Atheism's Opposition with Nature..

format_quote Originally Posted by M.I.A.

theist creationism is falsifiable in part,

format_quote Originally Posted by M.I.A.

but non-theist creationism still stands, most scientists should be inclined towards it.

Do you care to defend this nonsense with something outside your opinion?

format_quote Originally Posted by MustafaMc

The central element in this genetic variation is mutation. If you will examine the effects of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Chernobyl on genetic structure of people exposed to the radiation, I am sure you will find massive amounts of genetic mutations perhaps the equivalent of eons of time. How many new and improved species have been found in these areas? How many beneficial adaptive changes occured? In contrast, how many people have died from cancer and how many birth defects have been recorded? Are these genetic mutations beneficial or harmful?

... Yup., and somehow we're meant to believe that "beneficial mutation" led to the survival of the species

That's like me saying "hey look, here are 100 Romans, let's burn them all with fire - the ones who survive will be fire-proof"

It's an over simplified explanation but it does the job. ToE's Beneficial Mutation example is flawed beyond reason.

Scimi

Lol, your post made me giggle Your mind works in some rather lateral ways - you must be constantly amused by yourself

Scimi

format_quote Originally Posted by M.I.A.

no not really,

Ok thanks.. that's pretty much what I understood from your post.

best,

format_quote Originally Posted by Jim Fox

1. Because the Qu'ran is the exact word of Allah and therefore infallible, Muslims must accept everything in it without question. Is this so?

You can question everything in Islam, how else are you going to learn?

2. The 5 pillars include the most important requirement, submission to Allah with no choice or free will?

The question is logically flawed!
Submission to Allah doesn't preclude us from having free will!

3. Islam cannot accept any part of evolution due to 1.
4. This also puts Islam at odds with science in general because science does not require or accept a Creator.

Firstly you must define what 'Evolution' is. micro or macro?!
Adaptation is an observable science whereas speciation is in the realm of science fiction!
Secondly have you read the Quranic stance on the matter?

Sahih International
I did not make them witness to the creation of the heavens and the earth or to the creation of themselves, and I would not have taken the misguiders as assistants.

We don't in fact know the secret of creation, and you may think scientists have decoded it, but knowing something works (and not always the case) doesn't denote understanding why!
until such a time 'scientists' can create ex-nihilo, you can't use terms like 'at odds' with!

I could deal with each of these points but first, will someone point out any error on my part? I have read only a small pert of the Qu'ran in English, obviously and found it hard going. Much the same with the Bible with which I am more familiar.

I don't understand what hard going means!

best,

format_quote Originally Posted by Jim Fox

I hesitated to join this forum, thinking Muslims would reject any attempt at discussion critical of Islam; so it is pleasing to see that it is not true! It seems to me that the fundamental clash between Islam and western thought (excluding western religions) results from a small number of big differences-
1. Because the Qu'ran is the exact word of Allah and therefore infallible, Muslims must accept everything in it without question. Is this so?
2. The 5 pillars include the most important requirement, submission to Allah with no choice or free will?
3. Islam cannot accept any part of evolution due to 1.
4. This also puts Islam at odds with science in general because science does not require or accept a Creator.

I could deal with each of these points but first, will someone point out any error on my part? I have read only a small pert of the Qu'ran in English, obviously and found it hard going. Much the same with the Bible with which I am more familiar.

"Western thought?" I am sorry but I do not understand what you mean by Western thought? How is Western thought superbly scientific while others are hocus-pocus? You'd think that with such a thought many Westerns would be enlightened beings but the claim that vaccination causes autism emerged from amongst the "Western" people, did not it? So much for "Western" scientific thought! You need to pick up history books and see that for most of the human history, scientific thought persisted mostly among "Eastern" people, not Western. Ancient civilizations such as Chinese, Indians etc so on and so forth.

format_quote Originally Posted by CosmicPathos

"Western thought?" I am sorry but I do not understand what you mean by Western thought? How is Western thought superbly scientific while others are hocus-pocus? You'd think that with such a thought many Westerns would be enlightened beings but the claim that vaccination causes autism emerged from amongst the "Western" people, did not it? So much for "Western" scientific thought! You need to pick up history books and see that for most of the human history, scientific thought persisted mostly among "Eastern" people, not Western. Ancient civilizations such as Chinese, Indians etc so on and so forth.

