Have Muslims misunderstood evolution?
Reply #27 - December 21, 2012, 01:22 PM
Even if evolution was described in the Quran, it wouldn't lend a hint of credibility to its claims.
Lets remember that the "theory of evolution", in its basic form goes back to the early days of the "scientific revolution", roughly in the early-mid 1500s. Back then, some European scholars already postulated the basis of the "tree of life" and how all species evolved out of earlier species and so on. This led (of course) to some problems with racism, because as "sophisticated" as that hypothesis was, the people in question thought that the same applies to the human species (read: there are more than one and for example Africans are below "humans" (Caucasians)), etc...
Same goes for the Atomic Universe and the philosophers who made the atomic model up some 2,500 years ago. They didn't have any microscopes or any means to observe said phenomenon, so it was clearly just a hypothesis.
Of course there were hundreds of different theories and that one of them turns out to be true, ONCE THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE DATA EXISTS, is no "miracle".
Another example is the famous scholar Giordano Bruno, who was burnt on the stake for claiming that the "far lights" (stars) are stars just like our Sun and that they are probably surrounded by planets, just as our Sun is and that on some of these planets, there is life, just like on Earth. He was right, but he couldn't have had known this, because the first extra-solar planet was discovered just some 30+ years ago. And even then, it was a hypothesis; real observations of planets around other stars go back just a couple of years. Until the late 1920s, we didn't even know that there are galaxies outside of our own Milky Way.
It's like reading stuff "into" Nostradamus prophecies; you can only do it AFTER the event and all the stuff you "prophecized" before, that didn't come out as true is simply forgotten; same goes for the Quran.
But unlike in Nostradamus' case, where everything is complete gibberish, in the case of the Quran, there are clearly stated scientific claims - it's just that the claims are wrong and have nothing to do with reality (embryology, astronomy/astrophysics, biology and geology in general, etc...).
Topic: Have Muslims misunderstood evolution?