1. Regarding null hypotheses, I do not think it is appropriate to apply this to the notion of God since, by definition, evidence is a limited quantifiable physical quality. For similar reasons, I think it's not sensible to try to establish probabilities with regard to God.

2. One person here has mentioned that an extraordinary claims requires extraordinary proof. Extraordinary is a matter of perspective. If a man 3000 years ago had said he thought the world was round, this claim would have been regarded as extraordinary. Probably he would not have been able to offer proof of this. By the approach "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof", one would have arrived at the conclusion that the world was flat. We all agree this would be an incorrect conclusion. From a theist's perspective, the proposal that the symmetry of the universe, not simply with regard to evolution of species (which by the way I accept) but with regard to the four fundamental forces of physics, two of which have already been proven to be one (electromagnetic and weak forces), and indeed unification of these four laws, has occurred randomly from a Big Bang... is extraordinary. Evidence should be brought forward that this did not happen under design.

3. The demand for physical evidence is not reasonable. This is not a perfect analogy, but it is for instance, as if a deaf man were to say, "I will not believe in Beethoven's music until I smell it". How can one smell music? Every evidence must be sought by the appropriate faculty. Humans alone out of all species on this planet have a spiritual faculty and it is perfectly reasonable to hypothesise that this spiritual faculty allows some sort of relationship with God.

4. A further note on why the demand for physical evidence is not reasonable: Let us hypothesise, for a moment, that God does indeed exist. Now if God were to send down an angel from heaven to say "God exists", you could deny it as an optical illusion, or as the product of alien technology, whatever physical sign should be shown to you could not possibly prove God's existence because the definition of God is that God is the creator of the laws of physics.

5. I have very carefully stayed clear from mentioning my own specific religious beliefs, because I wished to provide less partial replies to the common "accusations against God" being posited here. I emphasise that I believe it is impossible to disprove or prove God by physical evidence, therefore I have never said God's existence is likely or unlikely (contrasting with some people here), however, I can give intelligent replies to the common accusations against God (as opposed to the accusations against God's existence, which I believe are futile accusations).

6. Having said this, I think there are interesting quotations from the Qur'anic scripture which are difficult to explain although of course bizarre explanations (for instance, the Qur'an was written by advanced aliens) are possible. Regarding the Big Bang, the Qur'an says "Do not the disbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were a closed-up mass, then We opened them out? And We made from water every living thing. Will they not then believe?". It also says that the universe will contract one day in the future and be rolled up into something small. This idea was not a current scientific idea 1400 years ago.

7. Similarly, I think it is difficult to reasonably examine the life story of Muhammad (and other great spiritual teachers), without recourse to the idea of God, in my opinion. Either they were charlatans, or they were insane, or they were indeed connecting with God or something which claimed to be God. Muhammad does not bear the hallmarks of a charlatan or a madman. I take his example not simply because I am a muslim, but because his life story is the best documented of the founders of the world's great religions, little is known about the history of other similar people such as Jesus and Krishna/

I can deal with the fine-tuning et cetera quite easily, the tripe I need to deal with is the charlatan/insane/recipient of revelation argument and the "science in scriptures" argument.

GenesForLife wrote:I can deal with the fine-tuning et cetera quite easily, the tripe I need to deal with is the charlatan/insane/recipient of revelation argument and the "science in scriptures" argument.

As Mr Dawkins pointed out in TGD with respect to CS Lewis, there is a further possibility which the advancers of this argument, for whatever reason, neglect to mention: that Muhammad (or Jesus, or whichever proclaimer of divine revelation they are discussing) was honestly mistaken.

WRT to (6), you might want to look at the various translations of that passage. None of them clearly refer to the Big Bang.

http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp ... 1&verse=30

The idea of "heavens and earth" (i.e. sky and ground) being initially united and then being rent asunder is a common one in the mythology of many cultures. The passage is an example of that, not a scientific pronouncement.

Here are a couple examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangi_and_Papa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangu

Be prepared for handwaving denials if you bring this up, of course.

