Miracle

[bennyboy]

Harris, even if early Muslim scholars invented/discovered/were aware of some science, so what? It's only a miracle if this knowledge is attained through supernatural revelation, i.e. from God rather than from observation and study.

You ramble on about passages that you say show awareness of scientific facts or principles that they could not have known. But if they wrote them down, they knew them. IF they knew these things, then the question is HOW did they know them?

If they knew science only through direct revelation from God, and not from their own observations and study, then either God was hopelessly stingy with the amount and quality of science he chose to reveal to them, or they were hopelessly retarded and uneducated in understanding, transcribing, and/or transmitting the complete body of all science, past present and future, which he must have revealed to them.

I think you are avoiding or not understanding one straight point. Although, people were reading these scientific facts in Quran yet they were unaware of the reality because of their incapacity to conceptualize these facts. 7th century people could not be the founder of these scientific facts because they were not even conscious of them.

Give a try yourself to find any trace in the history that someone knew about the expansion of the Universe before Einstein and Hubble especially in seventh century. At least how much I know there is no such evidence in the entire human history.

Second point, the purpose of scientific facts in Quran is not to give science education rather to show the incapacity of humans to produce such concepts in seventh century. By this Quran gives a proof to the future generations that these concepts can only be from God Who is the Creator of everything.

You could go through the various miscellaneous ideas in the Bible, in mythology, and in Greek and Roman literature, and find that among the many ideas presented by them, some of them seem to accord well with modern science.  I mean, the word "atom" has been around for thousands of years.  Is that a miracle, too?
I'd say a couple things about all this:

1)  People in the past were smart, perhaps smarter than today.  So it's only bias that makes you think that someone one or two millenia ago couldn't figure things out. It's also possible that they arrived at a correct view through an incorrect process-- guessing, for example, or extending a philosophical principle into a context in which it shouldn't have been.
2)  The particular passage you are talking about is explainable in other ways than "miracle."  For example, it may be that the idea of expansion was en vogue already at or before that time, and the writers of the Quran simply mentioned it as an aside.  You make the mistake of reading only the passage, and making assumptions without knowing the cultural context in which the passage was written.
3)  Why is everything in religion always so vague and ambiguous?  You say that God wanted to show his greatness by introducing the "miracle" of a Quran writer happening to mention the idea of expansion.  Why didn't he include a picture of the atom? Why didn't he produce the miracle of preventing infant deaths, or genocide, or cars that run on water?

By the way, you missed an important "miracle."  God said "I am the alpha and the omega."  This means that the beginning is the same as the end, which is only possible in a singularity.  Therefore, you should be making the case that the Big Bang singularity is God.  Go quick, run and start a thread about the miracle of black holes!