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Scientific Errors in the Quran: Difference between revisions
→Mountains as pegs which prevent the earth from shifting
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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. | 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. | The Qur'an, by contrast, holds that mountains are like pegs in the ground. Mountain formation can involve a thickening of the continental crust beneath them, which some modern Muslim scholars attempt to compare as peg-like, though mountains form in various other ways too (see main article for details and for many further problems with this claim). | ||
The Qur'an further claims that mountains were created to prevent the Earth from shifting or swaying with its inhabitants. This is most commonly interpreted by modern Islamic scholars as a reference to earthquakes. | |||
However, in early or pre-Islamic poetry mountains are mentioned in terms of stopping the Earth as a whole | However, in early or pre-Islamic poetry mountains are mentioned in terms of stopping the Earth as a whole swaying/convulsing. This seems to support a more straightforward reading of the Quranic verses, backed also by a hadith - that 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 criticism of a few other interpretations). | ||
{{Quote|{{Quran|16|15}}| | {{Quote|{{Quran|16|15}}| | ||