This excellent article is a much needed corrective to the uncritical acceptance of alleged scientific miracles in the Quran.
PAPER SUMMARY
Over the past few decades Muslim apologists have followed the way of Christian apologists towards the Bible in trying to make scientific conjectures, hypotheses, models and theories as a basis for interpreting certain verses of the Qurʾān with the intent of proving its divine nature. The apologists distort, exaggerate – or in the case of Zakir Naik outright lie – when translating certain verses as a means towards this end. As a result of this innovated approach (which has its roots in the ideas of modernists such as Jamāl al-Dīnal-Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh) atheists have stumbled upon a goldmine to refute the Muslim apologists in their claims of scientific foreknowledge in the Qurʾān.
However, these refutations in turn are based, especially in the field of cosmology, upon speculations, conjectures and hypotheses founded upon hidden unproven assumptions which are then promoted to the status of accepted ‘scientific facts.’ Using the terms “We now know…”, “It is now proven…” and what is similar, the atheists then proceed to ridicule the claims of Muslim apologists, not realising that their own beliefs are founded not upon hard empirical science but theories and models built on incredible, unquestioned, untested assumptions. This paper points out the error of the Muslim apologists and illustrates the danger in their approach. At the same time, it also pulls the rug from under the atheists and their religion of scientism in which they assert such levels of confidence and certainty which their conjectures do not actually allow.
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Categories: Quran
Blogging Theology 
It might also be interesting to note that the idea of a separation between heaven and earth, as in Surah 21:30, can also be found in many pre-Islamic texts from Mesopotamia (Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld; Song of the Pickaxe), Greece (Euripides, Melanippe Wise; Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica; Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica), India (Laws of Manu) and China (Xu Zheng, San Wu li chi).
And in fact, as the author notes, if we were to say that Surah 21:30 refers to the Big Bang, the Qur’an is in error because the earth was only formed some nine billion years after the Big Bang.
That being said, the article seems to be a bit needlessly aggressive against Big Bang cosmology and Copernican astronomy (and their proponents), for instance saying:
“Such evidence which invalidates the Copernican and Cosmological prinicples upon which Big Bang fairy tales are based has existed for a while. However, when you are dealing with blind-following religious nutters who worship their priests and do not question what they told and use their intellects and senses, its [sic] hard to convince them otherwise.” (p.43 n. 56)
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Interesting.
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I looked at the article which I find to be full of quackery.
The Big Bang theory has multiple independent lines of evidence all converging onto it. In fact even, one of these lines is of strong evidence but having all these independent lines converge on it…makes it solid.
On top of these lines of evidence, the General Theory of Relativity itself affirms it.
No wonder that it is the consensus of cosmologists all over the world.
The author is not knowledgable about this area at all.
He is also not making sense when trying to interpret the Qur’anic verses.
His basic claim is the Qur’an did not use the very technical language that physicists use.
Well….of course the Qur’an does not do that…it would be totally inappropriate for the audience of that time and for centuries until now if the Qur’an did that.
And his argument focuses on commentators of a thousand years ago to think if they thought the Qur’an was teaching the Big Bank….such silliness in his analysis.
Yes, one cannot say one verse of the Qur’an is miraculously in harmony with science. But there are so many verses that are in harmony with science, that it probabilistically impossible for the Prophet to have picked all these correct ways to describe numerous and various physical phenomena instead of for every correct theory, all the many false theories of the Greeks, the Arabs, etc.
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