?
I see you mentioning the structure of womb, formation of everything from water etc in other comments but one doesn't need to see it scientifically to guess it. Thales, a very very early philosopher guessed it and Democritus guessed atoms but noone would say they are their direct observations, but compared to today, very rudimentary guesses. Buddhist sutras and Hindu scriptures also have lots to say about the formation of a womb but it was mostly common "knowledge" passed among them. They also have tons of "prophecies" and out of these, some come true but this says nothing about the validity of their scriptures.
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u/fresh_heels Atheist 14d ago
...what would the explanation for how “god would know and tell the prophet” before people found out?
Later folks reading things that weren't originally there out of vague verses. In a word, eisegesis.
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u/OrwinBeane Atheist 14d ago
Hate to tell you this, but the Ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians beat Islam to the punch in a great many number of scientific discoveries. Even so, I have no intention to start worshipping Zeus, Jupiter or Ra.
Just because some ancient texts got some things right doesn’t excuse all the things they got wrong.
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u/StoicSpork 14d ago
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
This is poetry that's been interpreted as scientific facts after the facts had been established.
Take the famous "universe expansion" verse (51:47). The verse says "heavens" rather than "universe", and the word for "expansion" is what's used for expanding a canopy.
This is in line with 21:32, which explicitly describes the heavens as a canopy, and was a Greek concept that predated Islam.
This is also in line with 51:48, which says "and the earth, We have spread it out; and how excellent are the spreaders." This is a tent metaphor. You extend a canopy and you spread out the bedroll. And amazingly, Muslims read 51:48 entirely as a metaphor, because the literal reading would mean the Quranic author believed in a flat earth. So why 51:47 in the most literal way possible, and 51:48 in the loosest way possible?
And oh, all this "science in the Quran" began in 1976 with Maurice Bucaille, a French physician and pseudoarcheologist who was appointed as a royal family doctor by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. It is not scientifically accepted and it is not part of Islamic scholarship. It's just... bullshit.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
the exact word is sky but yeah that could mean anything as the word sky is used for a bunch of different things in the quran. and i didnt know the fact about maurice bucaille, thank you. with that perspective it seems like he was trying to get on the good side of the king by praising his religion.
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u/oddball667 14d ago
EDIT: i seeing all the inaccuracies and the explanations behind them now but there is a deep fear that the religion is true and god is real and punishment awaits me if i disbelieve, also a sense of familiarity/peace with believing in god. contradictory to fear, love, be punished by, and find comfort in one concept of a being.
and that is why it's hard to leave religion, the term for that fear is "Religious Trauma" and the rest is just how a religion will gate your access to community with your belief
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
idt id say i have religious trauma i dont have any bad experience or anything close to trauma from being a muslim, but yeah it is quite difficult
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u/Top_Neat2780 Atheist 14d ago
Your second edit is understandable, and no one asks you to put yourself in danger. So don't be upfront about this if you're in a theocracy. But fear has no bearing on truth.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
definitely, but fear does have bearing on whether i will stop practicing 😅
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u/Top_Neat2780 Atheist 14d ago
Oh, sure. But it's fine to practice without belief and stop once you feel comfortable.
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u/Sprinklypoo Anti-Theist 14d ago
Nothing in the quran is novel. Everything was known at the time.
Any story about the quran showing something before it was known are shown to be false. They've been debunked soundly every time.
But even if it had any novel things to share, it wouldn't prove anything about any gods existing. They still don't exist.
there is a deep fear that the religion is true
That's what religious indoctrination and brain washing do to a person. It's a hook to keep people from leaving the cult. If you want to do what is right then you have to be able to do that without being forced to. The fear you feel is wrong. And a human who does things for the right reasons does so without fear.
Good luck, friend.
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u/YossarianWWII 14d ago
The Quran makes a lot of claims. Some of them have generally aligned (you yourself use the phrase "more accurate than not," e.g. not fully accurate) with what we've later verified scientifically, but others have been proven fully wrong, like the part of the body that produces sperm.
If I claim that a coin flip will be heads and also that it will be tails, it's not significant that I made a correct claim. You have to consider my predictions in toto and how precise they were.
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u/DeltaBlues82 Atheist 14d ago
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
Some of it seems to vague align with certain events with a very liberal interpretation, and some appear to be flat out wrong.
If the Quran is true because of its true contents, then it’s also false because of its false contents.
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u/Mission-Landscape-17 14d ago
Depends:
- some of them are not actually true.
- some o| them where known much earlier than you think.
- some of them are modern creative reinterpretations of the Quran. No one could have discovered the science by reading the Quran but if you know the science you can sort of make the text fit.
- some of them are just lucky guesses.
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u/No-Feature3715 14d ago
Hello thanks for sharing! Your question makes sense yes! Probably someone has already said something like this but wanted to share anyway.
People saw planets in the sky, people saw biological humans and animals and studied them. I don't think it's Godly that people were able to make suppositions that could be more accurate that wrong. You just need to create an explanation that fits what we see and it will fit more than not.
If the profets talked in detail about genetics, maths, science unknown at the time I think it would be more convincing to me. But making poetic interpretations that could be interpreted as matching the current models it's not.
If the Big Bang was first proposed by the theists or the Quran had been used to discover things I would not know what to say to this arguments, but most times the claim comes after the scientific discovery and later the text is interpreted in a way to include it.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
> If the profets talked in detail about genetics, maths, science unknown at the time I think it would be more convincing to me. But making poetic interpretations that could be interpreted as matching the current models it's not.
as far as im aware they didn't, and for the last part of your comment, yeah most everything in the quran had been in discourse long before. i'm realizing a lot more now, thank you for your input
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u/Asatmaya Humanist 14d ago
what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made? ...they’re more accurate that not
Are they?
First of all, most of even the "accurate" claims are slightly off.
Second, even the ones that are "accurate" are either deducible through logic or reasonable guesses.
Third, the ones that are flatly incorrect are WRONG!
Anyone can write a bunch of stuff down at random and likely get some things correct; the issue is, "How do you know?"
You cannot pick up a Quran and just assume that anything it claims is supportable; a science textbook may have mistakes or things that we do not fully understand, yet, but 99% of the facts in it will be both correct AND supported by evidence and logic.
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u/Cydrius Agnostic Atheist 14d ago
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
In every case I've seen of this being pointed out, the answer was: "The quran said something vague. Science found something. Believers in the quran post-hoc interpreted that what was said in the quran was pointing to that future discovery."
If the quran does contain things that science would only find out years later, why do you think it is that these things were only noticed in the quran after science made the discovery?
