Posted by Illuminati on 3/10/2009, 4:00 am, in reply to "Re: The Sun and Allah's Throne"
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Your response is rational. When confronted with evidence such as this hadith, it is only reasonable to turn it into a metaphor. I do hope that you recognize that Christians have every right to take the Bible passages you have quoted as metaphors.
The question is whether the scientific inaccuracies in the holy books were originally meant to be metaphors or whether the prophets didn't understand modern physics? There is no way to know for sure. In reading the hadiths about the sun, and others which follow the same line of reasoning, I suspect that Mohammad actually believed that the sun stops at Allah's throne every night. However, as a Muslim, you have every right to claim that it was never meant to be taken literally so long as you are willing to grant me the same right to not take everything in the Bible literally.
Once you or I begin to escape scientific inaccuracies in our holy books by interpreting passages as metaphors because they are scientifically inaccurate, it is very difficult to then turn around and claim that the prophets had advanced scientific information which surpassed the information possessed by their contemporaries.
Your scientific claims for the holy books is the same as a game of chance where you flip a coin. If one side of the coin is "heads" and the other side is "tails," you can not lose the game if you say, "Heads I win, tails you lose." If a passage in the holy books is not scientific, you can say "This is a metaphor," but when the holy book sounds scientific you can say, "This passage is literal." This game may work on people who don't understand logic, but it will not convince people who can see through the fallacy.
As a Christian, I don't make that type of argument to support the veracity of the Bible because of that very problem. The truth in the Bible is found by looking deeper into the underlying theological and cosmological assumptions which the prophets made. If one lives at the level of the superficial details, they will completely miss the meaning of the book.
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