Experience dictates that they often rate themselves and live in a bubble and thus we must accommodate their level of understanding of how they perceive themselves and the world around them...

format_quote Originally Posted by Jim Fox

Iwestern thought (excluding western religions)

Peace with you Jim Fox;

I wonder what you mean about western religions? If you possible mean Christianity, it is originally from the Middle East - not from west. As well we could call Islam as western religion because it has a lot of followers in "the western world". Many original Europeans and Americans are muslims.

Sorry, but - Jim Fox is a female? What happened? Jim evolved into a woman? jokes aside...

format_quote Originally Posted by Jim Fox

1. Because the Qu'ran is the exact word of Allah and therefore infallible, Muslims must accept everything in it without question. Is this so?
2. The 5 pillars include the most important requirement, submission to Allah with no choice or free will?
3. Islam cannot accept any part of evolution due to 1.

I think bro MustafaMC has done fairly well with the above three questions. And has also done fairly well with this one below:

format_quote Originally Posted by Jim Fox

4. This also puts Islam at odds with science in general because science does not require or accept a Creator.

I would just like to add that modern Science, is flawed. Reminds me of Ptolemy...

Let me explain.

Are you aware of Ptolemy? He was a Greek-Roman citizen of Egypt who wrote in Greek. He was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He ever lived anywhere else than Alexandria, where he died around AD 168.Ptolemy was the author of several scientific treatises, at least three of which were of continuing importance to later Islamic and European science. The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest (in Greek, Ἡ Μεγάλη Σύνταξις, "The Great Treatise", originally Μαθηματικὴ Σύνταξις, "Mathematical Treatise"). The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion of the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the astrological treatise known sometimes in Greek as the Apotelesmatika (Ἀποτελεσματικά), more commonly in Greek as the Tetrabiblos (Τετράβιβλος "Four books"), and in Latin as theQuadripartitum (or four books) in which he attempted to adapt horoscopic astrology to the Aristoteliannatural philosophy of his day. That was considered a "science" back in those days lol.


Almost a thousand years later, came the man who would crush Ptolemys works with a single intellectual blow. That man was Ibn Al Haythm al Basri, better known as Alhazen in the west.


He was also nicknamed Ptolemaeus Secundus ("Ptolemy the Second") or simply "The Physicist" in medieval Europe.


In his Al-Shukūk ‛alā Batlamyūs, variously translated as Doubts Concerning Ptolemy or Aporias against Ptolemy, published at some time between 1025 and 1028, Alhazen criticized many of Ptolemy's works, including the Almagest, Planetary Hypotheses, and Optics, pointing out various contradictions he found in these works. He considered that some of the mathematical devices Ptolemy introduced into astronomy, especially the equant, failed to satisfy the physical requirement of uniform circular motion, and wrote a scathing critique of the physical reality of Ptolemy's astronomical system, noting the absurdity of relating actual physical motions to imaginary mathematical points, lines and circles:

Ptolemy assumed an arrangement (hay'a) that cannot exist, and the fact that this arrangement produces in his imagination the motions that belong to the planets does not free him from the error he committed in his assumed arrangement, for the existing motions of the planets cannot be the result of an arrangement that is impossible to exist... [F]or a man to imagine a circle in the heavens, and to imagine the planet moving in it does not bring about the planet's motion.

Alhazen further criticized Ptolemy's model on other empirical, observational and experimental grounds, such as Ptolemy's use of conjectural undemonstrated theories in order to "save appearances" of certainphenomena, which Alhazen did not approve of due to his insistence on scientific demonstration. Unlike some later astronomers who criticized the Ptolemaic model on the grounds of being incompatible withAristotelian natural philosophy, Alhazen was mainly concerned with empirical observation and the internal contradictions in Ptolemy's works.

In his Aporias against Ptolemy, Alhazen commented on the difficulty of attaining scientific knowledge:

Truth is sought for itself [but] the truths, [he warns] are immersed in uncertainties [and the scientific authorities (such as Ptolemy, whom he greatly respected) are] not immune from error...

He held that the criticism of existing theories—which dominated this book—holds a special place in the growth of scientific knowledge:

Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.