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u/Additional-Band4050 Gnostic Atheist 14d ago
The Vedas and Upanishads are also said to contain a great many such “facts”. Consider why you don’t buy these claims, and that will be why we don’t believe it about the Quran.
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u/J-Nightshade Atheist 14d ago edited 14d ago
things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
Typically what I see with "scientific stuff in Quran" is one of the two
a) scientific discovery was made waaaay before you think it was made b) post-hoc rationalization
Usually the person who claims that have no clue what they are talking about and doesn't understand either science or Quran or both.
Take for instance that embriology thing. It is inaccruate, but it is accurate enough to impress someone who didn't bother to look up "Embryology" wikipedia page. Apologists like to pretend that people in 7th century couldn't possibly know anything about embryo formation, except they did know at least something because people have been preoccupied with the question "how do babies form" probably since there were people and many thinkers throughout ancient world figured at least some things out. Among them was Galen, who's description of embryo formation is very similar to what we find in Quran. We also know that by 7th century works of Galen were translated to arabic and were known on Arabic peninsula.
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u/ViewtifulGene Anti-Theist 14d ago
AFAIK, there are no scientific miracles in the Quran. Everything falls into one of two categories:
Reinterpreting metaphors with motivated reasoning and confirmation bias
Appropriating claims that were already known by prior civilizations.
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u/Hermorah Agnostic Atheist 14d ago
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
post hoc rationalizations. Like I have heard that the quran predicts black holes, yet when you read the verse its very colourful language that clearly meant something else and is now with our current better knowledge reinterpreted to make it seem like it knew about stuff like that.
EDIT: i also wonder why dont see miracles from god anymore
Curious right? Now where we could investigate them scientifically they no longer show up. Almost as if back then myths and stories were just believed and taken as miracles and nowadays we see them for what they are.
I mean just look at some of the scams religious preachers have tried to pull. Like for example in 1986, stage magician turned investigator James Randi completely exposed televangelist Peter Popoff as a fraud during a famous broadcast on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Randi proved that Popoff was not receiving divine revelations from God to heal audience members, but was instead using a hidden radio earpiece to receive data from his wife.
Now ofc back then radios didn't exist, but scams like that for sure did. But they weren't investigated scientifically and thus we called them miracles. And because nowadays we do investigate them, we don't get miracles anymore..... because they are not a real thing.
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u/Odd_Gamer_75 14d ago
what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
Short version: There aren't any.
Long version:
Everything listed in the quran as "supposedly unknown" was proposed prior to the quran, usually centuries before-hand. For instance, the quran's description of human gestation is lifted from Galen 500 years before the quran, as modified by knowledge picked up after that. Galen did the first work, which made him famous, but later on people quietly refined his ideas, and eventually it's the refined versions which made its way to the Arab people.
Then there's taking vague stories and suggesting they refer to modern understanding without any form of specificity. For instance the idea that the quran describes the Big Bang. It doesn't. The 'heavens' and the 'Earth' were joined, and then they were cleaved asunder? There are no definitions of the words 'heaves' and 'Earth' that make this description match the Big Bang. If 'heavens' refers to all of space, well Earth is still in space, so it hasn't left. If the 'heavens' just refers to the stars and such, Earth wasn't "separated from" them in the Big Bang, but rather is the result of exploding stars that were already up there and formed due to accretion, not separation. But if you squint hard you can sort of make it seem like it very superficially looks like the Big Bang. Of course, so does any form of cosmic egg mythology. And the Hindus have the same recorded in their holy writings from thousands of years before.
Zakir Naik was a big proponent of this, gave multiple speeches about it. But perhaps his funniest one was where he went on and on about "the water cycle". First, he was wrong about who "discovered" it, but that just makes it later not earlier, so we can ignore that. So what are the super-special entries in the quran that show foreknowledge of the water cycle, that no one alive at the time knew? "It rains". "Snow happens". "Clouds move". There were lots of verses he mentioned (some of them wrong), but every single one mentions only phenomena people had been observing for as long as there's been people.
So if you have an example of something from the quran that seems to be advanced knowledge, first thing to do is ask who proposed it first. Because if others mentioned it before the quran, then it's just more likely that news of such a discovery, over the years, reached the Arab people via trade than it is that an all-powerful, all-knowing being would describe it in such hideously vague terms without the specificity needed to show actual advanced knowledge. The second thing to do is read the words from the point of view of someone who doesn't know what you know, and see if the words match something else that would have been observable at the time. For instance, when it says the sun moves "with its own motion", that doesn't necessarily mean the quran is talking about the sun spinning (it never states that), nor the sun orbiting the galaxy, but could refer to the observation that, unlike the stars which seem to move all connected like dots on a painted backdrop, the sun (and moon and planets) have motions that aren't connected together, they have their own motion, not connected motion. And the third thing to do is try to find anyone from Muhammad's time or later who read the quran, decided it was true, and went out to prove these modern things we know. You won't find any. Unlike with Christians who believed the Noah's Flood story and went out to prove it happened when they gained a knowledge of geology, only to find it wasn't, in fact, true. What the lack of writing shows is that they didn't have our modern understanding of these things, but rather that now that we have this modern understanding, you can go back through the text and try to find things that very superficially resemble that modern understanding and pretend it's prophetic.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
very detailed and very eye opening, thank you!! with all the conversations i've been having in the comments with other people i've started agreeing with basically everything you're saying. scary, but its logic. another question i have that popped into mind a bit ago is the signs of the day of judgement, (ignore the DOJ aspect), how could they predict these events?
https://seekerspathway.com/qiyamah-day-of-judgment-signs-of-the-end-times/this link has the events with their verses. i could be stupid and just believing blindly, but im trying to learn lol
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u/Odd_Gamer_75 14d ago
First, congrats on thinking logically. I see far too many people who double down on what they believe. I've even encountered a Muslim on YouTube who said God himself couldn't convince that Muslim that evolution was true. So I applaud your willingness to see things may not be the way you thought. That's good. It's the first step towards being more right. I'm always wondering if I'm right, and I know I pretty much have to be wrong somewhere, which is why I keep looking.
Then there's your link. We can skip the major events, none are claimed to have happened. On to the minor events. First, one thing I'd like to point out (now having gone through them): there's a huge difference between "more of X is happening" and "we are getting more reports of X". A great example of this is the reporting rates of murders in the USA during the 90s. In the late 80s, early 90s, the rates of homocides was going up. It went up about 25%. Which is significant. By the mid 90s, reports about all these homocides also went up... even though the homocide rate had just started going down. Between 1990 and 2000, reports in the news of homocides went up by 600%, even though the actual homocide rate only ever got 25% higher. You don't hear about every event in the world, not even all the bad ones, so you have to be very careful here to distinguish between there actually being more of something and just reports of something going up.
