Debunking Islamhttp://www.miraclesofthequran.com/index.phphttp://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=745154&page=4http://www.faithfreedom.org/debates/NaikCampbellintro.htm#contenthttp://www.councilofexmuslims.com/index.php?topic=5708.msg145311;topicseen#newKhadija/Inheritantancehttp://www.councilofexmuslims.com/index.php?topic=6678.new#newhttp://www.lakemaninjau.com/minang.htmlSexual harassment and Islamic dresshttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7514567.stmhttp://www.councilofexmuslims.com/index.php?topic=6217.0Noah's arkhttp://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showpost.php?p=20678268&postcount=217 layershttp://www.councilofexmuslims.com/index.php?topic=5823.0Plants (pomegranate)http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1157365874828&pagename=Zone-English-HealthScience/HSELayoutScience in the Quranhttp://www.aina.org/aol/peter/greek.htmGreek scientific thought had been in the world for a long time before it reached the Arabs, and during that period it had already spread abroad in various directions. So it is not surprising that it reached the Arabs by more than one route. It came first and in the plainest line through Christian Syriac writers, scholars, and scientists. Then the Arabs applied themselves directly to the original Greek sources and learned over again all they had already learned, correcting and verifying earlier knowledge. Then there came a second channel of transmission indirectly through India, mathematical and astronomical work, all a good deal developed by Indian scholars, but certainly developed from material obtained from Alexandria in the first place. This material had passed to India by the sea route which connected Alexandria with north-west India. Then there was also another line of passage through India which seems to have had its beginnings in the Greek kingdom of Bactria, one of the Asiatic states founded by Alexander the Great, and a land route long kept open between the Greek world and Central Asia, especially with the city of Marw, and this perhaps connects with a Buddhist medium which at one time promoted intercourse between east and west, though Buddhism as a religion was withdrawing to the Far East when the Arabs reached Central Asia. [pages 2-3].
Greek science and Islam"The major link between Islamic and Greek medicine must be sought in late Sasanian medicine, especially in the School of Jundishapur rather than that of Alexandria. At the time of the rise of Islam Jundishapur was at its prime. It was the most important medical centre of its time, combining the Greek, Indian and Iranian medical traditions in a cosmopolitan atmosphere which prepared the ground for Islamic medicine. The combining of different schools of medicine foreshadowed the synthesis that was to be achieved in later Islamic medicine
Arab medicine, to deal with only one side of this question, borrowed from many sources. The biggest debt was to the Greeks ... The medicine of Jundi Shapur was also mainly Greek. There must have been Syriac translations in the library of the hospital there long before the Arabs came to Persia ... According to Ibn Abi Usaybi'a the first to translate Greek works into Syriac was Sergius of Ra's-al-`Ayn [sic], who translated both medical and philosophical works. It was probably he who worked for Chosroes the Great and it was his translations in all probability which were used in Jundi Shapur [36].
According to Muslim historians, especially Ibn Abi Usaybia and al-Qifti [37], the most celebrated early graduate of Jundishapur was a doctor named al Harith Ibn Kalada, who was an older contemporary of Muhammed. "He was born probably about the middle of the sixth century, at Ta'if, in the tribe of Banu Thaqif. He traveled through Yemen and then Persia where he received his education in the medical sciences at the great medical school of Jundi-Shapur and thus was intimately acquainted with the medical teachings of Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen." [38]"
http://answering-islam.org/Quran/Science/embryo.htmlNumerologyChristians have done the same with the Bible, Jews with the Talmud, along with Dan Brown fans with the Da Vinci Code too. They all point to one thing in my opinion, and I will try to explain it with the help of some analogies.
Attempts to find cryptograms in Shakespeare's works, which tended to report results only for those passages of Shakespeare for which the theory produced a positive result. This could be explained as an example of the fallacy because passages which do not match the theory have not been accounted for. The fallacy could also be an explanation for cryptograms in the Bible.
You may be familiar with the Hong Kong telephone directory or the Texas sharpshooter analogy (about a cowboy that fire a round of bullets at a barn door, then draws the target around the bullets to show how good he is with the gun). They are fallacies related to the clustering illusion fallacy which refers to the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns in randomness where none actually exist.
Michael Drosnin once made a challenge with this statement:
"When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them." (Newsweek, Jun 9, 1997)
After reading the evidence in this thread
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html we might come to the conclusion that Moby Dick really predicted the assassinations of famous prime ministers.
The numerological miracle of Edgar Allan Poe's poetry
The following example is an expansion of one first presented on USENET
For this example, we will use numerical values for English letters assigned using the same pattern as used for Arabic, Greek and Hebrew.
A=1 B=2 C=3 D=4 E=5 F=6 G=7 H=8 I=9
J=10 K=20 L=30 M=40 N=50 O=60 P=70 Q=80 R=90
S=100 T=200 U=300 V=400 W=500 X=600 Y=700 Z=800
We will analyse the famous first line of Poe's classic poem "The Raven":
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary
* There are 7x7 letters.
