Scientific Errors in the Quran: Difference between revisions

As the above section explains, night and day in the Quran are a property of the entire heaven rather than a specific phenomena only occurring on the surface of the Earth as it rotates and orbits the sun. The Qur'anic description extends to the night covering/veiling the day, chasing it rapidly ({{Quran|7|54}}). And god 'strips' the night of the day ({{Quran|36|37}}). The day and night are also said to successively overlap ({{Quran|39|5}}) or enter into each other ({{Quran|35|13}}, {{Quran|3|27}}, {{Quran|22|61}}, and {{Quran|57|6}}).

{{Quote|{{Quran|21|33}}|And He it is Who created the night and the day, and the sun and the moon. They float, each in an orbit.}}{{Quote|{{Quran|36|40}}|It is not allowable for the sun to reach the moon, nor does the night overtake the day, but each, in an orbit, is swimming.}}

Some critics doubt that the author even understood the sun to be the source of daylight, or that the night is dark due to the lack of light therefrom. In {{Quran|6|96}} and {{Quran|10|5}}, we are just told that the sun and moon are lights and created for timekeeping, with both being mentioned in the same way. {{Quran-range|91|1|4}}, however, swears by the day when it 'reveals' the sun, and by the night when it 'covers' (''yaghshāhā)''<ref>[https://lexicon.quranic-research.net/pdf/Page_2261.pdf Lane's Lexicon Book 1 p2261] & [https://lexicon.quranic-research.net/pdf/Page_2262.pdf p2262]</ref> the sun. In reality it is the Earths rotation that prevents us from seeing the daylight and night is simply a result of it's absence on one side of the Earths surface; it does not cover the sun. Some modern Muslim scholars take these verses as a reference to the Earth's rotation, despite the Earth not being mentioned in them, and critics also point to a similar passage, {{Quran-range|92|1|2}}, which in a general sense states that the day reveals and the night covers (using the same Arabic verbs as the first passage), with no particular object to those verbs. In addition, {{Quran|10|27}} says the faces of evil doers will be dark, as though covered by pieces of the night.