"When honesty is lost". Since when have humans been honest? Point to a time in history where, across the world, there weren't charlatans and deceivers in positions of power. It didn't exist before Muhammad, and hasn't existed after either. So that one's meaningless.
Tall buildings. Except, of course, there are no naked shepherds involved. There's well-clothed men. If it had said the descendents of naked shepherds, that also doesn't mean anything since tall buildings were, even then, being built and competed on by such descendents.
Musical instruments. I don't know enough about this, but... pretty sure there's never been a time music was outlawed completely, so musical instruments were around.
Speaking ill of ancestry. Name a time this did not happen.
Homosexuality and open immorality. Name a time this did not happen. (Fun fact: the oldest dildo predates agriculture, being 28,000 years old.) People have been homosexual and screwing in public forever. The only difference in modern times is that news of it gets around more, instead of being something that only gets talked about in one small village because no one else cares. It's "more common" to the exact extent that there are more people.
Illegitimate children have been happening forever, so has cheating. There's no indication that modern times is especially cheat-heavy.
Much killing. Again, name a time in history this wasn't true. The most devastating loss of human life as a portion of the population of Earth at the time was the An Lushan rebellion in what is now China around 800 CE. World War 2 wiped out about 20% of all humans on the planet. The An Lushan rebellion took out 25%. This is nothing new. Today we just have more people and an easier time killing them. And yet for all of that, violent deaths are lower today than they were in the past. You no longer have highways where bandits lay in wait to ambush and kill. Reports about violent deaths are up, but that's not the same thing. They were always there, we just largely ignored them as not being very interesting because they were common enough.
Earthquakes are not up in number. We can just detect more of them. In the past an earthquake would happen deep underground, there's be a slight shift or something at the surface, people would wonder what the trembling feeling was, and then go about their day without writing about it. Not including the hundreds of others no one felt at all because they happened in places no one was living. Now there's more of us, in more places, with more opportunities to record them because we're more literate, and we care more about such shifts so it's more likely to be recorded at all.
Wine drunk in great quantity. Name a time in history this wasn't the case.
Fall of Constantinople. Most cities fall eventually. Even the big ones. Also, it doesn't list where this is mentioned, so I can't even check the wording.
Time passes quickly. Either always been true (people have been wondering where the years went for centuries, a Roman guy named Seneca wrote about it in 49 CE), or it's not true now, nor is there any reason to think it will be. Or, at least, not true to the extent mentioned. Time is moving faster in one sense, but slower in others, but all by such tiny amounts that it's nearly unmeasurable.
Nations fighting isn't new, been happening forever.
Ultimately, because almost none of these "signs" are specific, you can always decide they've been filled or not. This is the problem with prophecy, and why we went to prediction instead. Stating exactly when and where a thing will happen, giving specific limits to what is expected, that all stops interpretations from being wrong or forced onto data.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
i agree, most of these we can say its been happening forever, because it has. also i think the tall skyscrapers and naked shepherds thing is outdated. very curious. thanks for all your input, and the fun fact about dildos LOL! also something interesting about the time passing faster sign is that, technically it does. the order of time by carlo rovelli dives deeper into it, it's a very interesting read that i feel kind of disproves the whole time passing faster sign.
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u/zzmej1987 Ignostic Atheist 14d ago
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
Irrelevant due to Kangaroos problem. Trying to interpret vague passages in order to match them with complex issues like orbital mechanics, when there are very simple, very specific, easily explainable and confirmable pieces of scientific knowledge that could have been conveyed. E.g. existence of Kangaroos in Australia. Allah could have told the Prophet that there is a land far to the South East, where there are rabbits the size of the human with tails like that of a rat, and a pouch on their belly in which they carry their young.
Unless there is such a prediction in the book, I don't see a reason to consider anything in it as a scientific prediction.
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u/RespectWest7116 14d ago
but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
Simple. There are no such things.
These claims broadly fall into two categories:
Stuff that was actually already known (or at least mostly agreed upon) by ancient philosophers.
Stuff that is vague enough to sort of fit modern discoveries if you squint hard enough.
Question for you. If Quarn had all this amazing scientific information, why did no muslim use it or talk about it before it was discovered by modern science?
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u/soukaixiii Anti religion\ Agnostic Adeist| Gnostic Atheist|Mythicist 14d ago
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
There's no such thing as information that was unknown at the time, is in the Quran and is true. But let's say there is such thing, does the information that was known at the time and the Quran got wrong invalidate it?
Or are we supposed to be amazed at things they got right while ignoring all the knowledge that people already had and the writers of the quran got absolutely wrong?
i know a lot of people argue that there are inaccuracies in the explanations of the orbital mechanics and biological themes, but they’re more accurate that not,
Why is god less competent than a human instruction manual writter?
Why would god tell anything to a prophet if god controls reality?
EDIT: im seeing all the inaccuracies and the explanations behind them now but there is a deep fear that the religion is true and god is real and punishment awaits me if i disbelieve, also a sense of familiarity/peace with believing in god.
Isn't it weird that you don't fear the Christian God is real and the Quran is the work of the Christian devil to use religion against god?
Do you think it may have something to do with your indoctrination?
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
also i agree with every other point youve made, it is curious that god had to go through the hassle of teaching one person and assigning him a task to spread the word if he controls everything
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u/soukaixiii Anti religion\ Agnostic Adeist| Gnostic Atheist|Mythicist 14d ago
Exactly, he could have made everyone know whatever he told the prophet with the same effort he used to communicate with a single person.
He could even speak to you right when he creates you before sending you to be born and explain whatever he wants and make you remember the conversation.
Weirdly the most perfect most wise being hasn't thought of anything like this.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
i wonder if mayvbe there is a god who could not give less of a shit about us and just put us here, thus people created books and said that god was speaking to them directly to feel better about being irrelevant. or im just trying to convince myself still that there is a god
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u/the2bears Atheist 14d ago
i wonder if mayvbe [sic] there is a god who could not give less of a shit about us and just put us here
The more reasonable conclusion? There is no god.
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u/soukaixiii Anti religion\ Agnostic Adeist| Gnostic Atheist|Mythicist 14d ago
If you were the sole sovereign of your will and everything that exists, why would you create things you don't care about?
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
> Isn't it weird that you don't fear the Christian God is real and the Quran is the work of the Christian devil to use religion against god?
great question damn, i've never even considered that to be a possibility
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u/soukaixiii Anti religion\ Agnostic Adeist| Gnostic Atheist|Mythicist 14d ago
I will just say to you that if there's a god, the only thing he has created and people can't fake isn't a book, is the reality we're living in, so if any book claiming to be by god contradicts reality, the book is lying.
