The Location of the Moon and the Stars
In the Qur'an we find the following statements about the moon and the stars:
He Who created the seven heavens, one above the other ...
And We have adorned the lowest heaven with lamps ... (67:3,5)
And He completed them seven heavens in two days
and inspired in each heaven its command;
and We adorned the lower heaven with lamps,
and rendered it guarded... (41:12)
We have indeed adorned the lower heaven with the beauty of the stars. (37:6)
Do you not see how God has created the seven heavens
one above the other,
and made the moon a light in their midst,
and made the sun as a lamp? (71:15-16)
The above is Yusuf Ali's translation. Pickthall renders Sura 71:16 as
And hath made the moon a light therein, and made the sun a lamp?
The Qur'an seems to teach that there are seven heavens, one above the other, whether it was imagined to be like storeys in a high building (flat layers) or like shells or the layers of an onion.
As a poetic way of expression this is acceptable, even though there are, scientifically speaking, no discernable stages in the universe that would allow us to differentiate between those various heavens.
However, the Qur'an specifically assigns the stars to a lower or even the lowest heaven, while it states the relationship of the moon to the totality of the seven heavens is that it is "in them" (fehinna). This gives the impression that the moon is at least as far away as the stars if not further.
But everyone knows today that the stars are much much further away from the earth than the moon. This is not a small difference, it is an issue of several magnitudes. The average distance from the earth to the moon is 384,400 km, while Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us outside of the solar system, is already about 4.3 light years = 40,682,300,000,000 km (40 trillion kilometers) away, or expressed differently, we need to multiply the distance of the moon by more than 100 million to reach even the nearest of all the stars.
Had the Qur'an formulated "and the moon in the middle of them" then this would have been unambiguously wrong. The formulation "in them" is vague enough to still allow the possibility of the moon to be in the lowest heaven as well. The wording of the Qur'an is certainly less than scientific in this instance and suggesting wrong notions even though it is sufficiently vague to not make it a clear error. It does, however, throw substantial doubt on the claim that God made the Qur'an scientifically as a proof of its divine origin.
Dodgy science in the Qur'an http://www.answering-islam.org/Quran/Science/moon_locus.html
The Location of the Moon and the Stars
In the Qur'an we find the following statements about the moon and the stars:
He Who created the seven heavens, one above the other ...
And We have adorned the lowest heaven with lamps ... (67:3,5)
And He completed them seven heavens in two days
and inspired in each heaven its command;
and We adorned the lower heaven with lamps,
and rendered it guarded... (41:12)
We have indeed adorned the lower heaven with the beauty of the stars. (37:6)
Do you not see how God has created the seven heavens
one above the other,
and made the moon a light in their midst,
and made the sun as a lamp? (71:15-16)
The above is Yusuf Ali's translation. Pickthall renders Sura 71:16 as
And hath made the moon a light therein, and made the sun a lamp?
The Qur'an seems to teach that there are seven heavens, one above the other, whether it was imagined to be like storeys in a high building (flat layers) or like shells or the layers of an onion.
As a poetic way of expression this is acceptable, even though there are, scientifically speaking, no discernable stages in the universe that would allow us to differentiate between those various heavens.
However, the Qur'an specifically assigns the stars to a lower or even the lowest heaven, while it states the relationship of the moon to the totality of the seven heavens is that it is "in them" (fehinna). This gives the impression that the moon is at least as far away as the stars if not further.
But everyone knows today that the stars are much much further away from the earth than the moon. This is not a small difference, it is an issue of several magnitudes. The average distance from the earth to the moon is 384,400 km, while Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us outside of the solar system, is already about 4.3 light years = 40,682,300,000,000 km (40 trillion kilometers) away, or expressed differently, we need to multiply the distance of the moon by more than 100 million to reach even the nearest of all the stars.
Had the Qur'an formulated "and the moon in the middle of them" then this would have been unambiguously wrong. The formulation "in them" is vague enough to still allow the possibility of the moon to be in the lowest heaven as well. The wording of the Qur'an is certainly less than scientific in this instance and suggesting wrong notions even though it is sufficiently vague to not make it a clear error. It does, however, throw substantial doubt on the claim that God made the Qur'an scientifically as a proof of its divine origin.