#1 by Blitzkrebs » Jul 24, 2010 5:47 pm

not

under oath

Or (the unbelievers' state) is like the darkness in a deep sea. It is covered by waves, above which are waves, above which are clouds. Darkness, one above another. If a man stretches out his hand, he cannot see it.

I wrote: Dear Dr. Hay,



I am a young college student aspiring to become either a biologist or a linguist some day. Although I can’t be sure just yet about a career in the sciences, I know I’ll always be at awe of their ability to explain our world. For said reasons it also saddens me to know that there will always be people who are ready dishonestly twist any information we learn for their own ideologies. If I could just have a moment of your time, perhaps we could set a chink in the propaganda machine and get a few people to think critically about their sources of information.



At present I’m dealing with two Muslim creationists who keep insisting there there’s science in the Qur’an and that such has been acknowledged by non-Muslim researchers. Having read much of the Qur’an (I even taught myself some Arabic to get a “Sprachgefühl” of the text), I can definitely vouch for its beauty (although not its inimitability), but I remain suspicious of the circumstances you and other scientists were subjected to when you reached your conclusions regarding its scientific accuracy. This article in the Wall Street Journal has confirmed my feelings somewhat, and I posted it to the network where the debate is currently taking place.



Unfortunately, I don’t think that for present purposes the writer elaborated enough about the pressures you were put under at that time. Do you feel that information about Muhammad’s life was hidden from you when you were pressed to make those statements? The person who was interviewing you said that Muhammad never visited a seaport in his life. Have you been able to confirm that? Was there anything else suspicious going on? What else have other researchers said? Most importantly of all, what would you say now, decades after this happened, to the people who keep passing around your quotes?



Finally, do you mind if I post your response? Undoubtedly some of the readers of my blogs will try to contact you afterwards, and I don’t want to involve you in anything that you aren’t up for. If not, can I at least send one person in particular your response in a private message?



I originally wouldn’t have gotten involved in this debate when I signed up for Muxlim (a Muslim networking site), if it weren’t for the incredible following creationists like Yusuf Estes or Harun Yahya have there. Their supporters post wildly-dishonest and misleading articles and videos almost every day about science, and I feel that other people have a right to accurate information by real scientists and not just some schizophrenic interior designer. I’m also outraged by the dishonesty some of these apologists display, for instance here in this article where Yusuf Estes announces that Darwin was an “amateur” and that there is “no genetic evidence” suggesting a kinship between humans and other apes. You and I both know that those are lies, but my problem is that I’m only an educated layman and don’t have the credibility to knock those claims down.



I’ve no illusions about being able to convince my actual opponents, since some people just don’t have the ability to think critically after being indoctrinated for so long. (I’ve been accused of taking evolution as my “lord and savior,” for example. Repeat that accusation and keep a straight face, if you can.)



Sometimes I struggle just to keep my temper. But I believe making an argument is still worth the effort, if just give other readers a bigger picture of what’s really going on in the world.



Sincerely,



Roy Meredith

Dr. William Hay wrote: Hello Roy,



Thanks for contacting me.



What happened to me was as follows. In 1983 or 1984 two Saudi's approached the Geological Society of America to locate experts on certain aspects of Geology which might relate to the Koran. At that time our understanding was that the Saudis wanted to make it possible for science to flourish in the Arab countries as it once had, but the religious authorities stood in the way. The Saudi Royal Family sponsored a "holy man", Sheik Zindani for this project. Accordingly, I was flown to Jedda, and met with the Sheik for the better part of a week.



For me one of the questions concerned a passage in the Koran that seems to refer to internal waves in the ocean, and the idea was that these had been discovered only recently. I suggested that perhaps Mohammed was highly intelligent, and a good observer, and had been on a sea voyage. In case you are not aware of it proper Islamics believe that Mohammed was uneducated, illiterate, and to attribute a high level of intelligence to him is heresy. Also, the Sheik and his colleagues insisted that Mohammed never saw the sea (in spite of the fact that Mecca and Medina are almost in sight of the Red Sea. I suggested that perhaps Mohammed had friends who were observant sailors again this was considered heresy. So after one long afternoon on a boat in the hot sun, all of the caveats about observations having been rejected you come to divine inspiration! So none of my skepticism was reflected.



On the same trip I gave a geological lecture at the university in Jedda and talking with faculty there I got the impression that the assumption that the goal was to make the pursuit of science safe was essentially correct. However, even today there is a problem about studying geology in Saudi Arabia, since nothing of importance is thought to have happened before the birth of Mohammed. This is why there are no archeological investigations there, and why Aramco still has almost no arab geologists.



When I got back to the US I started to look into how old information about internal waves was, and discovered that the Vikings certainly knew about the effects of the phenomenon, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks/Romans knew about it, and almost certainly the Arabs, who were the best sailors, would have had some experience with this phenomenon. In practical terms where there is a sharp interface within the water, the waves on this interface control the motion of the boat so that it does not correspond to the surface waves or currents.