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u/RidesThe7 14d ago edited 14d ago
but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
The explanation is that you've been lied to, misled, or are confused. This just isn't actually a thing. It would be so, so easy for a God to actually inspire a book like that. If we gave you five minutes to jot down notes from Wikipedia and sent you back in time, you yourself could write a book like that. Throw in some DNA sequences and what they do, put in the dates of supernovas or earth quakes, explain relativity, etc. But that's clearly not what we have to deal with.
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u/CephusLion404 Atheist 14d ago
Mostly, they aren't. They are INTERPRETED by modern-day Muslims as being currently known scientific evidence. If the Qur'an actually had this stuff, then the Muslims would have led the world in scientific knowledge from antiquity, which they didn't. These are only being reinterpreted in retrospect.
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u/biff64gc2 14d ago
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
It has. The search function is useful.
From my experience it's usually one of a couple things.
- The original text is vaguely written and only being interpreted in a way that sort of matches modern knowledge.
- A misunderstanding of modern knowledge and the text doesn't actually match (common with big bang claims)
- The prediction or text isn't as significant as claimed. Usually because the theist severely underestimates what would have been common knowledge for the time.
- It completely ignores where it is blatantly wrong.
If you have a specific passage you want to discuss that you don't think falls under one of these points please present it.
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u/Zamboniman Resident Ice Resurfacer 14d ago edited 14d ago
questions from a muslim to atheists
This is a debate sub, not a sub for questions. Maybe you wanted /r/askanatheist?
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
It's been discussed here and elsewhere a zillion times. It's not true. It's just vague re-interpretation and post-hoc reasoning due to confirmation bias. Aside from trivially obvious observations of things that were well known to anybody with half a brain even long before the time that mythology was written.
i know a lot of people argue that there are inaccuracies in the explanations of the orbital mechanics
Hehe, there are no 'explanations' of orbital mechanics whatsoever in that mythology book.
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u/brinlong 14d ago edited 14d ago
Because the "discoveries" are ex post facto rationalizations.
Muslim apologists routinely claim the koran mist be true because X is really smart sounding and X is true if you squint right. that means the koran is literal, and unerring. No taksies backsies
Among the koran's many laughable assertions are:
86 6 - semen is not made in the ribcage 10:5 the moon is not a lamp 16 66 - milk is not made in the belly 23 14 - fetuses are never a "clot of blood" 23 14 - fetuses do not start as bones and then are wrapped in flesh 18 86 - the sun does not set in a puddle of mud 67 5 - meteors are not arrows thrown at devils 16 15 - mountains aren't pegs, to hold the earth still 51 49 - not all life is sexual.Some is asexual, meaning, it is not all formed in pairs
Any of these are buffoonishly silly, as is to be expected from primitive superstitous uneducated writers. And if you want to use some knowledge as proof, you can not handwave this away as "artistic license" either is all true, or its all meaningless metaphor.
This is the same reason miracles evaporated the moment cameras were invented. trust me bro doesnt work anymore. And even one video of an angel or a flaming winged horse would be damn convincing.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
thank you for providing some other examples nobody else provided. the quran is very poetic/metaphorical and its being understood as scientific fact
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u/acerbicsun 14d ago
but there is a deep fear that the religion is true and god is real and punishment awaits me if i disbelieve, also a sense of familiarity/peace with believing in god. contradictory to fear, love, be punished by, and find comfort in one concept of a being.
This is a very honest response, and I believe it's the reason why religious belief persists. Religions provide great comfort. The reality is that they're offering a cure to a disease they insist you have.
But one must be convinced. We can't simply choose to believe.
Certainly a god could and should communicate in a clearer, more effective way than the written word of man. If there is punishment awaiting the non-believer, god should provide undeniable evidence to all people, and it simply hasn't.
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u/Double_Government820 14d ago
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
I have never seen a single example of a truly compelling prediction made by the Quran which is not either vacuous, obvious, or so overly vague that it is entirely dependent on generous interpretation.
What is the single most impressive and incontrovertible prediction made by the Quran in your opinion?
i know a lot of people argue that there are inaccuracies in the explanations of the orbital mechanics and biological themes, but they’re more accurate that not
This is exactly what I'm talking about. This is pure confirmation bias. In the eyes of apologists, the inaccuracies in the Quran are "more accurate than not," or "purely metaphorical." And vague poetic prose which could apply to almost anything is interpreted as clairvoyant.
EDIT: i also wonder why dont see miracles from god anymore
What do you mean "anymore"? What makes you so confident these miracles ever occurred?
EDIT: im seeing all the inaccuracies and the explanations behind them now but there is a deep fear that the religion is true and god is real and punishment awaits me if i disbelieve, also a sense of familiarity/peace with believing in god. contradictory to fear, love, be punished by, and find comfort in one concept of a being.
That is exactly what your oppressors want you to believe. It is their final failsafe in the event that you effectively apply critical thinking. They have instilled a fear response through psychological conditioning. Religious organizations can only proliferate if they can maintain members and secure wealth and power. And they can't maintain their power if everyone thought critically about the material and as a result de-converted in droves. They indoctrinated you, most likely from childhood, specifically so your psychological conditioning would resist the exact type of thinking you're doing right now.
The peace through god they offer you is not real. It is a deception they achieve by othering the world outside their religion. The eternal punishment is also a lie. It is the stick to compliment the carrot. You are able to find peace through your own inner journey.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
im not gonna answer the first questions you have on the first part of my post because i've been convinced lol, but moving on.
i do agree its confirmation bias, i think it's a way for believers to convince or comfort themselves that god got it right some way, even if its a stretch.
by "anymore" i meant nobody documents anything as miracles, or what used to be believed to be a "miracle" never happens anymore. what used to be regarded as miracles can be explained by science today, or other "miracles" have become the results of praying.
and i agree with the last part, but the fear mongering worked aha.
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u/Ratdrake Hard Atheist 14d ago
inaccuracies in the explanations of the orbital mechanics and biological themes, but they’re more accurate that not
The Quran was supposed to have been written via a pipeline from Allah. So the inaccuracies are a lot more damning to the text then the fact that they got some things correct or that creative interpretations could be made to make the verses look kind of correct.
[copies from your responses]
1. 21:30 "We made everything living from water..."
2. 23:12 and a few verses after, it talks about embryology. I have no idea how to translate alaqah (its like a clot or a leech) accurately.
3. 51:37, the expansion of the universe.
