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WillowOne's Positions

Scientific Miracles in the Quran

Form

  1. The Qur'an contains accurate scientific statements that could not have been known in seventh-century Arabia: the development of the embryo (23:12–14), the expansion of the universe (51:47), the origin of the universe from a single mass (21:30), mountains as pegs stabilising the crust (78:7), the barrier between two seas (55:19–20), iron "sent down" from space (57:25).
  2. No human could have known these things.
  3. Therefore the Qur'an was authored by God.

My Positions

  1. Every "scientific miracle" is either a commonplace of ancient knowledge, a vague phrase read with hindsight, or simply wrong. Not one was identified as science before the science was known.
  2. The method is the Texas Sharpshooter: find the discovery, then search the text for a verse that can be stretched to it, and ignore the verses that cannot.
  3. The argument was invented in 1976 by a French physician and spread by television preachers. Its leading English-language proponent withdrew its central example in 2013. It has no standing among scholars of either the Qur'an or the sciences, and it is embarrassing to educated Muslims, who deserve better from their apologists.

Notes

  1. The embryology. The sequence in 23:14, a drop, then a clinging clot (alaqa), then a chewed lump, then bones, then flesh on the bones, follows Galen's second-century account of the stages of the embryo, which was taught in the medical schools of Alexandria and Jundishapur and known to the Arabs of the Hijaz through trade and through the Prophet's own physician. It also reproduces Galen's error: the embryo is never a blood clot, and bones and muscle develop together, not in sequence. Hamza Tzortzis, who had built the argument's best-known presentation, published a retraction in 2013 conceding that the verses were consistent with Galen and did not demonstrate foreknowledge.
  2. The cosmology. "We are expanding it" (51:47) is one reading of a verb that classical commentators took to mean "we are its enricher" or "we have power over it"; nobody read it as cosmic expansion before Hubble. "The heavens and the earth were joined together and we parted them" (21:30) is the standard ancient Near Eastern creation image, found in Genesis 1:6 and in Egyptian and Sumerian myth. Mountains as pegs is wrong: mountains do not stabilise the crust and are themselves produced by its movement. "Two seas that do not mix" describes the visible boundary at an estuary, known to every fisherman. Iron is indeed forged in stars, as is every element heavier than helium, so "sent down" proves nothing it would not equally prove of the gold in 3:14.
  3. The verses not cited. The Sun sets in a muddy spring (18:86). Sperm comes from between the backbone and the ribs (86:6–7). The stars are lamps hung in the lowest heaven and missiles flung at eavesdropping devils (67:5). The earth is spread out like a carpet (15:19, 71:19) beneath seven heavens. The same hindsight that finds Hubble in 51:47 must explain these, and the explanation is always that they are poetic. A method that reads the hits literally and the misses poetically will find science in any book, and has been used to find it in the Bible, the Vedas and the Book of Mormon.
  4. The decisive test. If the Qur'an contained scientific knowledge unavailable to its author, Muslim scientists reading it for a thousand years would have extracted the knowledge before the West discovered it. None did. Every "miracle" was announced after the discovery, by people who already knew the answer and went looking for the verse. A revelation that only becomes legible after someone else has done the experiment is not a revelation; it is a commentary.
  5. The history. The genre begins with Maurice Bucaille's The Bible, the Qur'an and Science (1976), written by a French surgeon in the employ of the Saudi royal family, and was industrialised by the Commission on Scientific Signs in the Qur'an and Sunnah in the 1980s, which paid Western scientists to attend conferences and then clipped their polite remarks into endorsements. The scientists later complained that they had been used. It is, in structure, creationism's mirror image: not science denied in the name of scripture, but scripture rewritten in the name of science, and it fails for the same reason, which is that it starts from the conclusion.

Sources

  • Needham, J., A History of Embryology (1934; 2nd ed. 1959), on Galen and his transmission
  • Tzortzis, H., "Embryology in the Qur'an: a scientific-linguistic analysis", withdrawn with a public statement, 2013
  • Bigliardi, S., "The Contemporary Debate on the Harmony between Islam and Science: Emergence and Challenges of a New Generation", Social Epistemology 28 (2014)
  • Golden, D., "Western Scholars Play Key Role in Touting 'Science' of the Quran", Wall Street Journal, 23 January 2002
  • Bucaille, M., The Bible, the Qur'an and Science (1976), for the argument in its original form

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