Scientific foreknowledge in sacred texts

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Scriptural literalism (specifically Creationism and some forms of Biblical archaeology) is a related ideology, but strictly the reverse process of aligning scientific observation with scriptural reading rather than aligning scriptural reading with scientific observation.


Bible [edit]



History and advocacy [edit]






Harry Rimmer (1890–1952) was president of the "Research Science Bureau of Los Angeles" and published "Harmony of Science and Scripture" (1936) [7] which attributed much scientific foresight to the Bible, including the wave nature and spectrographic analysis of light, stating "either Job knew this, or supernatural wisdom is revealed here!"[8] Rimmer had no earned college degree, although he was awarded an honorary "Doctor of Science" degree from Wheaton College (Illinois), a Christian liberal arts college.[9]




Qur'an [edit]



Muslims have cited the following Qur'anic verse as miraculous, "After that (Allah) spread the Earth out (dahaha: from the verb 'daha')" [Quran 79:30]. This verse has been interpreted by many Muslims as foreshadowing the concept that the figure of the Earth has an ellipsoid shape. Kamel Ben Salem's explanation for this is that "the ancient exegetes had earlier explained the Arabic verb (dahaha) by (has flattened it)" but that "the origin of this verb is found in the word (Ud-hiya)," which means "egg of ostrich," thus "the Earth would look like an ostrich’s egg" which is accurate with scientific data that confirms that the Earth is slightly flat at the poles very similarly to the shape of the egg of an ostrich.[13] Rashad Khalifa alternatively translated the verse as: "he made the earth egg-shaped."[14]

Bucailleism [edit]

One well-known proponent of this argument is Maurice Bucaille, a French physician and author of the book The Bible, The Quran and Science, whose translator into Indonesian, Dr. Muhammad Rasjidi, former Professor for Islamic Studies at McGill University and former Indonesian Minister for Religious Affairs characterizes as "a half-baked mish-mash of pseudo-science and pseudo-exegesis".[15] Maurice Bucaille asserts in his book that "he could not find a single error in the Qur'an", and that the Qur'an does "not contain a single statement which is assailable from a modern scientific point of view", which led him to believe that no human author in the 7th century could have written "facts" which "today are shown to be keeping with modern scientific knowledge".[1] Scholars criticize, that "Bucaille bends the meaning of the Arabic words to suit his own ideas."[16] and "Bucaille proposes new meanings for Qur'anic words to bring them into accord with modern scientific knowledge, without requiring any standard philological justification."[17]

The search for Qur'anic references to and prophecies of modern scientific discoveries has become a "popular trend" in some Muslim societies;[18] as a manifestation of the popularity of the scientific miracles belief, the Muslim World League at Makkah formed a committee named Committee on the Scientific Miracles of the Qurʾān and the Sunna to investigate the relation between Qur'an and science, headed by Zaghloul El-Naggar.[1]


Criticism of consistency [edit]

Taner Edis, author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam, describes this point.[20] He argues that Muslims are more likely to view the Quran as the direct word of God, and so it must be reconciled with their growing respect for science and technology. Edis suggests that Muslims often have a vested interest in finding passages whose interpretation can be stretched to describe modern understanding. He warns that reading into books like this can be misleading, since the method can be used to support any number of contradictory facts.[21] Russel Glasser (a Skeptic from the The Atheist Experience TV show with Matt Dillahunty and Jeff Dee) likewise suggests that reading into the Quran like this amounts to cherry picking and risks simply confirming the biases of the investigator.[22]

Criticism of pseudoscientific thought [edit]

High energy physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy has written on the phenomenon of pseudoscience based on Quranic scripture in the Muslim world, ranging from claims that Einstein's Theory of relativity proves the existence of heaven in Islam, to claims that, according to the Quran, nuclear energy comes from Genies.[23] He observes that the prevalence of such pseudoscientific concepts has led to significant decline in scientific output from Muslims since the distant past.[23] Hoodbhoy's book "Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality", provides more details about the rise of such kinds of pseudoscience promoted by Wahhabists such as claims of the Quran containing "scientific miracles" and the Islamic creationism of Harun Yahya.[24]

Vedic texts [edit]

Hindu tradition sometimes holds that all knowledge is pre-existing, to be "recovered" rather than "discovered", and is echoed can be found in the Vedas and other ancient texts.[25]