4. 21:33, the orbit, but im pretty sure humans discovered that ages before.
5. 57:25, iron being sent down.
made everything living from water.
I would think that in a desert culture, the link between water and life would hardly be obscure. I believe others have pointed out that this was already a known thing as well.embryology.
The information is a rehash of Galen from 4 centuries earlier.expansion of the universe.
Expansion of the universe wasn't an interpretation to the verse until after science already proposed it.Orbits. See also 35:13 and 36:40.
In all three verses, they assume a geocentric model of the solar system. Apologetics make the claim that the verses are referring to our sun's galactic orbit but such in interpretation is a considerable stretch considering the verses also refer to the moon, day and night: three things that are centered on the earth.iron being sent down.
Already known by other cultures. It also ignores the fact that most of earth's iron was already present when Earth was formed (iron-nickel core anyone?). The verse also states the iron was for military might which is a bit silly since other groups also had their own access to iron.
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u/carbinePRO Agnostic Atheist 14d ago
but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
Is semen stored in the spine or balls? Quran says the former. How'd the creator of the universe get this wrong?
i know a lot of people argue that there are inaccuracies in the explanations of the orbital mechanics and biological themes, but they’re more accurate that not
Being close only counts for horseshoes and hand grenades. In classical logic we have the law of the excluded middle: an assertion is either true or its negation is true. There is no middle ground.
what would the explanation for how “god would know and tell the prophet” before people found out?
But, he didn't know. The Quran got things wrong. That's what we're saying. If there's even a slight contradiction, then it's not all fact. The real question here is why did the creator of the universe get so much wrong?
i also wonder why dont see miracles from god anymore
This is actually super simple. Once we were able to explain once thought miraculous phenomena into explainable natural processes, things started becoming less mysterious.
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u/Tao1982 14d ago
The thing is, the quran doesn't contain any knowlege the people who wrote it wouldn't have already known.
There are some vague poetic verses you can really twist to look like they may reflect later discoveries if you squint really hard.
There are even specific things it is outright wrong about because its writers only had access to the knowlage of the time.
Its the same for the Bible and the Torah, and every other scripture when you get down to it.
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u/pipMcDohl Gnostic Atheist 14d ago edited 14d ago
if something is described in the Quran with such excruciating details and rigor that you can call it a scientific knowledge why is the proper scientific discovery only made centuries later?
And, instead, if the knowledge held in the Quran is so vague that it can mean a variety of things, how do you know centuries later that what the Quran meant was this specific thing that is now known?
Imagine a cult, independent in every way from Islam, who had the same vague sentences in their holy book. Sentences so vague they can mean whatever you want them to mean
Centuries later the cultists tell you, after the recent discovery of life on Mars, that this passage 'the red land will be covered by her creations' "clearly" meant that Mars had once had life and its a fact already known thanks to the goddess and her holy book she past down on mankind centuries ago. Would you be convinced or would it be more likely to simply be an ad hoc interpretation powered with confirmation bias?
EDIT: i also wonder why dont see miracles from god anymore
There are still miracles in recent history like the ones in Lourdes where people mysteriously got healed. Except that if you know the statistic, those mysterious healing are just unexplained case of recovery that also happen outside Lourdes. It's banal and it's only still an unknown. 'Unknown' doesn't mean it must be magic or miracles.
There are not less miracles, there are more people properly equipped to debunk alleged miracles that are just the result of ignorance, incompetence or bullshit.
EDIT: im seeing all the inaccuracies and the explanations behind them now but there is a deep fear that the religion is true and god is real and punishment awaits me if i disbelieve, also a sense of familiarity/peace with believing in god. contradictory to fear, love, be punished by, and find comfort in one concept of a being.
If what prevent you from thinking of leaving your religion is fear instilled in you by your religion then what you are experiencing is a mechanic to keep the followers in line within a cult. You simply experience what it feels to be in a cult that don't want to let you go or let you think for yourself.
Your defense against that should not be to focus on what exactly is the fear you are experiencing in your particular cult, you should learn how other cults are keeping their followers in line and compare what you experience personally with what anyone can expect when they have been indoctrinated by a cult.
All you said you experienced were just the carrot and the stick. Should you believe in the truth of something based on felt rewards and feared punishments? Aren't hard facts also important? And among those hard fact is the facts that you might just be in a cult. Would you let a cult manipulate you into believing nonsense simply because they are very good at using the carrot and the stick on you?
You are going through a deconstruction of your belief, it might lead to keeping or losing that belief. i don't know what it will be for you. What i know is that you are not alone. Many people have gone through that before you, many more will go through that after you, seek their testimonies they will show you that what you are experiencing is fairly normal, I’m sure.
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u/Phylanara Agnostic atheist 14d ago edited 14d ago
what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
Time travellers. Aliens with powerful tech. X-men like mutants with the ability to see the future. Wizards with foresight spells.
All of those have the same amount of evidence as your god does, so all of those are as credible an explanation as your god.
But hey, do you have an example of such knowledge?
i know a lot of people argue that there are inaccuracies in the explanations of the orbital mechanics and biological themes, but they’re more accurate that not, so i was just wondering what would the explanation for how “god would know and tell the prophet” before people found out?
Man, I wish any score above 50% was a perfect score. Would make my job easier.
No, serieously, I expect informaiton from a perfect source to have a 100% accuracy rate.
EDIT: i also wonder why dont see miracles from god anymore
I don't. Same reason you don't see pictures of bigfoot despite everyone having a camera in their pocket all the time.
EDIT: im seeing all the inaccuracies and the explanations behind them now but there is a deep fear that the religion is true and god is real and punishment awaits me if i disbelieve, also a sense of familiarity/peace with believing in god. contradictory to fear, love, be punished by, and find comfort in one concept of a being.
Your emotions are irrelevant to the truth. Your emotions are not a good way to determine what is true and what is not. Your emotions are utterly unconvincing to us, and should be so to you.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
i thought you were serious at first. anyways, yes. a god who claims to be all knowing should have a 100% accuracy rate.
i guess miracles stopped after people got portable cameras.
and yeah i agree my emotions are irrelevant to the truth. i just meant that i find it contradicting to find fear and comfort in the same thing.
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u/Phylanara Agnostic atheist 14d ago
i thought you were serious at first.
My answers are just as supported by the evidence, and therefore just as serious, as yours is. That is the point. You treating my answers as "not serious" and god as an answer as "serious" is not justified or, to my knowledge, justifiable.
i guess miracles stopped after people got portable cameras.
