Scientific foreknowledge in sacred texts is the belief that certain sacred texts document an awareness of the natural world that was later discovered by technology and science. This includes the belief that the sacred text grants a higher awareness of the natural world, like those views held by some Orthodox Jews about the Hebrew Bible (Tanach), by some Muslims regarding the Qur'an,[1] by certain Christian fundamentalists regarding the Christian Bible, and by certain adherents of Hindu revivalism regarding the Vedas. Skeptics have stated some of these attempts are examples of confirmation bias.
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.
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Supporters of biblical scientific foreknowledge believe that parts of the Bible contain observations regarding aspects of the natural world in line with modern scientific and medical research. This includes the view that such technology and knowledge would not have been discovered with the technology of the times and are therefore evidence of Biblical inspiration and of Biblical inerrancy.[2]
Critics contend that these references either represent information that was common at the time, or even no real knowledge of the scientific reasons behind the phenomena described.
An early example of claimed Biblical scientific foresight was the interpretation of passages of the Bible as showing Copernican motion, suggested in 1584 by Spanish theologian Diego de Zuñiga in his Commentary on Job:
William Harvey, the medical doctor who in the 17th century discovered the complete circulatory system, believed that this discovery was proof of Biblical foreknowledge. In his 1628 work De motu cordis, he supported this claim in On Generation by stating, "the life, therefore, resides in the blood (as we are informed in our sacred writing)," referring to Leviticus 17:11,14 .[5]
David Macht, a pharmacologist and doctor of Hebrew Literature was a notable advocate of biblical health practices.[6][7] In Dr. Macht's 1953 study entitled An Experimental Pharmacological Appreciation of Leviticus XI and Deuteronomy XIV, he suggested that the Levitical clean animals were less toxic than the Levitical unclean animals:
Harry Rimmer (1890–1952) was president of the "Science Research bureau" and published "Harmony of Science and Scripture" (1936), 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]
Henry M. Morris, then a hydraulics engineer, in 1951 published Science and the Bible which based on the work of George McCready Price. The first chapter of Science and the Bible dealt with Biblical scientific foreknowledge and set forth many of the arguments that are still in use by proponents today.
The Old Earth Creationist and astronomer, Hugh Ross, Ph.D., is a notable advocate of Bible scientific foreknowledge.
A number of Muslims believe that the Qur'an contains scientific information that would be discovered by the world in modern times, centuries after their revelation. These are claimed to include scientific information pertaining to creation, astronomy, the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and human reproduction.[1]
One such claim is based on an interpretation of the passage in the Qur'an which states: "Have not those who disbelieve known that the heavens and the earth were of one piece, then We parted them",[Quran 21:30] as representing the Big bang.[1] Another is the Qur'anic verse, "After that (Allah) spread the Earth out (dahaha: from the verb 'daha')" [79:30] has been interpreted as foreshadowing the modern 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."[11] Rashad Khalifa alternatively translated the verse as: "he made the earth egg-shaped."[12]
Developmental biologist PZ Myers has criticized claims that the Quran shows foreknowledge of modern embryology. Myers says "[T]he Quran contains negligible embryological content, and what there is is so sketchy and hazy that it allows his defenders to make spectacular leaps of interpretation. Mohammed avoided the trap of being caught in an overt error here by blathering generalized bullshit, and saying next to nothing. This is neither an accomplishment nor a miracle."[13]
Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani high energy physicist, has written exhaustively 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.[14] He observes that the prevalence of such pseudoscientific concepts has led to significant decline in scientific output from Muslims since the distant past.[14] 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.[15]
The most famous proponent of this argument is perhaps 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".[16] 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."[17] and "Bucaille proposes new meanings for Qur'anic words to bring them into accord with modern scientific knowledge, without requiring any standard philological justification."[18]
The search for Qur'anic references to and prophecies of modern scientific discoveries has become a "popular trend" in some Muslim societies;[19] 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]
According to some recent studies of the relationship between science education and religion, one of the ways in which science education in strongly Islamic societies is impacted by religiosity is when "acceptable" scientific discoveries can be found to have been anticipated or "identified" by the Qur'an, with consequent implications for what is taught and not taught.[20]
Taner Edis, author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam, describes this point.[21] 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.[22] 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.[23]
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.[24]
The Hindu revivalism movements that emerged in British India from the later 19th century developed an idea of a "Vedic science" found in the corpus of Brahmanas, Sutras and Shastras of Indian antiquity that supposedly anticipated certain results of modern science.
Of notable influence were the writings of Swami Dayananda Sarasvati 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".[25] 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 as having an element of religious fundamentalism.[26] Dayananda's Arya Samaj experienced a gradual renaissance in the 1980s.
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".[27] According to the historian of science Meera Nanda:
In 1900, Vivekananda said that:
Some of the authors "seeking to modernize India by recovering the supposedly pristine Vedic-Hindu roots of Indian culture" revived these notions.[27]:
In response to criticism to the effect that this is essentially the magic worldview prevalent in pre-modern Europe overcome by the scientific revolution of 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:
Critics of sacred text scientific foreknowledge believe that parts of various sacred text may simply contain observations regarding aspects of the technology of the times. Scientific and engineering knowledge have been documented in early cultures that claimed no divine guidance.[32] For example, scientists of Ancient Egypt documented knowledge of engineering and anatomy that were unknown to medieval Europe thousands of years later, such as the existence of cerebrospinal fluid; see Ancient Egyptian medicine and Ancient Egyptian technology.
Another criticism points out that the process of scientific foreknowledge only works in reverse; few advocates of scientific foreknowledge use sacred texts to predict the next scientific breakthrough. Only once a new scientific discovery occurs do proponents of scientific foreknowledge scan the text to look for a verse that can be said to have predicted the latest discovery. Thus, since the process only works in reverse and the text cannot predict new discoveries, the text cannot be said to contain scientific foreknowledge.
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."[33] 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[34] and Kent Hovind.
Richard Dawkins claims that religious proponents "cherry-pick" passages that fit a certain framework and disregard or even dismiss the vague rest, saying that those are meant to be figuratively and loosely interpreted.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote in her book "Purity and Danger" that the biblical cleanliness passages merely represent cultural concepts of symbolic boundary integrity.[35]
A number of classical Muslim scientists and commentators did not believe in the scientific exegesis of the Qur'an; Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī (973-1048), one of the most celebrated Muslim scientists of the classical period, assigned to the Qur'an a separate and autonomous realm of its own and held that the Qur'an "does not interfere in the business of science nor does it infringe on the realm of science." These scholars argued for the possibility of multiple scientific explanations of the natural phenomena, and refused to subordinate the Qur'an to an ever-changing science.[1]
Apologetics
Skeptical views
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