Monday, June 10, 2013

Deny All You Want, But You Can’t Debunk This

The Signs of Allah, As I See The Present Debate


In life, most things have a reasonable explanation, only few are completely confounding or impossible to fathom.

What is Allah, where is Allah and Does Allah (even) exist, are questions which cannot be answered empirically, through our senses, or by experimentation. Muslims do however believe that in the Quran there are great signs; some of these signs can be mentioned and have been mentioned elsewhere before. Allah tells us in the Quran that we should look for signs in the world and in ourselves. We can even go to the outer reaches of space; or maybe space will come to us and reveal signs of the Creator.

The sex of the insects mentioned in the Quran, e.g. the worker bee is a female, not a male, and the leader of the ants (or one with initiative at least) is a female; in the grammar we can see that it is definitely described in the female form, this means either that Allah revealed this word, or that Muhammad, pbuh, is a liar (not!) but got the sex of the worker bee and ant leader correct. Why wouldn’t a leader of men describe a leader of insects as male while every successful leader in history has been a male and naturally men describe things as they see in nature, that males are strong and the protectors of females, in nature or in humankind, at least, and females are weak and need protection, and females role is to nurture the young. (“Pretty sure”, but revising, sorry for the yellow highlight, again)

the Big Bang; more than a theory, more riveting than prime time televisions version.

The grammar is clear and the insect is described in the singular, so there is no mistake that it is a single female insect and it isn’t the case that the form of the word is plural; if it were plural we could mention that perhaps (in Arabic) some of the plural word forms can encompass male and female; in the case of one leader, this wouldn’t be plausible because there are not many ant leaders(at least, per grouping of ants) and in the case of the bees, there are only female worker bees. Male bees’ role is to reproduce with the Queen, nothing else is required of them, lol. (My young son would say, “that’s sexist!”but what does he know anyway? How will he feel when I tell him that all the nurses are females?) Importantly, in Arabic, like French, male plural word form encompasses the female(s) as well, so it is by the context that we know if the word (in m/pl form) is speaking about males in a group only, or males and female(s) in a group.


Metallurgy and Astronomy

The chapter Iron, in the Quran, states that the earth’s iron ore which is deep inside the earth and which we mine was sent down to earth sometime after the earth had been created; this happened, as scientists have explained, when the earth was still very hot and with the impacts of objects in space (I don’t know, meteors or an asteroid, or what have you. Perhaps there also wasn’t an atmosphere, or the ozone layer, as the temperature still had to cool.) If you want to argue against this point, then bring me information about how the iron ore got into the earth without it already being a part of the earth, because we have already learned (from science) that there are microbes from space (or evident signs that the iron ore isn’t terrestrial) which are not found on earth. If Muhammad had written the Quran, or any human had written it, during that era (550-650 AC, or so) then there wouldn’t be such a detailed verse about iron ore being from space (or maybe the ancients thought it came from heaven?).

So far I don’t see anything in contradiction in the Quran and science, so I would kindly ask that non-Muslims not refer to the Quran as a book written by men, or it would have contained many errors, as the Quran itself says, and to stop referring to Muslims as backwards because we believe in a book (which has scientific evidence, which cannot be disproven).

They also say that some of our interpretations are modern and we pick and choose which ones we prefer. Well, it’s a matter of science and our knowledge (therefore, our interpretations) catching up with Allah’s words (the Quran).

Creation in the Holy Book

The Arabic word, Yaum, for example, can mean  “days”, it can also mean “ages”, considering that we know from science and also experience, which is also one means of discovery - that the world couldn’t have been made in a day, and all the heavens included, etc, but that the creation was made in stages (or ages, which is like eons). If Allah created the baby in stages (not contradicted by embryologist Keith Moore, who I heard speak on the subject, over twenty years ago)or we could say also that the baby is created within three veils of darkness (again not contradicted by Keith Moore, the specialist on human development (embryology), why should we assume that even the ancients didn’t sometimes wonder how the earth or heavens were created and if it took a long time - it’s possible they thought about things like that, but the Quran definitely mentions “ages”.