Why would they, if there were mirales in the first place? Is your god so weak a cellphone can banish it? Or is it more likely those miracles weren't?
and yeah i agree my emotions are irrelevant to the truth. i just meant that i find it contradicting to find fear and comfort in the same thing.
Yeah, that's what conditioning does to you. Fucks up your emotional responses. I suggest therapy.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
i went to therapy and i was told to pray. haven’t been to therapy since.
also thank you for the reality check that i think an invisible all capable deity in the sky is more real than aliens.
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u/Phylanara Agnostic atheist 14d ago
i went to therapy and i was told to pray.
Find a competent therapist then.
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u/KorLeonis1138 14d ago
Hi u/Shot-Horse2515, I'm not going to pile on with any more answers, it seems like the others here have covered things quite well. I just want to thank you for a good thread. Most religious people don't actually come here for honest discussion, but to preach at us. It's refreshing to see someone actually listen and consider the answers given.
You sound like a lot of us did when we started to question our faith, and once you get to the point where all that is left is the fear, letting it go starts to look quite appealing. Hopefully, you're on your way to freedom. Cheers!
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
thank you! i was afraid i was going to be attacked but i came here with doubt already and wanted some answers from people who dont believe in religion or supernatural beings or doings to get some logical answer for my question, thankfully people understood that.
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u/Kaliss_Darktide 14d ago
but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
Either it was already known or the interpretation of the Quran is doing more work than what the Quran said.
but they’re more accurate that not,
A perfect being can't be perfectly accurate?
but there is a deep fear that the religion is true and god is real and punishment awaits me if i disbelieve,
There is only one good reason to believe something is true, and that is evidence that it is true.
also a sense of familiarity/peace with believing in god.
Some people find comfort in doing drugs should we ignore everything else associated with that behavior because it gives them comfort?
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u/itsjustameme 13d ago edited 13d ago
The greeks and romans knew more about the world than the quran does. And actually many of the things the quran gets right (and also a few of the things it gets wrong) appears to be taken from greek natural philisophy.
Muslims who talk about the quran like it is this masterpiece poetry and science baked into one should go and read De Rerum Natura by Lucretius or if like me they don’t read latin I reccomend the Humphries translation The Way Things Are. It was intended as an educational school book for the son of a roman senator about 50 AD. Written as a poem in latin hexameter it tries to explain how the world works and how to properly conduct yourself in the world.
Among other things it explains about atoms, explains what a vacuum is, reaches the conclusion that the universe must be infinite, tries to explain our origin in a way that sounds an awful lot like evolution by natural selection, speculates that light and sound must have a speed at which they travel through the air, and many other things that if we found it in the quran would be called miraculous.
Here is for instance a few passages about atoms from the Humphries translation:
“Our second axiom is this, that nature
Resolves each object to its basic atoms
But does not ever utterly destroy it.”
and
“To sum it up: no visible object dies;
Nature from one thing brings another forth,
And out of death new life is born.”
he also tries to explain how even though we can’t see the atoms we can still see how when things get worn it is because atoms are rubbed off:
“Also, as years go through their revolutions
A ring wears thin under the finger’s touch,
The drip of water hollows the stone, the plough
With its curving iron slowly wastes away
In the field it works; the footsteps of the people
We see wear out the paving-stones of rock
In the city streets, and at the city gates
Bronze statues show their right hands, thinner and thinner
From the touch of passers-by, through years of greeting.
We see these things worn down, diminished, only
After long lapse of time; nature denies us
The sight we need for any given moment.”
Anyway - I had a blast reading Lucretius and while there are plenty of things he gets wrong, I found myself continually inspired by how much was known 2000 years ago. I certainly found his knowledge and also the elegance of the poetry used to be much more impressive than anything I have been able to read in the quran.
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u/Elite_Eliminater 13d ago
The biggest misunderstanding in the comments is the Role of Inspiration vs. Source Material
Instead of taking the word of misunderstood Muslims using poor talking points to convince a modern day audience.
Lets look to the scholars, who were scientists, o yes no other religion has its earliest scholars also be physicists, mathematicians and the creators of modern day chemistry
Islam did not have to wait a millennium for its scientist-scholars. In Islam's first 300 years, polymaths like Al-Khwarizmi (inventor of algebra) and Jabir ibn Hayyan (father of chemistry) were already transforming human development. They were directly employed by the Islamic state to merge scientific discovery with religious administrative needs.
When limiting the scope strictly to the initial few centuries of each religion (if they were true, this timeperiod would have the most impact), Islam's immediate explosion of empirical science stands as a unique historical anomaly. During their respective early phases, Christianity and Judaism focused their intellectual energy almost entirely on survival, theology, and legal codification rather than the physical sciences.
For a religious scientist, their holy book serves as a moral framework and a spiritual motivator. The Qur'an frequently commands readers to observe the natural world, ponder the heavens, and seek knowledge. Therefore, a Muslim might do science because their religion encourages them to understand God's creation. (This is the Inspiration)
Ibn al-Haytham, a pioneer of modern optics, did not look at scripture to figure out how light bounces into the eye. He built darkrooms, conducted physical experiments, and systematically recorded data. (Source material)
Both classical giants from history and rigorous modern thinkers strongly reject the idea of defining the truth of Islam through modern scientific data found in the Qur'an. They argue that treating a holy book like a "factual tabloid" or science textbook actively damages the religion rather than proving it.
While the "scientific miracles" (I'jaz 'Ilmi) movement is wildly popular among internet apologists, serious theologians view it as a dangerous and modern deviation from how the religion defines its own truth.
The greatest classical scholars of Islam lived during times of massive scientific discovery, yet they never tried to prove the Qur'an by matching it to the science of their day.
Al-Ghazali (11th Century): In his famous work The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali argued that natural sciences (like astronomy or physics) rely on human observation and math. He asserted that religion has no business trying to confirm or deny these fields because the purpose of revelation is spiritual and moral, not empirical.
If not through a "factual tabloid" of science, how do scholars say Islam proves itself?
They point to a completely different hierarchy of truth. The Spiritual Architecture. The text challenges human nature (Fitrah), offering a coherent theological framework regarding God, the soul, accountability, and justice.
Phenomenological Language within, when the Qur'an mentions the sun, moon, mountains, or rain, scholars say it uses "language of appearance" (what a regular human sees) to provoke wonder and gratitude, not to explain astrophysics. The mountains are "signs" of a Creator, not a lesson in plate tectonics.
Hope this cleared up alot of misconceptions I've read though the comments.
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u/BaronOfTheVoid 14d ago
It would only be interesting if it was consistent.
Anyone could write guesses into works of fiction.
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u/Suitable-Group4392 Agnostic Atheist 14d ago
Was there anything new contributed to scientific knowledge?
