Note: this topic is from 11/30/2014. Thanks Eleutheria5.
Posted on 11/30/2014 3:19:26 PM PST by Eleutheria5
The Turkish Science Minister has become the latest public figure to make outrageous claims over Islam's hand in science and technology, the Hurriyet Daily News reported Friday - this time, claiming that Muslims discovered that the world is round.
"Some 700-800 years before Galileo, 71 Muslim scientists led by al-Khwarizmi convened by the order of the Caliph Al-Ma'mun and revealed that the Earth is a sphere," Minister Fikri stated on Thursday.
Fikri further claimed that a copy of the original document proving Islam's role in astronomy is currently in the Museum of Islamic Science and Technology in Istanbul.
The Earth was widely regarded as flat until the 3rd century BCE, when the Hellenists proposed that the Earth was a sphere based on astronomical calculations. Plato was among the early supporters of the concept of a spherical Earth, writing in Phaedo that "my conviction is that the earth is a round body in the centre of the heavens, and therefore has no need of air or of any similar force to be a support."
Fikri's statement does have a kernel of merit to it: indeed, around 830 AD, Caliph Al-Ma'mun did commission a group of Muslim scientists to calculate the Earth's circumference, using measurements of the distance from Tadmur (Palmyra) to Raqqah, the current capital of ISIS in Syria. The commission did, in fact, reach measurements close to modern values.
Fikri's fundamental error, however, is in who Galileo Galilei was; instead of pioneering Western acceptance of the Earth as a sphere, he supported heliocentrism, the theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He was subsequently persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church in the seventeenth century for holding these views.
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(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
The Romans did know, but their hands were full just trying to subdue the Germans and the English, while feeding the massive population of Rome. Actually, the Romans did have boats which could have sailed the Atlantic by following the coastlines. (Their ships ranged up to 180 feet. The Greeks built up to 360 feet.) Try looking at things from the historical Roman perspective, not your own or some modern point of view.
Look at any European map exiting from the Middle Ages and the world is portrayed as flat - even the Polynesian peoples knew the world was round, as they were successfully navigating the Pacific at the time.
Your so-called “Darwinists” are only correct in speaking about Europeans, about everyone else they are on quicksand in that regard. And the progressive theory of history they have used is defunct, in any case, as the modern history of science has proven.
I fail to understand why you are defending the European Middle Ages with such vigor - It was a horrible time and place to live, where ignorance was a survival tactic against the Church. You obviously want me to supply you with links to various items - do your own linking; I have other things to do than supply you with more items which you will lamely attempt to refute.
As every bicyclists knows...The World Is Not Round...The World Is Not Flat...The World Is Uphill
The Hebrew word “chug” can also be translated as sphere or ball.
Note: this topic is from 11/30/2014. Thanks Eleutheria5.
“The Hebrew word “chug” can also be translated as sphere or ball.”
I thought “chug” was derived from the Hebrew verb for “beer drinking” as in what ancient Hebrew college kids did on the weekend. I stand corrected.
What in Sam Hill are you talking about?!
Bede knew the earth was round in the 700s. Aquinas in the Summa Theologica (1270s) assumes the earth is round:
Sciences are differentiated according to the various means through which knowledge is obtained. For the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e. abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself.Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in the early 1300s--the High Middle Ages. He climbs down into Hell, reaches Lucifer at the center, then climbs out of the earth to the other side and up Mount Purgatory.
I can't think of a major author in the Middle Ages who asserted the world was flat.
The medievals had less reason to use spherical projections than we do. They had no reason to depict the other side of the world and no clear picture of what was there anyway (Dante was one of the few who took a stab at it). And as flattening a spherical perspective is commonplace in cartography anyway, we should look at what they actually *said* about the shape of the earth.
And what they said was, it's round.
Oh, you mean like they also invented the radio Popov راديو in 1873, but lacked electricity to make it work?
They invented the radio in the time of Mohammed but could only use it to hold down the edge of the tent until they invented the transistor that is powered by the Will of Allah.
Actually, pretty much everyone knew the Earth is round from the ancients on up. The Greeks and Egyptians and Sumerians knew that and most of them had calculated a circumference that was reasonably close. Seafaring cultures figured it out pretty early.
Moslem thinkers had different ideas long ago but, of course, the Koran trumps all. I even brought that up when I was actually trying to discuss things with a Moslem in who had the shop next door to mine 20 years ago. I thought he was being friendly. He got very evasive and wouldn’t actually answer the question about the shape of the earth. Not for that reason, I don’t discuss anything with Mohammedans anymore. It is pointless. Ultimately the only thing they will discuss with an infidel is the infidel’s imminent conversion.
In Saudi they have only translated some 100 book to Arabic: Everything that they think they need is already in their book. In a generation or two they will be back to the camel age.
And, as pointed out by Musharraf, all that there are, won them while at western universities.
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