| |
| | New Page 1 |
 | | Arab astronomers of the day had to account for two observed motions of the stars, the diurnal and the precessional, and they assumed that the Aristotelian circle, as said, was the path of each of those celestial revolutions. |
 | | Biological evolution, that is, the origin of diversity from simpler forms, was utterly inconceivable in the Aristotelian world; as inconceivable as it would have been for an eleventh century astronomer to reject the Aristotelian circle in describing the revolutions of the celestial bodies. |
 | | In A.D. Ptolemy, the great astronomer and mathematician of antiquity, adopted Hipparchus' figure of 36" annually when he described the geocentric system, in his Mathematical Composition, known today as the Almagest, with which al-Ghazali was quite familiar in its Arabic translation; see Book 7, p 227, 230, 233 in Ptolemy (1984). |
| www.asa3.org /ASA/PSCF/1994/PSCF3-94Aulie.html (16334 words) |
|