Episode 2: What has the Qu'ran got to do with Science, anyway?!

What has the Quran got to do with Science?

Well, what if we said that the Quran essentially led to the scientific revolution?

This series will show how the modern world with all of its advancements and technology owes its origin directly to the Quran…

When we talk about the Scientific revolution, immediately we have a picture of 17th-century Europe, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus, etc. But to say that the scientific revolution the fruits of which we enjoy today emerged out of Europe all of a sudden in the 16th century is no less ridiculous a claim as saying Columbus discovered America.

(Just like there were people living there in the Americas, there was a revolution in place just across the Mediterranean.)

The human quest for knowledge is as old as the human being. In that sense, science is as old as humanity itself. But the kind of science we have now, is science that works, produces results, improves the standard of living, builds cities, and adds to economic growth. This kind of science stems out of the Experimental Empirical Scientific Method. What that actually means is that for a scientific theory to be taken as truth, it has to be proved right experimentally. Now where did this method come from?

The common story that is forced down our throats is that it was the knowledge of the Ancient Greeks that led to the Age of Enlightenment in 16th-century Europe. Names like Pythagoras, Aristotle, Plato, and Ptolemy are mentioned.

There are three gigantic problems in this story:

Firstly, not only is the scientific method that produced modern science completely missing in Ancient Greece, but the father of Western Science as he is called Aristotle, and other philosophers like Thales and Epicurus are diametrically opposed to the Empirical  Scientific Method. Rather, Aristotle is known to have said, "It follows that there will be no scientific knowledge of the primary premises, and since except intuition nothing can be truer than scientific knowledge, it will be intuition that apprehends the primary premises." Now that is not how we do science.

Inductive reasoning- the most central way we do science in the modern world, which is to construct a theory out of a specific pattern that you observe is not afforded the status of scientific knowledge in Greek science. Everything from Newtonian mechanics to Einstein’s theory of relativity, from medical research to cosmology, all emerge out of Inductive reasoning. But for Greek science, it is left to intuition to provide a solid foundation. Add to it that Aristotle performed no modern-style experiments. Rather in Ancient Greece, it was considered unusual and unwelcome for a philosopher to be an artisan who would construct an apparatus to prove his theory. Then where before Europe was the Experimental scientific method being used? Or more precisely who devised this? The first people to use experimentation for scientific inquiry are Iraqi Physicist Ibn al Haytham and Philosopher and medic Al Kindi.

This is beautifully written by French anthropologist Robert Briffault that, "Science owes its very existence to Arabic culture. The ancient world was pre-scientific. What we call science arose in Europe as a result of a new spirit of inquiry, unknown to the Greeks. The spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs".

The second problem in the classical narrative is that between Ancient Greece and the Scientific Revolution in Europe, there are 2000 years. To say that knowledge will stay in its pure pristine form for two thousand years and that too the most active 2000 years in recorded history and then magically create a revolution in another part of history without there being any sort of a passage in between is devoid of all logic and understanding of how history works.

3. Thirdly, there were no original Greek manuscripts of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and other big names of Greek philosophy. The books that led to the Enlightenment of Europe were Latin translations of Arabic commentaries on Greek philosophy. So basically what the medieval Europeans were reading and what eventually led to their enlightenment were Muslim opinions on Greek philosophy. The best example is Copernicus, who is famous for proving that the earth moves around the sun, which in the 16th century was going against the Christian belief that everything revolved around the stationary earth, and that could very conveniently lead to death at the gallows. Copernicus would've never been able to formulate his model without the book on planetary motion by Ptolemy or more precisely the Latin translation of the Muslim astronomer Ibn Shatir's commentary and correction of Ptolemy. This point was proven by Austrian Mathematician and Historian of science Otto Neugebauer in 1957, that the lunar model that Copernicus used in his groundbreaking book De Revolutionibus that started the Scientific Revolution was exactly the same as Muslim Astronomer Ibn Shatir and Nasir ad-Din Tusi's planetary models written some 200 years back. Add to this the discovery of German scientist and polymath Willy Hartner in 1975 that even the diagrams are the same detail by detail, down to their alphabetical designations. Where Tusi uses Alif, Copernicus uses A, where Tusi uses ba Copernicus uses B, and so on.

The truth is out and now it’s clear as daylight, that the first global-scale Scientific Revolution did not start in 16th-century Europe.  It was in the 9th century in the Muslim world up until the 16th century- the Golden Age of Islam that a brand new method- the Scientific method to understand reality was devised. One that would change the world forever.

But that just leaves more questions than answers.  How does an unlettered desert civilization of bedouins, camel herders or superstitious fire worshippers from the fallen Persian empire usher in the first Global Scientific Revolution?

What happened in just a few 100 years that took them from shepherding camels to correcting Ptolemy's calculations and Galen's theories?

It was the Revelation of the Quran.

There is something very powerful in the text of the Quran.

To find out how the Quran compels the reader to examine the proof of its claim- the claim that there is one Super intelligence creating, controlling maintaining everything, all the time- to find the proof for this claim in the very workings of the universe, for this you'll have to watch the next episode.