On the Configuration of the World

In his On the Configuration of the World, despite his criticisms directed towards Ptolemy, Alhazen continued to accept the physical reality of the geocentric model of the universe, presenting a detailed description of the physical structure of the celestial spheres in his On the Configuration of the World:

The earth as a whole is a round sphere whose center is the center of the world. It is stationary in its [the world's] middle, fixed in it and not moving in any direction nor moving with any of the varieties of motion, but always at rest.

While he attempted to discover the physical reality behind Ptolemy's mathematical model, he developed the concept of a single orb (falak) for each component of Ptolemy's planetary motions. This work was eventually translated into Hebrew and Latin in the 13th and 14th centuries and subsequently had an influence on astronomers such as Georg von Peuerbach during the European Middle Ages andRenaissance.


^{Model of the motions of Each of the 7 planets}

Alhazen's The Model of the Motions of Each of the Seven Planets, written in 1038, was a book on astronomy. The surviving manuscript of this work has only recently been discovered, with much of it still missing, hence the work has not yet been published in modern times. Following on from his Doubts on Ptolemy and The Resolution of Doubts, Alhazen described the first non-Ptolemaic model in The Model of the Motions. His reform was not concerned with cosmology, as he developed a systematic study of celestialkinematics that was completely geometric. This in turn led to innovative developments in infinitesimalgeometry.
His reformed empirical model was the first to reject the equant and eccentrics, separate natural philosophy from astronomy, free celestial kinematics from cosmology, and reduce physical entities to geometric entities. The model also propounded the Earth's rotation about its axis, and the centres of motion were geometric points without any physical significance, like Johannes Kepler's model centuries later.

In the text, Alhazen also describes an early version of Occam's razor, where he employs only minimal hypotheses regarding the properties that characterize astronomical motions, as he attempts to eliminate from his planetary model the cosmological hypotheses that cannot be observed from the Earth.


Other astronomical works

Alhazen distinguished astrology from astronomy, and he refuted the study of astrology, due to the methods used by astrologers being conjectural rather than empirical, and also due to the views of astrologers conflicting with that of orthodox Islam.

Alhazen also wrote a treatise entitled On the Milky Way, in which he solved problems regarding the Milky Waygalaxy and parallax. In antiquity, Aristotle believed the Milky Way to be caused by "the ignition of the fiery exhalation of some stars which were large, numerous and close together" and that the "ignition takes place in the upper part of the atmosphere, in the region of the world which is continuous with the heavenly motions." Alhazen refuted this and "determined that because the Milky Way had no parallax, it was very remote from the earth and did not belong to the atmosphere." He wrote that if the Milky Way was located around the Earth's atmosphere, "one must find a difference in position relative to the fixed stars." He described two methods to determine the Milky Way's parallax: "either when one observes the Milky Way on two different occasions from the same spot of the earth; or when one looks at it simultaneously from two distant places from the surface of the earth." He made the first attempt at observing and measuring the Milky Way's parallax, and determined that since the Milky Way had no parallax, then it does not belong to the atmosphere.

In 1858, Muhammad Wali ibn Muhammad Ja'far, in his Shigarf-nama, claimed that Alhazen wrote a treatise Maratib al-sama in which he conceived of a planetary model similar to the Tychonic system where the planets orbit the Sun which in turn orbits the Earth. However, the "verification of this claim seems to be impossible", since the treatise is not listed among the known bibliography of Alhazen.

The point here is that, Alhazen took science, which seemed to be at odds with itself at that time, and he presented "The Scientific Method". A meothd which allows Real Science to be practiced in the most purest of ways. Without dogma. And this, coming from a man who believed in God... why?

To answer this, we must first understand that Al Haythm was looking for proofs for the divine laws which he believed in, as revealed by God in the Quran.

But he wanted to know if they are observable... So he conducted many experiments, and worked maths til he could understand the cosmos to a degree that none before him could have. He presented not only a refutation to Ptolemys famous works on Atronomy, (which had some elements of astrology in them) but also to other scientists and mathematicians... and he even rebuked philosophers such as Aristotle.

The new method he bought, (the Scientific Method) was heavily reliant on one core principle - and that is, "absence of proof is not the proof of absence". And he used this ideal, to investigate matters in ways that no one else had thought of. And he got real results, that remain a testament to his method, to this day.

...And today? Today atheists seem to forget 'that' golden rule from the scientific method when "Atheists" claim that "there is no proof for God" Take a hike fellas. You have clearly got yourselves in a pickle here - you practice what I call "bad science".

Scimi