Koranic verses which prove a human author #3

A few facts to start with today which I would ask you to bear in mind as you read the following verses.
1.3 million earths and 64 million moons would fit inside the sun.
The moon is 384,000 km away from us and its light reaches us almost instantaneously (1.3 seconds)
The sun is 149 million km away and its light takes eight minutes to reach us.
The moon's orbit takes 28 days.
The sun's orbit takes 240 million years.

What is the most significant of the signs that Allah has given us to ponder as proof of His majesty and divinity, would you say?

If one were to go by that which is remarked upon most frequently in His final message to mankind, it is almost certainly the alternating day and night.

Not only does God mention it approximately twenty times in His Revelation, in six of those the phrasing is almost identical: night passes into day and day passes into night. Thus we can read…

3:27  Thou causest the night  to pass into the day, and Thou causest the day to pass into the night.
22:61  That is because Allah maketh the night to pass into the day and maketh the day to pass into the night, and because Allah is Hearer, Seer
31:29  Hast thou not seen how Allah causeth the night to pass into the day and causeth the day to pass into the night,
35:13  He maketh the night to pass into the day and He maketh the day to pass into the night.
39:5  […] He maketh night to succeed day, and He maketh day to succeed night, 57:6  He causeth the night to pass into the day, and He causeth the day to pass into the night, and He is Knower of all that is in the breasts.

No doubt the faithful see in the above repetition a sure sign of wonderful and super-natural literary greatness. I’m certain Hamza Tzortzis, for example, would refer us to his infamous list and possibly ask us to consider the superlative examples of chiasmus and epizeuxis.

An objective reader, however, might be tempted to see in the repetition a sign of very human forgetfulness.

But let’s leave aside the fact that the author seems obsessed with night and day to the point of repeating the same idea in exactly the same words. (It might seem churlish also to note that night doesn’t pass into day if you happen to live near or above the Arctic Circle.)

Instead let us examine why and how the author seems to be so obsessed with the diurnal cycle.

It seems that God is keen for us to appreciate that the sun and the moon obey Him and it is thus He who dictates their movements.

7:54 tells us, for example, that “He covereth the night with the day, which is in haste to follow it, and hath made the sun and the moon and the stars subservient by His command”.
Whilst we learn from 13:2 and 16:12 that “Allah compelled the sun and moon to be of service” and that we are to take this as “a portent”. So Allah ties the movements of the sun and the moon very closely to the diurnal cycle and expects us to learn lessons from this.

 21:33 makes this even more explicit: And He it is Who created the night and the day, and the sun and the moon. They float, each in an orbit.

Except of course, there is a problem: the movement (or “orbit”) of the sun is irrelevant to the diurnal cycle. An omnipotent creator would know this. A 7^th century desert Arab would, however, have a geocentric view of the universe, because that was the limit of man’s knowledge at the time. He would look at the sun tracking across the sky and draw the obvious conclusion that its movement was due to it orbiting the earth  rather than the earth revolving. Thus a 7^th century desert Arab composing verses to show the might of the Creator as shown in the alternation of day and night  would almost certainly write something like this:

35:13 He maketh the night to pass into the day and He maketh the day to pass into the night. He hath subdued the sun and moon to service. Each runneth unto an appointed term. Or this:
36:40  It is not for the sun to overtake the moon, nor doth the night outstrip the day. They float each in an orbit.

One might be tempted to say that OF COURSE the sun doesn't overtake the moon. Such an idea is meaningless. But it is not ridiculous if one believes the sun and the moon both orbit around the Earth.

And because the author imagined the Sun and the Moon to be travelling around the earth, he might also imagine their colliding on Judgement Day:

75:9  And sun and moon are united, (“Day of Judgement”)

Another incoherent and illogical concept if one remembers the relative positions and sizes of the Earth, the Moon and the sun. An utterly reasonable threat in a 7^th century geocentric universe.

And finally, he might also believe in the literal truth of  the story of Alexander the Great reaching the place where the sun sets

18:86 Till, when he reached the setting place of the sun, he found it setting in a muddy spring, and found a people thereabout: We said: O Dhul-Qarneyn! Either punish or show them kindness.

Thus in the verses dealing with the diurnal cycle an objective reader finds plenty to lead him to the supposition that the Koran is a product of a fallible man of his time and nothing to suggest it is the words of God.