User:Sultan Rahi/sandbox

Zakir Naik is an Indian Muslim and Islamic scholar, orator, founder and president of the Islamic Research Foundation and, being president of Peace TV and omnipresent on this channel, a televangelist. According to his fundie foundation, he is a doctor, having a M.B.B.S. (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) to be precise. That doesn't mean that he has a ph.D. or any degree related to theology, Islam and comparative religion.

Zakir Abdul Karim Naik, just like Harun Yahya, is a bucaillist. Bucaillism is a Muslim concordism. Helaine Selin said that ''[Bucallism] is a combination of religious and scientific fundamentalism. Bucaillists try to legitimize modern science by equating it with the Qur’an or to prove the divine origins of the Qu’rān by showing that it contains scientifically valid facts. Bucaillism grew out of The Bible, the Qur’ān and Science by Maurice Bucaille published in 1976. Bucaille, a French surgeon, examines the holy scriptures in the light of modern science to discover what they have to say about astronomy, the earth, and the animal and vegetable kingdoms. He finds that the Bible does not meet the stringent criteria of modern knowledge. The Qu’rān, on the other hand, does not contain a single proposition at variance with the most firmly established modern knowledge, nor does it contain any of the ideas current at the time on the subjects it describes. Furthermore, the Qu’rān contains a large number of facts which were not discovered until modern times. The book, translated into almost every Muslim language from the original French, has spouted a whole genre of literature looking at the scientific content of the Qur’ān. Subjects ranging from relativity, quantum mechanics, and the big bang theory to the entire field of embryology and much of modern geology have been devised to discover what is mentioned in the Qur’ān but not known to science — for example, the program to harness the energy of the jinn! Bucaillism takes the reverence of science to a new level: Bucaillists do not just accept all science as Good and True, but attack anyone who shows a critical or skeptical attitude towards science and defend their own faith as "scientific", "objective", and "rational". This is the most popular version of Islamic science. in Encyclopædia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures'', page 456. Berlin; New York: Springer, 1997.

Naik believes that he can prove the existence of God through logical argument; but it requires a serious lack of critical thinking ability to be persuaded by him. One argument he made actually depended on the argument that "at the time when the Qur'an was revealed, people thought the world was flat," thus adapting the old creationist slop about the Biblical scientific foreknowledge in Isaiah 40:22.

However, not only is his statistical reasoning extremely fallacious, the premise is completely false, and his claim should set alarm bells ringing in anyone with an elementary knowledge of history. The ancient Greeks knew the earth was spherical as early as the 4th century B.C.; the Qu'ran was written in the 7th century A.D., by which time this knowledge had spread.

One of Zakir Naik's claim to fame is his public dialogue with Dr. William Campbell (of USA) on the topic “The Qur’an and the Bible in the light of Science” held in Chicago, U.S.A., in April, 2000. According to the Islamic Research Foundation, it was a resounding success. Ali Sina, a critic of Islam and apostate, rebuked most of his claims on faithfreedom.org. Dr. William Campbell, who is supposed to be a prominent personality, doesn't seems to be that famous. "Dr. William Campbell did his medical work, in Cleveland Ohio at Casewestern Reserve University . He worked for twenty years in Morocco, where he learnt Arabic. After 7 years in Tunisia, he wrote his book, answering Dr. Maurice Bucaille." So it was definitely a debate about Bucaillism. William F. Campbell is active on answering-islam.org and, interestingly enough, a physician, just like Bucaille and Zakir Naik.