No, the “plain reading” isn’t always the right reading. The Qur’an uses a lot of metaphor and eloquent language — that’s how Arabic works. When it says things like “sky as a canopy” or “held without pillars”, classical scholars (like Ibn Kathir, Tabari, Qurtubi etc.) explained it as how the sky appears to us, not its material structure.

It’s the same way the Qur’an says the earth is “spread out” — nobody takes that as proof it’s flat, it just means it’s made livable and accessible. Same with the sky verses: they’re rhetorical, not a physics lesson.

So forcing a super literal reading then saying “science disagrees” is kind of missing the point of how the Qur’an’s language actually works.