The “mistake” the bible makes could maybe be examined as per the language and whether or not it also states that the earth’s creation took ages, or merely days? I believe someone has already done that, e.g. Ahmed Deedat, and that the language (original Greek, I assume, or Aramaic, which Jesus spoke) of the bible shows that it was written by a human being (it is fairer to say that the bible today isn’t what Allah revealed to the followers of Jesus, but that it was corrupted (or fabricated, either in whole or in part); but Jesus also said that he didn’t come to change the law, so I wonder what he did bring, besides a law or anything or if there is a contradiction; actually I don’t believe there is a contradiction, this can be explained easily enough, that Jesus brought a scripture, or his sayings were preserved (more likely, and not contradictory what Muslims believe about him, AS) in book form. Because Jesus, AS, didn’t bring a new Law, he wanted his followers to remain on the same law which was the King’s law and/or the law of the Jews. This might be controversial for Christians or they haven’t thought much about it, but actually Jesus, being there only for a while (before he was believed to have been crucified, but was saved by God and taken to heaven)didn’t bring a new law, or that would have left his followers with little guidance besides the few saying they were able to get from him and preserve in a short amount of time; Jesus’ followers or disciples were to follow the letter and spirit of the law they already had (the torah or Talmud, not sure if it is both?) and then also to “give to Caear what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”, which suggests (if it isn’t a fabrication, too, like his “death”) that he didn’t want them to rock the boat, or become rebels, they would have quickly been annihilated.) It is interesting to note that there are Christians e.g. the Unitarians, or perhaps some others, who believe in One God worthy of worship, and that Jesus was a messenger, not the “begotten” son of God. Jesus was one of many “sons” and “children” of God, if you believe what the Bible says. (checking - revise)

- I’m unbiased in as far as I admit if I don’t know something or can’t recall details, but it is very exciting to recount the knowledge I have been able to learn just by reading Islamic books and watching Islamic videos and television. It is the Muslims today, despite claims and accusations of non-Muslims to the contrary, that pass this knowledge onto humankind, and daily, we are seeing reasonable people, even non-believers attest to the facts, that there are verses in the Quran that can have no human source, and no explanation other than that Allah revealed them to Muhammad in the 7th Century.

I mention that experience is as valuable(and it’s one way of gathering data that humans acknowledge works well, before I have said it) to inquiry as testing; for example, the experience that we know it takes 9 months for a baby to develop and be born, therefore, wouldn’t the rest of creation by analogy have taken a long time, why assume that ancient people didn’t also believe (some of them, anyway) that most things take a long time to develop, including living and non-living things? The ancients had a lot of time to contemplate the stars and the universe, and who knows, maybe when some of them (somewhere, not the Christians who wrote the Bible, because they were not very prone to reason, it would seem, or the Europeans during the Dark ages, because they used to think that the baby was a miniature human and just got bigger inside the mother (even though humans also develop once outside of the mother, or we would all look like Mr. Magoo) gazed at the stars, wondered why a star dies, and therefore also wondered if it had a birth? Maybe this is stretching it too much, and in fact, even the Muslims couldn’t explain most of the Quranic verses which spoke of phenomenon which they couldn’t test (before science developed and technologies came along (many invented by Muslims); the scientific method was a Muslim invention, which must be clear.

I will point out, for some, that early Muslims didn’t believe the sun rotates around us, but that the earth moves around the sun; this is proven by the verse(s) in the Quran which suggested to early Muslims to investigate phenomenon, such as shadows. (The only Muslims who believed the sun rotates around our planet were people who didn’t know what Muslims science was theorizing and learning by experimentation, exploration, including but not limited to others works ( e.g. Greek works) etc.)

The Sun Is a Big Ball of Fire (even though the Quran doesn't say as much)

No Muslims (who understood the Quran properly) believed the sun rotates around the earth, because the Quran states that the day and the night “wrap around each other” and “follow each other” in the way that a turban goes around the head; they imagined that this “following in quick succession” meant that day and night were occurring simultaneously, that one part of the earth was in darkness while the other was in light (night and day, happening together). If this was true, they also knew that the earth must be round. In fact, they knew for sure, because the quran says as much; the earth is ostrich egg shaped. They also observed the shadows (obviously, if the earth were flat, would mean that the sun is turned on and off like an electric light, with a switch) and change during the day, as the earth turns (away from the sun) and because during different seasons the sun is farther away (which maybe they didn’t imagine as early on, or someone else later proved this, I don’t know these facts myself e.g. who invented the astrolabes and why?) I only know some of this (how seasons occur) because I studied first year astronomy, which is something everyone should do at some point in their university careers. Probably I had slept through it in high school astronomy, one of my electives (that course had nothing on the university level course, which afforded us to see the sky at any time of the year (any time) while leaning back in our chairs). Earlier Muslim science details facts, not fiction. As civilizations ventured to travel the globe, it became apparent that travellers on sea voyages never fell off the earth’s surface, which was a fear early travellers by ship (or their land loving people) had, they were however likely to be attacked by pirates or drowned in terrible storms at sea (drowning and disappearances, attributed by some to sea monsters). Muslims would have been silly to think so, too, because they could see the moon, a great sign, which once was split (I saw photos of this, whether they were real or photoshopped, I can't say) I could also see Muhammad written in arabic, and we all know about the one (the face) of Mother Theresa. Anyway, the moon or solar eclipses show that obviously the earth is round (or I also barely remember some science fact like that that proves the earth is round for early people, who used telescopes). (Today) We know it's round because we live in the modern space age and study space in gradeschool, if not any further, otherwise most of us wouldn't know the moon from a flying saucer.


