Spacetime in the Quran

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The Quran doesn't talk anywhere about spacetime. Some Islamic apologists claim that when the Quran says "stars and trees prostrate", it means that stars curve spacetime (the word "tree" is ignored).

Miracle claim

The claim starts as a normal text about prayer, but then it continues:

When Moslems pray they prostrate to Allah. They bend down so that their faces become parallel to the ground.

Now imagine that they don't bend down but rather the ground curves upward in order to become parallel to their faces. But this is what really happens in stars. Spacetime curves to become parallel to the star's face. This is because matter tells spacetime how to curve.


miracles-of-quran.com [1]

So in traditional Islamic prayer Muslim puts his face to the ground so that it is parallel to the ground, but in this apologetic version of prayer, the ground curves up around the Muslim, so it is like the letter U and he stands inside it and looks at the wall, so his face is parallel to the "ground", which is currently more like a wall. And this is what supposedly happens in stars, because they curve spacetime. And the star also look with its face towards the curved spacetime.

  • The apologetic version of prayer makes no sense and is not similar to the traditional prayer
  • The point of the prostration is to show submission. If the Muslim just stands and space curves around him and Mecca gets somewhere above his head, it makes him the center of the world, which is the opposite of submission.
  • Curved ground (a physical object with a curved shape) is not the same thing as curved spacetime. In order to curve spacetime the ground would rather have to gain mass, not get a more curved shape.
  • Stars don't have faces. They don't have nose, eyes nor mouth. There is no direction "parallel to the star's face". A star is like a ball and it looks similar from all angles. There's no face.

Now the Quran verse:

And the stars and the trees prostrate.


The verse obviously doesn't talk about curving the spacetime, since it mentions trees along with the stars. Besides that, there are even more explicit verses which say that the prostration is to Allah, so it is not about curving spacetime:

Do you not see that to Allah prostrates whoever is in the heavens and whoever is on the earth and the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the trees, the moving creatures and many of the people?


See also

External:

References