RE: How Muslims believed earth was spherical long before anybody mentions it.
March 17, 2015 at 5:45 am
(This post was last modified: March 17, 2015 at 6:08 am by Smaug.)
AtlasS2
To say the truth, I don't know Quaran so well as to conclude with full confidense that there're no mentions of spherical Earth hypotheses in it in any reasonably-recognisable way and in any of it's editions. Hereby I let the more educated collegues to present a compelling arguement on this topic. But even if there is a mention it doesn't actually indicate it's novelty or divine origin. The points why it is so have been brought up earlier in this topic. That is, spherical earth hypothesis was introduced 2-3 hundred years B.C. and by the first century it was a well-confirmed fact. To add to it, this hypothesis appeared as a result of systematic natural observations and logical reasoning (of ancient Greeks).
Medieval Arab civilization played a major role in preserving and developing natural knowledge (mostly Astronomy, Math, Medicine) in times when civilization in Europe was in sharp decline in terms of science. And European clerics of the Dark Ages sometimes really backed up their bad attitude towards certain "ungodly" branches and ideas of natural science with claims that said ideas came from "the heathens". But it's religious fundamentalism and politics of those times. This doesn't have anything to do with the nature of science.
As I've said in another topic, science is observancy, competence and first and foremost hard work. But not revelations. To say more correctly, there may be a "revelation" as a result of a long period of careful study and reasoning but not in any other way. No work - no revelations. That's what I'm trying to point out, actually. All those naive stories about "genious revelations" (such as about Newton, Einstein, Mendeleev et al) are in fact modern myths and completely fail to tell the full story. For example that it took Newton about a decade of hard work to study carefully Kepler's and Galileo's considerations, collect and analyze the most up to date data on Lunar motion, make and prove hypotheses and finally complete his Theory of Universal Gravitation. It's like when you look at a marvelous work of art and wonder what inspired the artist but don't really bother about the amount of routine effort it took to complete said masterpiece, let alone become skilled enaugh to even be able to do it.
Speaking of famous Arabic scientists of the Middle Ages they first and foremost relied on logic and experiment which is clear from their works that have been preserved for our times. Of course they were all Muslims but didn't invoke faith in their actual research (they rather used faith as a motivational factor how responsible theists do it).
To say the truth, I don't know Quaran so well as to conclude with full confidense that there're no mentions of spherical Earth hypotheses in it in any reasonably-recognisable way and in any of it's editions. Hereby I let the more educated collegues to present a compelling arguement on this topic. But even if there is a mention it doesn't actually indicate it's novelty or divine origin. The points why it is so have been brought up earlier in this topic. That is, spherical earth hypothesis was introduced 2-3 hundred years B.C. and by the first century it was a well-confirmed fact. To add to it, this hypothesis appeared as a result of systematic natural observations and logical reasoning (of ancient Greeks).
Medieval Arab civilization played a major role in preserving and developing natural knowledge (mostly Astronomy, Math, Medicine) in times when civilization in Europe was in sharp decline in terms of science. And European clerics of the Dark Ages sometimes really backed up their bad attitude towards certain "ungodly" branches and ideas of natural science with claims that said ideas came from "the heathens". But it's religious fundamentalism and politics of those times. This doesn't have anything to do with the nature of science.
As I've said in another topic, science is observancy, competence and first and foremost hard work. But not revelations. To say more correctly, there may be a "revelation" as a result of a long period of careful study and reasoning but not in any other way. No work - no revelations. That's what I'm trying to point out, actually. All those naive stories about "genious revelations" (such as about Newton, Einstein, Mendeleev et al) are in fact modern myths and completely fail to tell the full story. For example that it took Newton about a decade of hard work to study carefully Kepler's and Galileo's considerations, collect and analyze the most up to date data on Lunar motion, make and prove hypotheses and finally complete his Theory of Universal Gravitation. It's like when you look at a marvelous work of art and wonder what inspired the artist but don't really bother about the amount of routine effort it took to complete said masterpiece, let alone become skilled enaugh to even be able to do it.
Speaking of famous Arabic scientists of the Middle Ages they first and foremost relied on logic and experiment which is clear from their works that have been preserved for our times. Of course they were all Muslims but didn't invoke faith in their actual research (they rather used faith as a motivational factor how responsible theists do it).
