I know you kids like the youtube and hate that tl;dr text stuff, so if you couldn’t find the patience to read my post on Islamic embryology, you can now watch the screen instead. The Rationalizer goes through the ‘science’ in the Quran and shows that it’s largely plagiarized from Galen, and that it also steals Galen’s mistakes, so it’s a beautiful example of a plagiarized error of the type biologists use to demonstrate a lineage.
All the straining Muslim apologists use to fit the science to the few lines of poetry in the Quran (I’m looking at you, Hamzas Tzortzis) are futile and really only demonstrate that the founders of Islam borrowed their message, not from a divine source, but from Greco-Roman medicine.
But perhaps Allah is just another name for Galen.
(Also on Sb)
It may have been asked before, but do Muslims have hamstrings?
That’s what Mohammed gets for trusting a Techno-Mage…
On a related note, Muslims medical students in the UK have been walking out of class when told there are random processes out there that aren’t controlled by God.
If I walked out of lectures in college or wrote papers that were wrong, it usually meant I didn’t pass…
Daily Mail Article
But how could the Rationalizer know that Mohammad copied Galen? The Rationalizer wasn’t there. OMFSM! It’s a miracle! [tears, gibbering, self flagellation]
Hitchens: Religion poisons everthing.
Christopher Hitchens will live on forever by creating that slogan-summary. Proof there is an afterlife.
I’m speechless and this is the internet. Just how do you differentiate between random processes controlled by the gods and random processes that are not controlled by the gods?
What are those students afraid of? If they can’t listen to a contrary viewpoint without melting down, they have no business practicing medicine.
The last bastion of Flat Earthers are a few Moslem sects that still claim this. Most of them have moved on to the Round Earth though.
But both “Galen” and “Allah” have five letters! And they both have an L and an A in them! Therefore Galen was divinely inspired by Allah! You meanie atheists are just denying the obvious Truth!
Both the Bible and the Koran are full of deep insights into subtle scientific concepts that can be understood by anyone once they are tortuously explained and twisted into a semblance of the discoveries of secular science — and not one minute before. See, that proves how wonderful God/Allah is! [/sarcasm]
Christmas is just around the corner. Usually I send a subversive xmas card to all my friends and acquaintances. Last year was Darwin’s “tree of life” as a christmas tree, before that SFM standing in for baby jeebus. This year it will be baby mohammed standing in for baby jeebus. Source picture here: Linky to picture of baby mohammed.
There is just so much scope for taking the piss out of religions. And every joke is powered by the very seriousness by which the religious make their crazy claims.
@ Hamzas Tzortzis
Lighten up bro’. Those where campfire stories told for entertainment. Next you will be telling us the tales of horses with women’s heads and peacocks’ tails really really happened.
(Or should I have said “Light up bro’?”)
Thanks for posting this!
Hamza has told me that I have missed something very critical.
I wait with great anticipation for his counter argument. No, really I do. Honest. I know it sounds like sarcasm but it’s not, I *really* am looking forward to it. I don’t suppose the “*really*” helped either…..but I am, it’s fun :-)
(No sarcasm intended)
Why yes, all the more reason to insist that similarities are due to the magical mystery God, and not to any heathen inference of derivation.
Funny, they won’t accept the “God explanation” when their students plagiarize–just when Muhammed does, or, when God allegedly self-plagiarizes (slavishly and apparently without thinking).
Glen Davidson
I used to work in a medical school in the UK and can remember about 5-6 years ago when I heard that a minority of muslim students were requesting that they be allowed not to attend lectures or have to complete modules concerned with STDs. Thankfully none that I knew.
I’ve no problem with that, or with them not attending lectures pertaining to evolution, so long as these bozos are considered not have completed and don’t get medical degrees.
Pshaw, I say. PSHAW!
It’s obvious that Galen was copying Mohammed.
And don’t try to debunk that with all your western linear-time crap. With Allah, anything is possible.
All this proves is that Galen was divinely inspired and that anyone who now insults the prophet Galen should be stoned to death!!!
The best example of fitting the data to support the theory came when I was told, as a child, that the story of Eve being made by god from Adam’s rib is proven by the fact that men have one less rib than women. Unfortunately, men and women have the same number of ribs.
Poor old Hamza only has himself to blame. His next paper is on mountains in the Qur’an, a topic which he also badly fumbled with PZ in Dublin (see a pattern here?).
