Scientific foreknowledge in sacred texts

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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),[citation needed] 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.

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.

Contents

[edit] Bible

Further information: Biblical inspiration

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.

[edit] History and advocacy

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:

"Therefore the present passage [Job 9:6],[3] which we have been discussing, is easily reconciled with Copernicus' opinion. And in order to show the marvelous power and wisdom of God, who initiates and maintains the motion of the whole earth, which is enormous by nature, the text adds, 'and its pillars are shaken.' This teaching means that it is moved from its foundations."[4]

William Harvey, the medical doctor who in the 1600s 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:

Every word of the Hebrew Scriptures is well chosen and carries valuable knowledge and deep significance[6]

Harry Rimmer (1890 - 1952) was president of the "Science Research bureau"[citation needed] and published "Harmony of Science and Scripture" (1936),[citation needed] 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), an evangelical religious institution.[9]

Henry M. Morris, 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.[citation needed]

The Old Earth Creationist and astronomer, Hugh Ross, Ph.D., is a notable advocate of Bible scientific foreknowledge.

"Some of the latest discoveries about the universe, specifically about the hot big bang model, speak volumes about the predictive power of a Bible-based, science-affirming perspective on the cosmos."[10]

[edit] Qur'an

Further information: Qur'an and science
See also: Islam and science

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",[Qur'an 21:30] as representing the Big bang.[1] Another claim interprets the passage: "It is not for the sun to overtake the moon, nor doth the night outstrip the day. They float each in an orbit"[Qur'an 36:40] as a reference to cosmic orbital motion.[11]

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".[12] 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 seventh century could have written "facts" which "today are shown to be keeping with modern scientific knowledge".[1] Scholars critisize, that "Bucaille bends the meaning of the Arabic words to suit his own ideas."[13] and "Bucaille proposes new meanings for Qur'anic words to bring them into accord with modern scientific knowledge, without requiring any standard philological justification."[14] Bucaille's opinion did not gain scientific consensus on the matter, and has been extensively criticized by skeptics and rationalists for promoting distortion[15].

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 that , according to the Quran, nuclear energy comes from Genies.[16]. He observes that the prevalence of such pseudoscientific concepts has led to significant decline in scientific output from Muslims since the distant past.[16] 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[17].

[edit] Vedic texts

Indian tradition sometimes holds that all knowledge is contained in the Vedas and other ancient texts.[citation needed] As van Buitenen puts it:[18]

"Central to Indian thinking through the ages is a concept of knowledge which, though known to Platonism and Gnosticism, is foreign to the modern West. Whereas for us, to put it briefly, knowledge is something to be discovered, for the Indian knowledge is to be recovered. [...] One particular preconception, related to this concept of knowledge concerning the past and its relationship to the present, is probably of central significance: that at its very origin the absolute truth stands revealed; that this truth—which is simultaneously a way of life—has been lost, but not irrecoverably; that somehow it is still available through ancient life-lines that stretch back to the original revelation; and that the present can be restored only when this original past has been recovered."

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.[citation needed]

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".[19] 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.[20] Dayananda's Arya Samaj experienced a gradual renaissance in the 1980s.[citation needed]

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".[21] According to the historian of science Meera Nanda:

any traditional Hindu idea or practice, however obscure and irrational it might have been through its history, gets the honorific of "science" if it bears any resemblance at all, however remote, to an idea that is valued (even for the wrong reasons) in the West.[21]

In 1900, Vivekananda said that "the conclusions of modern science are the very conclusions the Vedanta reached ages ago; only, in modern science they are written in the language of matter."[22] In one lecture he claimed that: "Today we find wonderful discoveries of modern science coming upon us like bolts from the blue, opening our eyes to marvels we never dreamt of. But many of these are only re-discoveries of what had been found ages ago. It was only the other day that modern science discovered that what it calls heat, magnetism, electricity, and so forth, are all convertible into one unit force. But this has been done even in the Samhita."[23] identifying concepts from physics like gravitation, electricity, magnetism and other forces with the mystical Vedantic notion of Prana.

Some of the authors "seeking to modernize India by recovering the supposedly pristine Vedic-Hindu roots of Indian culture" revived these notions.[21]:

"By postulating interconnections and similarities across Nature, they [the Vedic thinkers] were able to use logic to reach extremely subtle conclusions about diverse aspects of reality."[24]

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:

"Western scientic thought draws on the traditions of Greek rationalist thinking according to which only what is within the purview of the five senses is taken cognisance of. Scientific methods follow some kind of closed scientific reasoning which insulates itself against facts that its methods cannot account for. How else can they [scientists] dare dismiss Jyotisha [astrology] which sees a level of existence beyond the purview of the five senses?" (Vasudev 2001)[25]

Or even that in India, science and religion are fundamentally identical:[clarification needed]

"The idea of 'contradiction' is an imported one from the West in recent times by the Western-educated, since 'Modern Science' arbitrarily imagines that it only has the true knowledge and its methods are the only methods to gain knowledge, smacking of Semitic dogmatism in religion." (Mukhyananda 1997:94)

[edit] Criticism

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.[26] 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.