The Sun Always Sets

Now that we can test and prove with science that there is a “barrier” which science of large water bodies proves (oceans and seas are meant; the “seas” do not “encroach”; where the sweet and salty waters meet, e.g. the “barrier” (barzakhun) is a “homogenizing area” as explained in the book This Is The Truth, by Capt. Al-Rehaili, published in Saudi Arabia. Both “seas” (or water bodies) meet, pass through the homogenizing area in their meeting, and then compete the passage to the other side (since salinity affects this passage, there is a visible slanting where the less dense is on the bottom and the more dense is on the top, but in a way that they do not meet like a wall which is standing upright, but like a fallen structure – a fig. would be handy about now.) Dawkins didn’t lie when he said that two waters, one salty, one sweet will mix, nor does the Quran say that “mixing” doesn’t occur; Mixing occurs e.g. “maraja al Bahraini” means, loosely translated, “the two seas (Bahraini, “ain” being “the two”, e.g. “bahr” is one “sea” or “ocean”) mix” (I could be wrong about this, but I think “bahr” is used generally to mean seas and oceans, the Quran isn’t particular about which is spoken of, as far as I can tell, also proving my assertion that it is first a “religious text” and not a text book, the fact that there is some science in it doesn’t make it the science text Muslims prefer,(though we can defer to it occasionally in discussions) it is our Holy Book.) The topic being the meaning of words in the verse, we know that “maraja” is mixing, and that early Muslims didn’t quite understand or couldn’t picture how the seas “meet without mixing” (Dawkins or others are so far unwilling to investigate or admit this) so they continue (the first or earlier Muslim exegesis)to have two opinions on it, the first, that the seas meet but don’t mix (they couldn’t explain how); second, that the seas meet and mix, but without “encroaching” on each other (again a conundrum, in that era, especially for those who never would travel to the sea).

The Encroachment of Muslims

What happened later on, but much later in places where Muslims encroached, as islands like Bahrain, where many people intermarry between Indian and Arab and of course people of African descent (the first to call themselves “Bahrainis” prior to migration to the island by other permanent residents; the original people are what is taught as “dilmun” in schools) is that some pearl divers used to go to the sea floor and gather sweet water to drink, either in utensils with a small mouth or a leather bag, or a plastic bag; I don’t know when this occurred, but it was in the Persian gulf area, where many Muslims, Arabs and Indians prospered by the pearl trade. The best pearls were traded not in Bahrain, or the GCC, but in India, apparently. Therefore, by diving only were many men able to get drinking water on these boats (fishing or pearl boats) while they stayed many months on their tours. Especially the pearl divers wouldn’t go ashore for long periods, then how can we explain how they survived other than that they collected sweet water from below the salty water?

Even though the ancients could possibly have guessed at some of the things which are found in the Quran, they couldn’t have avoided making some mistakes, but there isn’t a mistake in the Qur’an. It is also a reasonable person who will admit that since pearl diving happens in salty (and sweet water - revise) (there are fresh water pearls, too, but are they only man-made or cultured pearls?) water or large bodies of water, that Muslims would have to have known about this practice of gathering sweet water from other people. But do we find literature on this subject. There is apparently more to learn about this and I look forward with anticipation, until I can try and Google it. In any case, there is no proof that Muhammad, pbuh, learned about the availability of sweet water within the ocean from others, because there is no proof; no one has written anything on this subject which we definitely know of today is ancient writing. This means that at least we do know that whoever revealed the Quran didn’t “invent” the verses by accident, nor did the author of the Quran make a mistake about it, because these are either extremely unlikely propositions or clearly untrue, no matter how much you want to debunk the existence of this verse in the Quran, the Holy Book of Muslims which “claims to be revealed by God”.

Quranic Styles, Scientific Evidence

As for verses which are less scientific and more literary, that doesn’t mean that definitely, they don’t (in many instances) speak to real things e.g. just as we cannot see Allah, we cannot see other “invisible” or “the ghaib” (unseen things) which Allah has created, heaven and hell, the angels, and so on.

Someone might say they are pure fiction (many people say that), but others (again, many people), say that such things exist, whether or not we can ever prove by science (not happening as far as “showing God” to everyone) that they do exist.