A couple of years later a conference was organized by Sheik Zindani in Islamabad bringing together most all of the non-Islamic scientists he had conferred with. We were asked to prepare papers to be published in the Conference Proceedings, and mine included what I had been able to learn about possible ancient knowledge of internal waves in the ocean. Needless to say it did not get included in the published proceedings. Since then a much simpler explanation of the "internal waves" occurred to me. When you look down in clear, shallow water on a sunny day, you see the effect of dffraction of light passing through the water on the bottom as narrow bright bands separated by broad dark bands. These often seem to have little if anything to do with the surface waves that actually produce them. Those might be the "internal waves."



I do not read Arabic, and hence had only the translation provided by Sheik Zindani to go on. I know that Islamic scholars believe the words of the Koran have been preserved exactly, but I would question whether the meaning of the words has remained unchanged. The meanings of words drift with time so that for example, the BBC Productions of Shakespeare have modern English subtitles so one can understand the nuances of meaning. In some cases the meaning of words has changed completely. Another example is “The meek shall inherit the Earth”. When the King James translation of the original biblical text was made, the word ‘meek’ had nothing to do with its modern meaning; it meant ‘charitable.’ I suspect that this may have happened with arabic as well. If this is the case, it makes the modern interpretation of obscure passages of the Koran an exercise in futility.



The meeting in Islamabad was an extraordinary experience. I later realized that many of the clerics must have been Taliban. One night at dinner we asked those who were at our table why there were no women present, and were told that it would be inappropriate, since women were like animals, they have no souls. Sheik Zindani, as I understand it, is now in Yemen, and a major supporter of Bin Laden.



Since then some highly edited TV clips of me (and others) have appeared on Arab TV and even on Youtube (although we got those taken down).



Dan Goldin’s insightful article for the Wall Street Journal is about the only piece I know of that gives a good idea of what happened.



Bill Hay

A lot of Muslim apologists, especially Harun Yahya, Yusuf Estes, and Zakir Naik will brag about how Muslims were once holders of the most advanced civilizations in the world. This is fair enough, for philosophy, literature, art and early forms of science did indeed thrive during the early days of Islam before suffocating under the weight of Sunni orthodoxy. Apologists, however, often go even further than what can be reasonably ascertained by history and claim that the Qur’an itself is gut-loaded with secrets about the universe, which scientists have only recently discovered. Their faith, they say, is inseparable from science.Of course, this demonstrates a deadly ignorance of what science really is. Science does not depend on belief, for starters, nor would any scientist use the kind of vague and metaphorical language the Qur’an does in order to describe natural phenomena. Indeed, even in languages as complex and beautiful as classical Arabic a single word can have more than one meaning. To demonstrate what I mean, let’s look at the word “Maktub”. In Arabic it means “desk” or “office”, but it can also mean “destiny” (literally “it is written”). A more comical example is “rabb”, which is often used to refer to God but can also mean “boss” or “employer”.Science is different. The vocabulary thereof must be precise in order for researchers to make successful predictions and to communicate difficult ideas with one another. Not surprisingly, one of the many grounds why Intelligent Design isheld to be science by the majority of researchers is because it confuses scientific jargon with everyday speech, a point which Michael Behe conceded toduring the Kitzmiller v Dover trial, when he admitted that his use of the word “theory” was so loose that even astrology would qualify as one. (“Theory” to a scientist does not mean an educated guess, but an explanation of data that has been investigated and scrutinized by researchers and found to be thoroughly reliable.)Claiming that science exists in the Qur’an also betrays a willful double standard on part of Muslim apologists who so readily ridicule advancements made in evolutionary biology and even cosmology, solely because it doesn’t agree with their interpretations of Islam. It should be manifest to any educated observer that these people have not the slightest interest in real science or advancing human knowledge. They are sensationalists looking for whatever information they can twist into supporting their ideology.Recently I debated two Muslim creationists on an Islamic networking site who tried to resurrect this kitsch, apparently as they realized they weren’t going to have any luck persuading me of their beliefs by criticizing a theory as strongly supported as evolution. I decided to contact an actual scientist, Dr. William Hay from the University of Colorado, about the matter. Dr. Hay, if you don’t know, is one of those infamous non-Muslim researchers from the 1980s, whom Muslim preachers are very fond of quoting whenever they say that there’s “science in the Qur’an.” I didn’t for a second trust the conditions under which the scientists had to work prior to making those claims, especially after reading an article thereabout in the Wall Street Journal . Hay studies marine geology, and while attending the Islamic science conferences in the 1980s was asked to comment on a verse in the Qur’an which described the phenomena of underwater wave movement. He allegedly suggested that it may have been divinely revealed. The verse in question is this:..[Quran 24:40]Our correspondence is as follows:Dr. Hay was very helpful and responded the following morning. My long-standing suspicions were confirmed.Needless to say, unless apologists are able to demonstrate that their findings are the result of rigorous inquiry and not wishful thinking/manipulation, we shouldn't be afraid the induldge ourselves in a little inductive reasoning and assume that what happened to Hay happened to the other scientists as well.