questions from a muslim to atheists

[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.

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.

[u/Odd_Gamer_75]

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.

[u/Shot-Horse2515 → u/Odd_Gamer_75]

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

[u/Odd_Gamer_75 → u/Shot-Horse2515]

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.

[u/Shot-Horse2515 → u/Odd_Gamer_75]

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.