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."[27] 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[28] 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.[29]

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]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d e Ahmad Dallal, Science and the Qur'an, Encyclopedia of the Qur'an
  2. ^ Bible scientific foreknowledge - CreationWiki, the encyclopedia of creation science
  3. ^ Job 9:6, NIV
  4. ^ De Zuñiga, Diego, Commentary on Job (1584), p205
  5. ^ Ferngren, Larson, Amundsen (Editors). "Encyclopedia of the History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition", Garland Publishing Inc,US (29 Jun 2000), p. 470. ISBN 0815316569
  6. ^ a b An Experimental Pharmacological Appreciation of Leviticus XI and Deuteronomy XIV, Bulletin of the History of Medicine - David Macht
  7. ^ Ask the Rabbi - 199
  8. ^ Harmony of Science and Scripture, Harry Rimmer (1936)(p131-132)
  9. ^ Froth and Fraud in Fundamentalism
  10. ^ Hugh Ross, Ph.D. "Predictive Power: Confirming Cosmic Creation". http://www.reasons.org/resources/fff/2002issue09/index.shtml#predictive_power (accessed: October 06, 2006).
  11. ^ Science and Islam in Conflict Discover magazine 06.21.2007
  12. ^ Roff, William R. (1987). Islam and the political economy of meaning: comparative studies of Muslim discourse. Routledge. p. 279. http://books.google.de/books?id=s5sOAAAAQAAJ&dq=Islam+and+the+political+economy+of+meaning&lr=&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0. 
  13. ^ Negus, Michael Robert (2005). Islam and Science. God, humanity, and the cosmos, Edition: 2, illustrated, revised, by Christopher Southgate, John Hedley Brooke, Celia Deane-Drummond. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 332. http://books.google.de/books?id=2euuM3YOh6YC&dq=God,+humanity,+and+the+cosmos&lr=&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0. 
  14. ^ Wood, Kurt A. (June 1993). "The Scientific Exegesis of The Qur'an: A Case Study in Relating Science and Scripture". PSCF (American Scientific Affiliation) 45: 90–95. http://www.asa3.org/asa/PSCF/1993/PSCF6-93Wood.html#6. 
  15. ^ [http://www.mukto-mona.com/Articles/skm/Religion_Science_Bucaille.htm Religion, Science, and Maurice Bucaille], by Syed Kamran Mirza
  16. ^ a b Islamic failure, by Pervez Hoodbhoy
  17. ^ Hoodbhoy, Pervez (1992). Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality. Zed Books. ISBN 1856490254. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/996690.Islam_and_Science_Religious_Orthodoxy_and_the_Battle_for_Rationality. 
  18. ^ van Buitenen, J. A. B (1966), "The Archaism of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa", in Milton Singer, Krishna: Myths, Rites, and Attitudes, pp. 23–40  Reprinted in S.S Shashi, ed., Encyclopedia Indica, pp. 28–45, ISBN 9788170418597, http://books.google.com/books?id=U-sC1GkwH7sC&pg=PA44&dq=discovered 
  19. ^ Saraswati, Dayananda. Introduction to the commentary on the Vedas. pp. 443. 
  20. ^ Ruthven (2007:108)
  21. ^ a b c Nanda, Meera. 2003. Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0813533589. See also Nanda, Meera. 2005. "Response to my critics," Social Epistemology. 19(1):147–191.
  22. ^ 1970, vol. 3, p. 185, cited after Sokal, Allan, "Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?" in: Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public Routledge (2006) ISBN 0415305934, chapter 3.2 "Hindu nationalism and 'Vedic science'")
  23. ^ lecture on The Vedanta delivered at Lahore on 12 November 1897; 1970, vol. 3, pp. 398f.
  24. ^ Feuerstein, Kak and Frawley in their 1995 In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (p. 197)
  25. ^ Vasudev, Gayatri Devi. 2001. Vedic astrology and pseudo-scientic criticism, The Organiser (an English-language publication of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), reprinted in The Astrological Magazine, cited after Sokal (2006:38)
  26. ^ Parkins, Michael D,(Preceptor, J. Szekrenyes), Pharmocological Practices of Ancient Egypt, Proceedings of the 10th Annual History of Medicine Days, Faculty of the University of Calgary, edited by Dr. WA Whitelaw
  27. ^ Farrell Till, The Skeptical Review 1990, What About Scientific Foreknowledge in the Bible? p2-5
  28. ^ [http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/farrell_till/geisler-till/geisler1.html Farrell Till debate with Norman Geisler
  29. ^ Dr. Diane M. Sharon, 1998, Parashah Commentary

[edit] External links

[edit] Apologetics

[edit] Skeptical views

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