Here’s what I suspect Muhammad meant in 23:14 when he said “then We clothed the bones with flesh”. I noticed that 2:259 uses the same Arabic words for bones, clothe and flesh to describe the resurrection of a donkey which had died 100 years earlier: “Look at thine ass! And, that We may make thee a token unto mankind, look at the bones, how We adjust them and then cover them with flesh!”.
Here the bare bones are clothed with flesh.
22:5 suggests that embryology is smilar to resurrection:
“O mankind! if ye are in doubt concerning the Resurrection, then lo! We have created you from dust, then from a drop of seed, then from a clot…”
Put it all together and it’s pretty obvious that Muhammad imagined a small, unclothed skeleton, which he then clothes with flesh. If this is Allah’s work, he’s a real tease giving us all this debunking material!
I’m as prone to teal deer syndrome as anyone, but I still prefer reading to watching Youtube videos.
I think there is another point that needs to be emphasized. Egypt was overrun by muslims only about 20 years after the death of mohammed. There are no original copies of the koran going back to the days before this happened. Since you Galen’s works were accessible in Egypt koranic materials reflecting them may simply have been later insertions. Of course they will claim the Koran has only the parts of Galen’n writings in it that were correct, somehow miraculously. But as PZ pointed out the koran has all of a few sentences on embryology and those are so vague, that they can be shown to be compatible with science no matter what science says.
Oh Julius Fucking Caesar on a stick. Aren’t these religionists original in ANYTHING?
How many times have I got to tell you people? His name is HAMSTER TORTOISE.
I preferred the PZ version =). But still a very good look at the problem from a broader historical perspective.
Sin. Non-relgionists can’t do it at all.
@ #8 – YULE is just around the corner. Kindly keep that Xtian crap out of my pagan winter solstice festival.
@ Upright Ape
Galen have been translated to Arabic and was definitely available in centers like Baghdad before the time of Mo.Also don’t forget that at the time there were large jewish communities in the region of Mecca and Mohammed could have got the information from the talmudic version, which have been plagiarized from the Greek anatomists in the first place. I once has this discussion with a muslim apologist and his defense was to try and convince me that Mohammed was such an illiterate moron that even though the greek knowledge was readily available to his contemporaries there is no way he could have understood it enough to steel it without the help of big AL.
How utterly ridiculous. It is like a student of UK or US law saying that they don’t believe in legal precedents because their faith mandates that all true laws were codified by their god through his earthly servants, but they still want their law degree.
#25: Baghdad did not exist before Mo, it eas founded by muslims. As for what Mo could or could not have done, remember, Mo is just a shorthand version, just like Mark is shorthand for “whoever wrote the gospel known as Mark.” If Mo was illiterate that is irrelevant because whoever put pen to paper clearly wasn’t and that person could have copied it from whatever source available to him.
Comment 8: “Christmas is just around the corner. Usually I send a subversive xmas card to all my friends and acquaintances.”
here’s mine from last year,
I made it so anyone can feel free to use it.
Crow@3,
The story may well be true, but in general it’s as unwise to believe anything appearing in the Daily Heil! as it is to believe anything appearing in the Quran.
Here’s my Yuletime card from a couple of years ago.
I Google Imaged Galen, Mohammed and Allah and none of them looked alike at all.
The norse religion tells us about the “tree of life”. Modern biology tells us about the “tree of life”.
Therefore Odin… and Thor and Loki…
It makes about as much sense.
Well, that’s the thing, Crow. Years ago I knew a muslim student with just this attitude. He ostentatiously missed all the academic classes involving evolution but crammed up well enough in the library to pass the exams anyway.
He ostentatiously missed all the academic classes involving evolution but crammed up well enough in the library to pass the exams anyway.
and then there’s Jonathan Wells.
PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Berkeley.
but then, he deliberately chose a lab where evolution wouldn’t be needed to process the data for his thesis.
some people will go to just as great a length to lie to themselves, as they will to lie to others.
was told, as a child, that the story of Eve being made by god from Adam’s rib is proven by the fact that men have one less rib than women.
yup. I even recall being taught that in Sunday school when I was about 6 or 7.
we all felt our ribs…
strangely, I can’t recall how the sunday school teacher convinced us that what she said was accurate; perhaps as children we so wanted to believe her, we convinced ourselves it WAS true.
…interestingly, there actually IS a slight deviation, statistically, in the number of ribs each sex has.
About 1 in 200-500 people have an additional cervical rib, and…
it’s skewed towards females.
so, if anything, it seems that it would have to have been females donating that extra rib.