I dissected that claim that the Qur’an contains a detailed description of embryological development, but maybe you’d prefer the cartoon?
Yep, that’s accurate. That’s really all it says.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
So, it’s basically like when people claim Genesis reflects the Big Bang: There are some very, very superficial similarities that can be interpreted in a way to kind of sort of fit, assuming you ignore blatant contradictions (like bones becoming “clothed in flesh” here or the order in which animals appeared in Genesis).
I’ve heard worse. Keratinized skin really is fairly late in fetal development, iirc.
So, that’s fetal development done, what shall we do next? Cell biology and metabolism in six easy steps? DNA replication in three? How about a complete model of human neurophysiology drawn on the back of a postage stamp? And PZ would have you believe this science stuff is hard and takes a lifetime of careful study and diligent work…
Saganite, a haunter of demons @ 1;
Got it in one. It is pretty much just an intellectual variant of common-or-garden pareidolia. If you look at a body of literature as large and long winded as your average so called holy book, you are almost bound to find something that can – with a little elbow grease, some impressive squinting, and whole lot of outright lies – be more or less wrangled into a very, very rough approximation of the most crude and unsophisticated expression of a scientific theory. For Muslim creationists and Quranic literalists, this butchery of reproductive biology is their face on a piece of toast.
If you really want to follow the strange logic and risk insanity here is the reference for their embryology text book. It is a text still used in Western universities today without of course the “Islamic additions”. The nonsensical interpretation of the Qur’an verse and their relation to real embryology is bad enough but the absolutely dismiss the Carnegie Scale in favour of a “simpler” to understand Quran’ic verson of development.
Keith L. Moore and Abdul-Majeed A. Azzindani, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology with IslamicAdditions (Jeddah: Dar Al-Qiblah with permission of W.B. Saunders Company, 3rd edn.,1983)
It’s not a contradiction: Mohammed was clearly warning Humanity about the Terminator.
I find it so amusing that religious people think that this is some sort of divine revelation, rather than the result of scientific inquiry. Aristotle wrote an extremely detailed text about the natural world called “The History of Animals” about a thousand years before the Qu’ran. In it, Aristotle differentiates between oviparous and ovoviviparous sharks, among many other extremely fine details. Learning about the natural world doesn’t require a miracle, it requires a lot of patient observation and experimentation.
Like SkeptiKarl, I am not surprised or amazed that the Qur’an was written by one or more people with a basic knowledge of developmental stages in the womb. It seems to me that there would have been a surfeit of human cadavers available for observation, and misinterpretation of observations is nothing new. But once religious dogma is set, thus it is so. Because magic, ad infinitum.