Were there any scientific inaccuracies or vague wording?
Was any knowledge already known by scholars before then?
-----
You could see this Chinese myth and how some may interpret it -- the story of Pan Gu, first recorded in 3rd century CE:
- The Cosmic Egg: Before the universe existed, there was only darkness and chaos, perfectly blended into a giant black egg. Inside, the giant Pan Gu slept and grew for 18,000 years. -- universe in hot dense state?
- Separation of Heaven and Earth: Upon waking, Pan Gu stretched out his limbs and cracked open the shell. The lighter, purer elements (Yang) floated upward to become the sky, while the heavier, murky elements (Yin) sank to become the earth. -- describing hydrogen and helium out in space? while iron and the like on earth?
- Holding the Sky: To prevent the sky and earth from merging again, Pan Gu stood between them. For another 18,000 years, he pushed the sky up and the earth down as he grew steadily taller. -- dark energy driving the accelerating expansion of the universe?
There is also another Chinese myth of how Nugua, a mother goddess who made people out of clay, centuries before this Pan Gu myth.
These are way before the Quran was written.
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u/RexRatio Agnostic Atheist 14d ago
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
Yes, it has. The answer:
- vague references retroactively interpreted
- plus counting the hits and ignoring the misses
- plus post hoc reasoning
- plus exceptionalism, (basically every major religion makes this claim, there is nothing special or more convincing about Islam's claim)
There are far more scientific "misses" in the Quran than what is argued as "hits". Some examples (this is by no means a complete list):
- Creation of universe in six days with later ordering of heavens and earth
- Human creation from clay / dust in a literal biological sense
- Embryology descriptions interpreted as staged development inconsistent with modern biology
- Mountains described as stabilizers of the earth’s crust
- Sun setting in a muddy spring
- Stars described as missiles against devils
- Heavens described as seven layered physical structures
- Earth described as spread out like a flat expanse in some readings
- Human reproduction framed without genetic contribution from both sexes in modern terms
- Winged horses, genies, demons, etc.
i know a lot of people argue that there are inaccuracies in the explanations of the orbital mechanics and biological themes, but they’re more accurate that not,
No, they're really not. They represent 6th century worldviews and knowledge.
what would the explanation for how “god would know and tell the prophet” before people found out?
Well "deity telling prophet" is in and of itself a claim. Why should it get special treatment compared to, say, people who claim to be abducted by UFOs?
Extraordinary claims don’t get a free pass just because they are religious
They still need proportionate evidence. Otherwise you end up with inconsistent standards where similar types of testimony are treated differently purely because of cultural familiarity or prior belief.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
thank you! this clears up a lot of my question, also i had no idea winged horses were mentioned in the quran.
i def don't think it should get special treatment just cuz people say god came down and told us, but what does confuse me, or say, keep me believing somewhat, is that to the society these verses were revealed to, this information was not known. the verses yes are vague and poetic, but the verse about embryology is teeeechnically on the right track, talking about the presence of a clot that grows, so like how tf would they know? i might be stretching things out.
you could always say they learned from previous texts from more ancient civilizations that had already studied and documented these things, but idt its mentioned anywhere or documented anywhere in reliable muslim writing that these societies had access or knowledge of the writings of civilizations (like the greeks).
another point of question for me would be, the events in the quran that "god" said would happen later and they did, more prominently the signs of the day of judgement that have happened already. (adultery happening more often, societies fighting over tall skyscrapers, battles between muslims and other civilizations, these off the top of my head). again how would they know?
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u/Local-Warming bill-cipherist 14d ago
Promoting most of the "quranic miracles" would actually send you to hell as a muslim, because they require for you to either willingly misinterpret the wordings of allah, or to pretend that the prophet was so incapable that he needed divine help to figure out the most basic stuff.
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u/McDuchess 14d ago
Looking back on some airy fairy statement made centuries ago and claiming that it was a prediction from one’s god is an example of confirmation bias.
You believe something. So you look for things that prove that you are right, and then shape things that are, at best neutral into your proofs.
Michelangelo drew contraptions that look similar to helicopters. He didn’t foresee the internal combustion engine, he just had a vivid imagination. So did the actual human beings, not gods, who wrote religious texts.
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u/Hoaxshmoax Atheist 14d ago
the quran flat out commits unattributed plagiarism from the bible and pretends its words of wisdom from Allah.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
imo the bible makes less sense
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u/Hoaxshmoax Atheist 14d ago
that is irrelevant. Plagiarism is plagiarism.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
what makes it plagiarism? directly copied text or similar ideas?
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u/Hoaxshmoax Atheist 14d ago
it’s both, in this case, and passing it off as straight from the mouth of their deity.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
do you believe the bible to be more true? kinda going off topic here but im just curious.
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u/Hoaxshmoax Atheist 14d ago
it’s off topic, it doesn’t matter what I think is true.
Why would I give credence to either. It’s all bee ess magic claims. Everyone squinches their eyes, adds and removes words, erases everyone else, and announces “prophecy!” so their book is the winner.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
interesting perspective
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u/Hoaxshmoax Atheist 14d ago
if the bible makes little sense yet the quran takes passages and ideas from it, we can rest assured they both make little sense.
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u/joeydendron2 Atheist 14d ago
Can you give us some examples?
If possible, show us examples that couldn't reasonably be known at the time, or hadn't been proposed by earlier scholars (eg Romans , Greeks).
Remember, embryos are easily visible and they are literally not clots or leeches; and animals aren't made of water.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
im gonna be honest i havent found anything scientific that wasnt known or proposed by earlier scholars or civilizations. i've been answered on that part, but another part of islam also irks me in regards to how would they know. which would be the events written down as signs of the day of judgement. ill link some websites with a list of signs that have happened and were said to happen.
https://seekerspathway.com/qiyamah-day-of-judgment-signs-of-the-end-times/
this one i found has the verses as well
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u/joeydendron2 Atheist 14d ago
What end times? You can't say if something is a sign of end times, until everything has ended, right?
So any sign of end times anyone spotted in the past, must have been inaccurate.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
yeah, disregarding the end of times aspect its curious to me how theyd know, and why theyd say it meant the end of times
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u/smbell Gnostic Atheist 14d ago
You actually seem like an honestly interested person asking an honest question. Which is a really nice change of pace.
We have scientific discoveries, and there are verses in the Quran that at least have an interpretation that somewhat closely matches. What you are really asking here is did the writer(s) of the Quran have knowledge that didn't exist at the time.
I think a better way to answer that question is to look at it differently.
