Scientific Errors in the Quran: Difference between revisions

Modern geology has discovered that large plates in the crust of the Earth are responsible for the formation of mountains. Called plate tectonics, the slow movement of these massive plates meet and the pressure between them pushes up the crust, forming mountains while also causing earthquakes and faults in the Earth's surface. The formation of mountains and occurance of earthquakes are thus both largely the result of destabilizing tectonic activity. They are part of the same ongoing process and one cannot exist without the other. The Qur'an, by contrast, holds that mountains are like pegs in the ground, and claims that they stabilize the Earth which would shift without them (interpreted by modern Islamic scholars as a reference to earthquakes). Moreover, there are various ways in which mountains can form, not all of which involve a thickening of the continental crust beneath them that some attempt to compare as peg-like (see main article for details).

In early or pre-Islamic poetry mountains are mentioned in terms of the Earth as a whole shifting/convulsing. This seems to support a more straightforward reading of the Quranic verses, backed also by a hadith - that Allah's creation of mountains to prevent the earth shifting/convulsing (tamīda<ref>تَمِيدَ tamīda [http://www.studyquran.org/LaneLexicon/Volume7/00000274.pdf Lane's Lexicon] page 2746</ref>) does not refer to earthquakes, which have occured throughout history including in Muhammad's era and whose seismic waves can actually be amplified in certain locations by mountains, but rather to a movement of the entire Earth (see main article for details on all of these points).

And He has cast into the earth firmly set mountains, lest it shift with you, and [made] rivers and roads, that you may be guided,}}