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

[WinterHold]

I want to comment to this since it slipped away yesterday.

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.

First of all the text is beautiful. I mean omg, even on beauty, you need an an objective definition ? who's america now ?
Well, there is indeed an independent code of beauty to each person and each has their own definition of what is beautiful or what is not ; but there are major beliefs that beautiful is what makes you happy ; give that stray look and in silence you wonder : how beautiful, as goose pumps invade your body and strayed you stand and wonder.

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.

I'm not an Apologists, first of all, I observe and report. I didn't claim that the Quran is a scientific book neither an astronomy book. As for this one, you can blame my historical background, and stop putting lots of pressure on me for many reasons :

1)As a mixup, I traveled. I studied school in a shitty country, under a salafi/wahabi minister. They taught us for example that Darwin is a liar for his evolution. Guess what made me believe in evolution ? Duuh reading discussions like this and NOT BEING AN APOLOGIST !!

2)My native is Arabic, yet I learned English via self study since school books were shit, so if you studied history when you were 6, I started studying history for real when I was 16.

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.

Yes because I'm not an apologist.

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.

This is the reality. Even Columbus believe it was flat ; though.
The Quranic verse "DID" change the mentality of a whole region, by that transferring the world dramatically.

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.

How ? if we spoke about the society, then the society is out of measurement unless you actually live within it, or its in the same time-frame as you.

For example : how would I judge that the ancients had foot fetish ? I can't, even if some statues and drawings indicated that. Since I didn't live in that era, I can't pierce in through to see how each person felt that fetish.

The same goes with spherical earth : what is reported, JuliaL, is that even between scholars, the spherical earth theory wasn't the fashion. Society wise, neither me nor you can judge ; though I quoted wikipedia on that it wasn't the major belief !!

Yet in Islamic countries, it was a matter of "faith", that if a scholar is a Muslim, they should acknowledge it.

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.

compile error ; it seems.

I'm I using auto-correction in my browser ! ENGLISH ISN'T MY NATIVE LANGUAGE, you might argue that it also isn't yours, then in that case, excuse me for not being as smart as you, and excuse my terrible, bad, devastating, destructive, ugly, shameful ignorance ! ! Oh come on I want to see you write in Arabic -if you're an arab, then...let me see you write in a language that isn't your native one !-

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

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.

It wasn't the major belief and my source said that.
Despite
what the bright scientists from all these cultures said.

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.

Yes, to show you that the major belief wasn't in a spherical earth, and that nobody knows when this theory first surfaced.

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.

Thank you for quoting this it's very useful for me, and as many other members also mentioned Aristotle's contribution. But if that theory was so spread, why did Columbus assume a flat earth along with almost most of old societies ?? your theory has a huge hole in the middle

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

Thank you. Proving my point even more.

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]

The topic is spherical earth not spherical sky. The sky for any person does look like a dome & everybody can see that.

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

Most ? spherical ?
Actually they should write "round view", which we discussed earlier, that it differs so much from "spherical".


Quoting magellan himself.

Did he actually read his own reference?

Some points of it, yes.

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

Oh woo fuckin hoo !

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.

I can't judge how every person sees the Quran, though what I know is that the book is being highly ignored even as an archeological object of an age of 1400 years.
Though, you guys lack imagination, and believe only in physical stuff, and materialism is not good for the brain. It makes you miss lots of theories even if they made total sense.

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.)

I will be materialistic and borrow me some atheist argument mentality to go kick some "theist" ass !
What is your evidence that Mohammed peace be upon him borrowed it ? You actually have none.

I'm sure he didn't, because the ancient society wasn't like today's..or wait. Do you think the ancients had internet ???

Actually, AtlasS2 reminds me of Chekov, no, not Anton, Pavel, navigator of the Starship Enterprise.

And now I'm a startrek character with a weird hairstyle ?

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I've noticed something. As soon as science makes a new discovery and as long as it doesn't contradict the scriptures in an undesired way religious people are there to claim that "it was all fortold" or "it had been in the Scriptures long before the scientists came up with a discovery" or "the scientists have just taken it out of the Scriptures". Without hesitation they try to claim that some of the researchers had experienced a divine revelation and were in fact members of their religion. They also meddle in History and try to claim that every other major scientist was a memder of their faith. Every time they try to pull such thing they display unfathomable ignorance of the subject be it Astronomy, Quantum Physics or inventing the Wheel.

I didn't do that, my dear dragon.
Actually, in a comment here I mentioned how I believe god taught humans everything and gave them the brains to find out.

If you proved me wrong, then fine, what am I, but another scholar ? though still, I wasn't proven wrong totally : history does ignore the religious claims of a spherical earth in the Quran, and we all know the reason. Why do you think the church prosecuted people, who practiced Muslim science ?
It's again a case, where politics invade the scientific field.

I was saddened by your fast fall at the intro of the hobbit 3.