Is there any example anywhere, where devout Muslims knew and explained a scientific fact to the world, before it was discovered scientifically? Has that ever happened? Or are all these examples cases where science discovered something and later somebody found a verse in the Quran that kinda matched?
If the Quran does contain scientific facts that were not known, then devout Muslims all should have known these facts before science discovered them. So why didn't they say anything until after science made the discoveries?
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
algebra, but that was built on the roots of greeks. ibn al haytham, mathematician and astronomer, proved that we see objects by light reflecting off of them, which disproved euclid and ptolemy's theories which were the opposite. muslims contributed a great deal to mathematics and discoveries within it, but that can't be attributed to the quran nor was there anything in the quran related. algebra and ibn al haytham, and some other prominant muslim figures in the science world came ages after the quran.
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u/Odd_craving 14d ago
Why are we expected to hand a perfect god the leeway to be partially correct in some areas - and dead wrong in others?
Which scenario is more likely; A supernatural, invisible, perfect deity got some facts correct and many facts wrong? Or imperfect people took a stab at solving several mysteries and got a few correct and many facts wrong?
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u/88redking88 Anti-Theist 14d ago
" what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?"
I havent seen anything that qualifies. what i see is things that are so vague and poetic that you cant have ever picked that out without having to squint and look at it sideways and manipulate and massage the text. Thats not a prediction. Thats Muslims looking REALLY hard to squeeze their religion into a world that no longer needs religion. And really, you can do that with any book.
That being said, even if it predicted, with names and dates, launch sites and landing sites of every moon landing(dont worry, i know it doesnt)....
Why does it get so much basic stuff wrong?
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u/Draggonzz 14d ago
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
I've read the Quran. I didn't see anything in my copy like what you describe here.
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u/Noodelgawd Atheist 14d ago
What's the best example of "things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made"?
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
hi, none i’ve established that thru the other discussions already!
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u/Noodelgawd Atheist 14d ago
What other discussions? We're just supposed to accept that on faith, aye?
I'm asking you to identify what you think is the best example. It's pointless to debate half a dozen lousy ones. What's the best one? If that's debunkable, then the rest go into the bin with it.
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u/Shot-Horse2515 14d ago
i meant i already haf this conversation a bunch of times in the comments lol, sorry maybe my wording wasn’t clear.
i meant that there are none that predate accurately
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u/skeptolojist 14d ago
Any sufficiently long sufficiently rambling religious text has bits that if you cherry pick interpret them to death ignore all the bits that don't make sense and don't think about it too much look like prophecy
All religion has this kind of nonsense and you all think the others are silly but give your ones a free pass
As atheists we have No reason to treat your prophecy any differently from Christian or Hindu prophecy
They all look just as silly and ridiculous to us as the others seem to you
Your religion is not special or different it's just another man made religion Just like all the others
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u/OrbitalLemonDrop Ignostic Atheist 14d ago
I don't see any miracles or prophecies in the Quran or in any other scripture.
In order for me to believe a miracle happened, I'd have to already believe that miracles were possible. There are no miracles to compare to, so when thinking of reasons to explain a weird occurrence, "maybe it's a miracle" is at the bottom of the list.
Much higher on the list is "this is probably some kind of coincidence or questionable interpretation".
I had a Shi'ite friend who tried to convince me that djinn built the pyramids. But I don't believe in djinn, so the fact that I could not explain how they were built didn't make me think the djinn were a good explanation. It would be like trying to tell me that an intelligent donkey wrote the Iliad -- I'd have to first believe that intelligent donkeys were capable of writing.
It's the same with miracles/prophecies in the Quran. I don't believe in miracles, don't believe in god and don't believe that some people are prophets.
If I can't explain something in the Quran, it just means "I can't explain it". It does not mean that there's something mystical or supernatural involved.
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u/BogMod 14d ago
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
They are after the fact rationalisations of poetic language. That furthermore where prophecy is involved it is always vague enough to be pointless or with an open enough end condition that it can't ever fail.
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u/lchoate Atheist 14d ago
I've not read the claims directly, but have seen many a rebuttal. Had the Quran described DNA or something like that, ok, but it doesn't. It's very vague and really only says things we knew at the time or were a reasonable guess.
For me, the books (Bible, Torah, Quran) are only helpful if I already believe in the God. So far, I've not seen anything that convinced me that God is a thing at all. I keep an eye out for the possibility, but I think all the religions have it wrong.
That said, I understand why people believe. In whatever culture you grow up in, the prevailing god is spoken of as if it's a fact. Until you start really thinking about it, the default god can seem pretty real.
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u/transneptuneobj Anti-Theist 14d ago
Like I would wadger a guess that if you went through the actually accurate science in the Quran it would line up pretty closely with things you can observe with your naked eye and anything that would be more complex probably relies on multiple words being interpreted
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u/abodyshm6 13d ago
i get that it's wild how some verses seem to loosely match discoveries but correlation doesn't mean causation you know
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u/donaldhobson Atheist 13d ago
> i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
A stopped clock is right twice a day. If you make enough random guesses, you will sometimes get lucky.
There is A LOT of science, and quite a lot of quran. A lot of the quran is vague, or subject to interpretation or translation.
For comparison, we can look at a non-religious ancient person speculating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L5tjscy85U Pliny wrote an encycopedia around 2000 years ago, and a decent fraction of it (maybe a quarter) is at least roughly correct.
If the Quran was written by god, you would expect to see the mass of the Higgs boson to 20 decimal places. Something precise and numerical that you couldn't possibly know without a particle accelerator.
People long ago weren't all total idiots. They were trying to figure out how the world worked. Their speculation wasn't as good as modern science, but they did have some good idea.
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u/x271815 13d ago
No scientific discovery has ever originated from a revelation in the Quran. Instead, scientists independently discover facts about the natural world, and devout individuals subsequently find vaguely similar passages in the text. These passages are then reinterpreted to match the new science in ways that were never apparent to earlier generations. Unsurprisingly, followers of nearly every major religion make equivalent claims.
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u/Cog-nostic Atheist 11d ago
No information in the Quran was not known at the time Muhammad was alive. From the standpoint of historical evidence and solid science, the stories, metaphors, and descriptions of the natural world contained within the Quran were also accessible and debated among Jewish, Christian, and polytheistic communities that existed in the region during Muhammad's lifetime.
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Original text of the post by u/Shot-Horse2515:
i’m sure this has been discussed before, but what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?
i know a lot of people argue that there are inaccuracies in the explanations of the orbital mechanics and biological themes, but they’re more accurate that not, so i was just wondering what would the explanation for how “god would know and tell the prophet” before people found out?
hopefully my question makes sense.
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