Why Islamic cosmology is Important for us?
Muslims should realize that modern cosmology is as much a religion to atheists as atheists themselves would see the beliefs of others as ‘religion.’ They are just not willing to admit this is the case which makes them even greater blind-following zealots than those whom they accuse with the same label for following a revealed Book. There is a difference between scientism as a religion (which is what we have today) and the scientific method as a tool to investigate material processes, laws and principles without delving into first causes or reasons which are outside the realm of the scientific method as defined by them. Any atheist who says science has disproved creation and a creator is a worshipper of scientism as a religion and not a follower of the scientific method, because the scientific method is not supposed to deal with affirmation or negation of first causes and reasons, it is only interested in extracting laws from what is routinely observed. The laws so derived are then harnessed for other purposes, but all along, first and final causes, meaning causes and end-goals, related to what is observed are not the domain of science. This is how the scientific method is explained by philosophers of science. This process has been hijacked and abused to create a religion called Scientism whose practitioners pass off their philosophical, cosmological ideas derived from Hermeticist astrology as hard facts. Therefore, it is not befitting for Muslims who follow the religion of Islām to interpret the Qurʾān through the conjectures of Hermetic scientism.
The roots of modern scientism can be traced to Hermeticism, an occult system in which the three fields of astrology (the belief that celestial bodies affect world events), alchemy (belief that matter can be transformed with special powers) and theurgy (ritualistic acts of magic) came together and where humans are said to have divine potential which can be unlocked through the discoveries of science. Many of those who made discoveries in astronomy were motivated by their indulgence in the art of astrology as they believed that advanced knowledge of the former would perfect the practice of the latter. Their theorizations, conjectures and mathematical calculations were influenced by their astrological beliefs. The general idea driving scientism is the belief in the ability to influence; harness or control nature with the ultimate goal of realising the ‘divine potential’ said to be in every human and acquiring eternal life. Hermeticists, or those influenced by Hermeticism to one degree or another include Francis Bacon, Marsilio Ficino, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton. The solar system cosmology of Nicolaus Copernicus was influenced by Hermes Trismegistus, a mystical figure from ancient sun-worshipping Egypt, said to be the author of the Hermetic literature whom Copernicus references directly below his famous heliocentric diagram in his book On the Revolution of Celestial Spheres. Likewise, the idea of the orbital and rotational motion of the Earth was taken by Copernicus from Hermetic astrology. The separation of science from the occult took place after these figures had laid down the major ideas and any connection was then written out of the history of science for fear of embarassment. Refer to Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality by anthropology Professor Stanley Tambiah (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 26-27 and the first 200 pages of The Forbidden Universe: The Occult Origins of Science by Picknett and Prince (Skyhorse Publishing, 2011).
Genuine discoveries put to practical use should be separated from speculative conjectural beliefs founded on subjective interpretations of observed data which form the basis of modern sciences such as Cosmology.
In other words, discussions of origins and final goals of cause-effect systems are avoided and focus is only on a material description of the cause-effect system itself.
The central ideas in the Copernican model come from the Hermetic Egyptian system of magic involving sun-worship in which the sun is a deity, a ‘visible god’ and the planets orbit the sun whilst also rotating around their axes attesting to the majesty of the sun. Copernicus was influenced by these ideas and was motivated by a desire to validate these beliefs as Hermeticism gained ground in European elite circles. The connection between the ideas of these astronomers in the late medieval, early-renaissance period (15th, 16th centuries) and Hermetic astrology is conveniently written out of the history books. Copernicus did not discover anything new, the idea was present more than two-thousand years earlier in Egypt and Chaldea (where astrology and magic was practiced as an art form). When the written sources of the Hermetic occult system were discovered and spread through Europe, their ideas brought about what is now known as ‘the Scientific Revolution.’ Putting the sun in the centre of the universe was motivated by Hermeticists to validate their sacred, religious texts, the Hermetica. It was simply a preferred model of the universe for which mathematics were devised but never disproved the earth having a central, preferred location in the universe. George Ellis is a famous astronomer who authored books with Stephen Hawking, and in a profile in Scientific American by W.W. Gibbs, Ellis was quoted as saying, “People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations... For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations... You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds... What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.” Scientific American 273(4):55, October 1995. There is no evidence which falsifies the earth having a centralised location in the universe and plenty of evidence which supports it.