* The first and last words sum to 202x7, of which the first letters contribute 80x7.
* The consonants in words starting with a consonant sum to 537x7.
* The consonants in words ending with a consonant sum to 485x7, of which 192x7 comes from the odd length words and 293x7 from the even length words.
* The consonants in words 2,4,6,8,10 sum to 177x7.
* There are 7 words ending with consonants.
* There are 3x7 consonants in words of even length.
* Considering words 1,3,5,7,9,11:
* There are 3x7 letters.
* The even (2,4,6..) letters in each word total 138x7.
* The last letters of each word total 205x7.
* The first and last letters of each word total 51x7x7.
* Considering the verb "pondered":
* The first letter has value 10x7.
* The vowels have total value 10x7.
Embryology in the Quran.The Qur'an describes the stages of foetal development thus..
Thereafter We made him (the offspring of Adam) as a Nutfah (mixed drops of the male and female sexual discharge and lodged it) in a safe lodging (womb of the woman). Then We made the Nutfah into a clot (Alaqa, a piece of thick coagulated blood), then We made the clot into a little lump of flesh (Mudghah), then We made out of that little lump of flesh bones, then We clothed the bones with flesh, and then We brought it forth as another creation. So blessed be Allah, the Best of Creators.
Nutfah translates as semen, not both semen and egg.
The claim from Moore and others is that the idea of a foetus developing in stages is a modern one, not known outside the Qur'an till the 15th century. However, apart from the fact that the Torah describes six stages of foetal development, and the fact that the Romans had performed Caesarian sections at varying stages of pregnancy and so must have also known about it, the Ancient Greeks were also familiar with the concept.
Writing circa AD 150, Galens wrote on the same subject...
But let us take the account back again to the first conformation of the animal, and in order to make our account orderly and clear, let us divide the creation of the foetus overall into four periods of time. The first is that in which. as is seen both in abortions and in dissection, the form of the semen prevails (Arabic nutfah). At this time, Hippocrates too, the all-marvelous, does not yet call the conformation of the animal a foetus; as we heard just now in the case of semen voided in the sixth day, he still calls it semen. But when it has been filled with blood (Arabic alaqa), and heart, brain and liver are still unarticulated and unshaped yet have by now a certain solidarity and considerable size, this is the second period; the substance of the foetus has the form of flesh and no longer the form of semen. Accordingly you would find that Hippocrates too no longer calls such a form semen but, as was said, foetus. The third period follows on this, when, as was said, it is possible to see the three ruling parts clearly and a kind of outline, a silhouette, as it were, of all the other parts (Arabic mudghah). You will see the conformation of the three ruling parts more clearly, that of the parts of the stomach more dimly, and much more still, that of the limbs. Later on they form "twigs", as Hippocrates expressed it, indicating by the term their similarity to branches. The fourth and final period is at the stage when all the parts in the limbs have been differentiated; and at this part Hippocrates the marvelous no longer calls the foetus an embryo only, but already a child, too when he says that it jerks and moves as an animal now fully formed (Arabic ?a new creation?) ...
... The time has come for nature to articulate the organs precisely and to bring all the parts to completion. Thus it caused flesh to grow on and around all the bones, and at the same time ... it made at the ends of the bones ligaments that bind them to each other, and along their entire length it placed around them on all sides thin membranes, called periosteal, on which it caused flesh to grow [19].
The four stages of foetal development described by Galens correspond to the four stages described by Mohammed in the Qur'an.
Galen's works were translated into Syriac in the 6th century by the Christian priest Sergius of Resh' Aina, a Nestorian. When the Nestorians faced persecution from the mainstream church, they fled to Persia and founded a medical school at Jundishapur. One of the school's most famous graduates was al Harith Ibn Kalada, a contemporary and companion of Mohammed, who would have been familiar with the works of Galens, and other Greek scientists.
Furthermore, Galens got many things wrong, and the Qur'an repeats his mistakes. Ancient Greeks thought that the woman was merely an incubator inside which the semen developed into a foetus by mingling with menstrual blood. They had no knowledge of the role played by ovaries and the Qur'an shows no knowledge of them either. Nor is there any stage at which the embryo resembles a "clot of blood" or a leech. The relationship between the placenta and the uterine wall may be described as "leech like" in that the placenta clings to the uterine wall, but that applies to the entire 9 months of a pregnancy and so can hardly be called a stage of foetal development.
Some handy links for further reading...
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CJ/CJ533.htmlhttp://www.babycentre.co.uk/pregnancy/fetaldevelopment/http://www.faithfreedom.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=49655http://www.faithfreedom.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=26725#26725http://www.arguewitheveryone.com/general-political-discussion/38271-quran-rip-greeks.htmlFun fact of the day - on the acknowledgements page of Keith Moore's text book on Islamic embryology, he lists Osama Bin Laden as a scholar who supported the work.