Of notable influence were the writings of Swami Dayananda Saraswati and Swami Vivekananda. Dayananda rejected the older commentaries of the Vedas by Sayana, Mahidhara and Uvata as medieval corruptions "opposed to the real meaning of the Vedas".[26] He summarily renounced the academic philological work of western scholars as being misinformed by such corrupted Indian commentators. For example, the first volume of the Sacred Books of the East series, containing editions of some Upanishads, had appeared in 1879. Dayananda's writings are recognized[by whom?] as having an element of religious fundamentalism.[27] Dayananda's Arya Samaj experienced a gradual renaissance in the 1980s.[citation needed]

It has been said that pseudoscience was unwittingly helped into being by the postmodernism embraced by Indian leftist "postcolonial theories" like those of Ashis Nandy and Vandana Shiva who rejected the universality of "Western" science and called for the "indigenous science".[28] According to the historian of science Meera Nanda:

any traditional Hindu idea or practice, however obscure and irrational it might have been through its history, gets the honorific of "science" if it bears any resemblance at all, however remote, to an idea that is valued (even for the wrong reasons) in the West.[28]

In 1900, Vivekananda said that:

"the conclusions of modern science are the very conclusions the Vedanta reached ages ago; only, in modern science they are written in the language of matter."[29] In one lecture he claimed that: "Today we find wonderful discoveries of modern science coming upon us like bolts from the blue, opening our eyes to marvels we never dreamt of. But many of these are only re-discoveries of what had been found ages ago. It was only the other day that modern science discovered that what it calls heat, magnetism, electricity, and so forth, are all convertible into one unit force. But this has been done even in the Samhita",[30] thus identifying concepts from physics like gravitation, electricity, magnetism and other forces with the mystical Vedantic notion of Prana.[original research?][improper synthesis?]

Some of the authors "seeking to modernize India by recovering the supposedly pristine Vedic-Hindu roots of Indian culture" revived these notions.:[28]

"By postulating interconnections and similarities across Nature, they [the Vedic thinkers] were able to use logic to reach extremely subtle conclusions about diverse aspects of reality."[31]

In response to criticism to the effect that this is essentially the religious worldview prevalent in early Europe succeeded by the scientific revolution of around the 18th century (Nanda 2003:116), Hindutva authors answer that the distinction of science and pseudoscience (or proto-science) is Eurocentric and inapplicable to Vedic science:


Or even that in India, science and religion are fundamentally identical:[clarification needed]


Criticism [edit]



Farrell Till asserts that biblical passages with supposed foresight can be interpreted in a number of ways, and that believers "see prophecies and their fulfillments in passages so obscurely written that no one can really determine what the writers originally intended in the statements."[35] Till is an author with master's degree in English (and a former pastor and missionary of the Church of Christ) who has had public debates with well-known Bible inerrantists such as Norman Geisler[36] and Kent Hovind.




See also [edit]

Notes [edit]

  2. ^ Job 9:6, NIV
  6. ^ Ask the Rabbi - 199
  7. ^ Dr. Harry Rimmer
  9. ^ Froth and Fraud in Fundamentalism
  11. ^ "Science in The Qur'an" Evidence That Islam is True
  12. ^ "The Scientific Miracles of the Qur'an" Mission Islam
  13. ^ Kamel Ben Salem (2007). "The Evolution of the Universe: A New Vision". European Journal of Science and Theology. Retrieved 2010-03-19 
  20. ^
  21. ^ Reasonable Doubts Podcast: Islam, Science and Modernity
  23. ^ a b Islamic failure, by Pervez Hoodbhoy
  24. ^ Hoodbhoy, Pervez (1992). Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality. Zed Books. ISBN 1-85649-025-4. 
  26. ^ Saraswati, Dayananda. Introduction to the commentary on the Vedas. p. 443. 
  27. ^ Ruthven (2007:108)
  28. ^ a b c Nanda, Meera. 2003. Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-3358-9. See also Nanda, Meera. 2005. "Response to my critics," Social Epistemology. 19(1):147–191.
  29. ^ 1970, vol. 3, p. 185, cited after Sokal, Allan, "Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?" in: Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public Routledge (2006) ISBN 0-415-30593-4, chapter 3.2 "Hindu nationalism and 'Vedic science'")
  36. ^ Farrell Till debate with Norman Geisler
  37. ^ Dr. Diane M. Sharon, 1998, Parashah Commentary

References [edit]

External links [edit]


Skeptical views