Internet Infidels has a piece up titled ‘Predicting Modern Science: Epicurus vs. Mohammed‘. A debate between those who argue that the Koran predicts many of the discoveries of modern science and those who reject this assertion serves as the background. When I was a child the book The Bible, the Qu’ran and Science: The Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of Modern Knowledge was making the rounds. I happened to read it and found it to be a most unconvincing text, teasing from scripture bizarre interpretations that dovetailed with modern physiology or cosmology (it was kind of like a more sexually preoccupied version of something like The Fingerprint of God).
In my personal experience Muslims tend to take the evidentiary tack quite a bit more often than Christians. Partly this is the result of the special place that the Koran has in Muslim thought, its sacrality and almost magical properties imbue it with an aura of literality that might imply in the minds of some that the sum of all knowledge must be found in the text. Another problem is that in some ways Islam has been less impressed by the bracing impact of modern secularism, ergo, some Muslims seem to assume that unbelief is due to either obstinance or ignorance, rather than its own merits.
The piece above makes the case that the Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus’ predictions, or more properly fantastical hypotheses vaguely informed by reason and empirical evidence, are more congruent with the state of modern scientific knowledge than the Koran (I do believe that Epicurus’ reductionistic materialism helped make his guesses more predictive than if he was of a mystical ‘holistic’ bent, in that in the latter case I wonder if his hypotheses would have been clear enough to be tested in the context of modern science in the first place). A plain reading of the evidence will likely point to this direction to most non-Muslims, while many Muslims will remain skeptical, which goes to show that arguments from evidence serve to buttress the faith of believers rather than convert anyone through force of reason or empiricism. The author’s point, that if you look at any obscure text you can glean predictive power is instructive, The Bible Code and God and the Astronomers are both books that exploited human preconceptions and dispositions, people wanted to see certain patterns, they saw them and never bothered to consider contradictory patterns that might nullify the force behind their conclusion.
I recall what a friend of mine once told me: when someone is cured of cancer, praise be to God, and when someone dies a slow death, to hell with modern medicine!
Posted by razib at 01:50 AM