A verse which Muslims all agree is purely “literary” in nature is that the sun set in a murky pool of water. It doesn’t matter if non-believers argue that Muslims actually believed (as the Arabs might have in ancient times) that the sun rises and sets (not that the earth turns away from the sun) below the horizon, like an egg might fall off a breakfast table. But that isn’t what early Muslims scholars or scientists believed, and it is proven by what they did say early on. If the sun sets by falling under the level of the earth or into a body of water, then we would imagine that the sun, which was very great (it looks very big at times, just as the moon looks very big at times) would have caused a lot of steam to rise and the Arabs should also be able to see steam rise, because the sun also sets on the desert nations (they see the sunset, believe it or not, sometimes). They would also have imagined from the verse (if they believed the sun sets inside a body of water) that they should see a lot of steam as the hot sun descends and immerses itself into the water, but that doesn’t occur, does it? Also, why doesn't it get cold even though the sun is gone? Muslims and others must have wondered about this and other phenomenon a lot..noone thought there were two suns, or even five, even though it's possible that everyone could have seen a different sun in the sky because they lived so far away in separate nations, but we don't probably find this belief, except maybe in some indigenous writings, if at all; definitley Muslims were intellilgent enough and inquisitive enough to investigate and also reason about the sun and the moon. (The Qur'an mentions one moon and one sun, but many other possibilities exist in verses for interpretation about other worlds. It isn't beyond Muslims expectations, who have imagination, that aliens or other beings, (besides the djinns) exist on other planets far away in the cosmos in other solar systems, we can't see. Just because we don't see them, doesn't mean they don't exist, again.

One might argue these things are purely made up, but even the “unseen” (ghaib) have support in our own experience, for example, as the falling stars appear to die, or fall, while they once lived above. We cannot see oxygen, but we have the ability to prove that it exists; while we won’t prove God this way, we can use our imagination a little; something God given which comes in useful occasionally, and which some scientists seem too much lacking in – only six percent of scientists believe in God, I could be wrong (about the exact %age)

Smelly Gas, Imagine That

Some gases smell, and yet we can’t see them. This is also an example of something (a gas) which the ancients could have pondered and wondered, e.g. if something smells, does it have an invisible form or a molecular level? If gases which we don’t see can create smells, or asphyxiation, etc. why can’t a being we can’t see create us? The fact is that we are here, so there is some explanation, and the “creation” “theory” isn’t any more farfetched than science, and of course I believe it isn’t farfetched, or impossible to prove (through examples, and proofs, as you see here) but that we can almost certainly prove to many people that God revealed many signs in the Holy Quran. It isn’t the only book which has some proofs, for example, the Bible mentions the coming of “Ahmed” (another name for Muhammad, which is a prophecy; who revealed this Prophecy to Jesus, God or a fortune teller? It is strange that some new age worshippers believe in fortune telling or astrology, or numerology, but don’t believe in revelation (it’s too improbable or stories only, and because Science opposes all religion in general, which the numerologists and others are not immune from believing is more “rational” than earlier “monotheistic” and pagan religions.)

Even our imagination is a sign of what could be or is, but that we can’t see; how is it that people can “invent” or “imagine” new things and yet, we go about our business without much thought as to how this all takes place, sometimes in the twinkling of an eye, or the “inkling” of our mind. If we are so creative as to be able to make something almost from nothing, but not quite, and for example, bring data from the computer and send it elsewhere, through cables and this data is basically ‘nothing’, doesn’t that in a way support the existence of God? (David Icke believes it points to something other than us, or we are not seeing the world as it really is because we only rely on our five senses; he calls this reality “the matrix” - he also believes in “aliens”, some ppl would say they are “djinns”) We are going to die someday, but God never dies, and it is a fact that we once didn’t exist, but appeared (it seems) from nowhere, but like cybernetic data (is that a good metaphor, I don’t know, WT… is it?) we were somewhere (in the past, Allah created humankind, and brought them all forth from their parent (Adam) and asked them if they believe in Him, and they all said that they do, so If they after that deny Allah, despite their innate ability to know him, then they will end up in Hell) and God “pulled” us out just like David Icke describes “data” being “pulled out” from a computer to a network, or from the internet to a computer.

Let the deniers work their magic, but they can’t prove that God doesn’t exist; it is more plausible and with more research and effort we can prove (to many minds) that the Quran is a miracle.

Next: If I feel like it, Abraham Lincoln, aka “vampire slayer”, in historical perspective (working title)

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1 comment:

  1. Please share on Facebook, because I can't for some reason, thanks.

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