romansh Posted March 24, 2022 Share Posted March 24, 2022 The recent bout of Islamic posting on here got me surfing the web and I came across this interesting chap: Anaxagoras Some salient points: He was born about 500 BCE ie a millennia before Islam. He was a Greek citizen born in what is now present day Turkey. He was an unbeliever in that he did not believe the Sun was a deity. He was the first known person to give an explanation of eclipses. He thought the sun was made of fiery metal. He thought it would be possible that the sun could rain down metal on the Earth, and people thought flaming meteorites landing on Earth proved him right. He thought of matter as homogeneous and heterogeneous parts, which with sloppy analogies might be atoms and their substituents. Anaxagoras thought heavenly bodies rotated. All this a thousand years before the creation of Islam. Anaxagoras Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PaulS Posted March 29, 2022 Share Posted March 29, 2022 It is remarkable to me that Christians and Muslims alike, don't question simply why God or Allah left it for so long in our history to come up with a book of so-called wisdom! Surely by their own logic this should have been communicated in full, like the day immediately after creation! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
romansh Posted March 29, 2022 Author Share Posted March 29, 2022 5 hours ago, PaulS said: It is remarkable to me that Christians and Muslims alike, don't question simply why God or Allah left it for so long in our history to come up with a book of so-called wisdom! The usual answers work here: moves in mysterious ways, infinite wisdom, beyond human capacity to understand etc etc. The questions for me are more philosophical than theological. What are the underlying causes for my beliefs, what are the mechanisms for the process called belief? But my point was Anaxagoras was ahead of his time, not beholden to the then going deity of his culture, had explanations for the reflected light of the moon. But not surprisingly, he was quite wrong in other aspects. ie the Earth was flat. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PaulS Posted March 30, 2022 Share Posted March 30, 2022 18 hours ago, romansh said: But my point was Anaxagoras was ahead of his time, not beholden to the then going deity of his culture, had explanations for the reflected light of the moon. But not surprisingly, he was quite wrong in other aspects. ie the Earth was flat. But he couldn't have known about honey because the Quran wasn't written yet! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
romansh Posted March 30, 2022 Author Share Posted March 30, 2022 5 hours ago, PaulS said: But he couldn't have known about honey because the Quran wasn't written yet! :rolf: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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