How Muslims believed earth was spherical long before anybody mentions it.

[JuliaL]

To perform a successful goalpost move, you have to shovel harder than this.

Adherents to Islam have tried to show divine inspiration for their pet religious texts by claiming perfections not available to mortals. For instance claims of "beauty" of the text, unprovable without an objective definition of beauty. Scientific discoveries gain acceptance as truths by most cultures because of their usefulness. Apologists have tried to combine these strategies by claiming prior discovery in their religious texts of scientific truths. The 'clot of blood' which Hamza Tzortzis tried to claim predicted discoveries in embryology (and his getting bitch slapped by PZ Myers, an actual biologist) is one example of this.
Now that AtlasS2 has been repeatedly shown that a spherical model of the earth existed in ancient cultures throughout the world long pre-dating Islam he has changed his tune. No longer is it that the alledgedly inspired text of the Quran interpreted to indicate a spherical earth pre-dated that discovery by ancient astronomers. Now his claim is that the Quran spread the concept widely through religious education and indoctrination, kind of an early PR campaign for a spherical earth.


His second post contradicts this change as it did not indicate that he was referring to the culture or a majority of citizens. Then and subsequently, a reasonable assumption is that he was referring to his "coin like" earth as a concept shared by all Greeks.

Ancient greek believed earth was coin-shaped, not spherical with hollow interior (despite what fills the interior ; today we know it's lava & molten metals ; and btw the Quran also shows what interior of earth actually is with a direct reference to gravity).

Ancient greek believed the interior was "the underworld", another hellish dimension. Also believed in the "end of the world" theory, that at the end of the coin, there are no locations to go to.

Saying earth is spherical is a totally different thing. The verse -if you read the topic- says "yokawer = shapes in a spherical/round manner", this is totally not the "coin-like" earth that the greeks believed in.

<sarcasm>Perhaps his use of the singular (greek) rather than using a plural (Greeks) was meant to mean that only one Greek person did believe in the "coin like" earth leaving the actual proportion of the culture that believed in a spherical earth unstated.</sarcasm> His later use of the plural (which should have been capitalized if used properly) denies this hypothesis.

Further on he restates his claim with some creative interpretation or perhaps translations:

It's the bald claim the Quran presented that nobody ever said or believed in for a fact ; which is "Earth is a spherical shaped ball".

Saying earth is a ball, is so different from trying to measure its circumference or size. Saying earth is a ball, that contains "Heavy weights inside" is a bald claim, Alex K. That's the difference.

robvalue

It means Europe erased that the Quran mentioned it first & replaced it with the story of the poor guy who got toasted by the Church for saying it?

Mybold in quotations throughout.

Either way, he has consistently ignored evidence that a spherical earth was at least an accepted truth among the educated in Greek, Roman, Indian, Celt, Chinese culture and certainly appeared to claim divine inspiration and primacy for its appearance in the Quran.

Not to mention it's a verse. The Muslim scholars didn't "discover it", the prophet told it & Muslims believed it. I guess he didn't go to greece before, unless you want to claim that Mohammed peace be upon him was a scientist.

He subsequently used a Wikipedia reference to a flat-earth article apparently as explanation or rebuttal to my characterization of his prior argument in the OP and subsequently.

What an odd argument, that everyone (ancients included) recognize that the earth is round, but nobody until Mohammed specifically connected round to spherical?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of...stic_world

I already replied that earlier, and this article has it all :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth

I'm not sure that article has "it all," but it does have some interesting points:

Aristotle accepted the spherical shape of the Earth on empirical grounds around 330 BC, and knowledge of the spherical Earth gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world from then on.

The late Norse Konungs skuggsjá, on the other hand, states that:

From this you may infer that the earth-circle is round like a ball and not equally near the sun at every point.

Many ancient cultures have had conceptions of a flat Earth, including <snip>India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD)

The model of an egg was often used by Chinese astronomers like Zhang Heng (78-139 AD) to describe the heavens as spherical:
The heavens are like a hen's egg and as round as a crossbow bullet; the earth is like the yolk of the egg, and lies in the centre.[54]

During the early Church period, with some exceptions, most held a spherical view, for instance, Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose to name a few.

Did he actually read his own reference?

Having backed away from the claim of prior discovery for the Quran, he is left with the weaker, "But Moslems spread it around."

It wasn't the model mostly adapted, neither was it even famous.
The Quran though, in two lines , made it a fact that all the Muslim scholars didn't deny or even cross.
<snip>
Well, denying that would mean I deny the contributions of this genius scholar to science, along with all the other genius greek scholars too.

The point julial, is that a book widely called by non-believers as a book of fairy tales, delivered this fact and changed the major mentality of the ancient world which viewed earth as a coin.

It was certainly not spread throughout Northeast Asia by religious fiat. So even this lesser claim fails.
Non-believers I know do not consider everything in the Quran to be a fairy tale. We realize that Mecca exists. It is the self serving claims of the supernatural, the miracles and unquestionable divine intervention that we consider stories for children who should really grow up.

My point is that, give me one society that viewed earth as a sphere ; yet as you would not find any (and wikipedia told you that in the link I provided), god made showed humanity and taught the reality via the quran, and finally this model wasn't another "joke" or something that people would ignore and forget : IT BECAME A RELIGIOUS FACT.

He might be able to support a claim that: by religious edict, for some time, within the territory held by Islamic states, the Quran could have been, and possibly was interpreted to indicate a spherical earth. The claim that this knowledge was divinely inspired rather than borrowed from the other cultures proven to possess it prior to the founding of Islam has always been and still is unproven (or more colloquially, bullshit.)

Actually, AtlasS2 reminds me of Chekov, no, not Anton, Pavel, navigator of the Starship Enterprise.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Pavel_Chekov

Pavel was very proud of his heritage. He often noted (sometimes erroneously) that most great inventions and events ever noted in history came from his homeland, which both amused and annoyed his crewmates: