Wow, you guys need to lighten up on the prejudices a bit. Take off the "all organized religion is antiscientific dogmatic crap" head and stick the "ok, lets be objective" head on for a moment :lol:
Just because you don't like a religion is no reason to deride everything it says regardless of context, or refute that people of that faith ever developed anything that wasn't already known. Thats simply insulting the work of countless people who tried to unravel the world around them just because you think that they arent qualified to have an objective mind because they were religious.
If you are going to bash something, at least study it closely first, else you can end up looking an arse - just like I did :lol:
However, its common for people to avoid doing just that for fear they may actually find some things they agree with.
Better to stay willfully ignorant.
@Kenny
Whilst I agree totally that its generally possible to massage specific meaning from just about anything if you try hard enough, I can honestly say that I have never had to stretch my imagination when studying quranical references.
One of the first ones I found all by myself was a reference to what required no great leaps of intuition. I can't remember the exact verse but I could find it again if I were pressed. Now, the translation perhaps has modified the meaning, but I've asked native arabic speakers *exactly* what does it mean to them and the agreement was spot on.
The translated verse read (from memory) "Praise be to Allah who has set mountains deep into the earth as pegs, lest it should quake."
We may differ on opinion here, but to me the above isn't particularly vague at all.
Now, as platetectonic theory describes, mountains (which a bit like icebergs tend to go much deeper into the mantle than they poke above the ground), are formed as plates buckle and fold as one is gradually pushed beneath the other. There are plenty of eathquake prone places where plates are pushing directly against each other, but neither has began to fold into a mountain range.
There are innumerable other examples, some slightly less specific, some slightly more.
Far from being a anti scientific religion, it actually instructs its followers to go an seek knowledge and learn how the universe and everything in it works.
Just because at this period in history people of the faith at large don't seem unduly concerned to do this does not mean the instruction isn't there.
@Bloodline
You are incorrect on the general assumption that all faiths of the era depended solely on pre-existing knoweldge, but I will let you off because its a massively common misconception that even I had.
Regarding algebra, you are correct only to a point.
The modern form of abstract algebra (al-jabr), using operators and symbols to define indeterminable quantities, was developed by a the arab mathematician (living in Baghdad, then an established centre of learning) Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi. He wrote a famous book in about 825 AD called "Hidab al-jabr wal-muqubala" in which he documents the symbolic (operator based) representation of equations, their transposition and use in problem solving etc.
It's historically documented and verified all over the place.
Now, that is not to say, as you correctly point out that analytical forms of arithmetic did not already exist and nobody denies the contribution of greek and Hindu mathematicians. The latter introduced 2 fundamental concepts, specifically the number zero and the negative number scale.
However, the analytical arithmetic used by the classical greek mathematicans was not directly comparable.
To paraphrase from a book on the evolution of albebra "Greek mathematical thought and the origin of algebra"
The Greek concept of mathematical objects was based upon the notion of arithmos, but this cannot be thought of as a concept of "general magnitude" i.e. "x", the unknown quantity. It never means anything other than "a definite number of definite objects," or an "assemblage of things counted".
Likewise, geometric figures and curves, commensurable and incommensurable magnitudes, ratios, have their own special ontology which directs mathematical inquiry and its methods.
