"Allusions to
badly-understood modern science" would be even more accurate. The Koranic verse that's supposed to anticipate Relativity shows about the same second-grade understanding of that theory as "why are they still fish instead of human?" does of the actual theory of evolution.
I remember that- this lady, I think, at a premiere of a Chaplin film-
[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_65969614900c6a07ed.jpg[/qimg]
Though I remember the assertion, by the Irish film-maker who spotted it,
George Clarke (contemporary ABC News article, though the video is no longer there), that it was a cell phone she was using. I found this bit sort of amusing-
Right, it
obviously couldn't have been an AM/FM radio (by which I assume he meant something like a transistor radio), because it was 1928, before those were invented, but could have been a cell-phone, even though 1928 was also before
those were invented. Funny how a standard used to discard one possibility is itself quickly discarded to favor another.
Anyway, all this does go to show the danger in (and sometimes comical results of) interpreting what people were doing or understanding far in the past only by the light of what people do or understand now. Antonia Fraser has a quote (I think in her biography of Mary Queen of Scots) about the historian's need to understand that what people now see as in the past was once unseen in the future. That seems sort of applicable here, in that a perspective forced by faith results in a false view of its own history.