Here's something else I've found interesting about the Islamic claims that the Quran describes the Big Bang. One of the verses most commonly cited is 51:47:

And it is We who have built the universe with [Our creative] power; and, verily, it is We who are steadily expanding it.

Pretty impressive, huh? That's from Muhammad Asad's translation, which was made in 1980. It's even more impressive when you compare it to the most authoritative earlier English translations. For instance, Marmaduke Pickthall, from 1930:

We have built the heaven with might, and We it is Who make the vast extent (thereof).

and Yusuf Ali, from 1934:

With power and skill did We construct the Firmament: for it is We Who create the vastness of space.

Of course, as you probably know, the Big Bang theory was not formulated until 1931, and did not become well-known to the general public for some time after that. So it is doubtful that Pickthall and Yusuf Ali knew about it at the time they were making their translations.

So you know what this means, right? It means that, by remarkable coincidence, after the Big Bang theory became widely known, Islamic scholars suddenly realized that the Quranic phrase was not properly translated as "make the vast extent (thereof)" or, "create the vastness of space." No, the correct translation is "steadily expanding." Which just happens to match with the Big Bang theory! Isn't that remarkable, that they would realize this translation error only after the Big Bang was discovered, and not before? And, like I said, purely by coincidence! You would almost call that a miracle! Or something....

Thoughts from my son who is currently studying early Islamic history:

7. Similarly, I think it is difficult to reasonably examine the life story of Muhammad (and other great spiritual teachers), without recourse to the idea of God, in my opinion. Either they were charlatans, or they were insane, or they were indeed connecting with God or something which claimed to be God. Muhammad does not bear the hallmarks of a charlatan or a madman. I take his example not simply because I am a muslim, but because his life story is the best documented of the founders of the world's great religions, little is known about the history of other similar people such as Jesus and Krishna/

There are two principal problems with this claim. The first is that the argument 'insane, liar or divinely-inspired' is originally derived from CS Lewis' trilemma with regards to Jesus: that he must be 'Lord, Liar or Lunatic'. If you would be so kind as to explain why precisely this trilemma proves Muhammad's connection to god whilst not applying to Jesus, I would be most grateful.

The second is more fundamental. It used to be argued that Muhammad was 'born in the full light of history': that we had accurate, contemporaneous accounts of his life story so that, unlike Jesus or Moses, we had an understanding of his life that was not from devotional literature. Unfortunately, recent Western scholarship has all but demolished the credibility of this. Several reasons exist for this:

1) the earliest biography we have is that of Ibn Ishaq, writing at least a century after the fact. We only have his account related through later scholars. The Qur'an and the Constitution of Medina are virtually the only contemporaneous documents we have for Muhammad, neither of which sheds much light on his life.

2) For the first 200 years of its existence, the Islamic people persisted in the oral tradition of the Arab tribes. Unlike the Roman or Persian empires they demolished, thus, we have a scant documentary record and the only histories (e.g. al-Tabari, al-Baladhuri) we have were written hundreds of year after the fact.

3) People used to think this was not a problem. Early Islamic histories give very precise lists of names of participants in battles and of how certain 'historical' events occurred, so they were assumed to also be accurate. Moreover, almost every anecdote they relate is given a chain of authorities ('isnad') to back it up. Even if it was originally oral, the argument went, these stories were well backed-up and probably reliable. The same argument was made of the hadith. Following Watt, a consensus developed: if you ignored the miracle stories, there was a 'hard core' of truth to the accounts of Muhammad's life.


4) However, questions had to be asked. The first three centuries after Islam saw three civil wars just during the first caliphate, each of which had an ideological dimension -- different pretenders to the throne claimed they represented the true Islam. The supporters of these pretenders each had an interest in tweaking the story of Muhammad to suit their interests. Likewise, when the 'Abbasid (750-1258) dynasty replaced the Umayyad (661-750), they went to great lengths to portray the Umayyads as evil usurpers, creating a great incentive to alter the history of Muhammad to portray themselves as the true heirs. Given that the earliest known histories date from these periods, one must question whether they represent truth or later interests.

5) Unfortunately, the past fifty years of Western scholarship has pretty well confirmed that the histories have very little basis in fact. Crone's Meccan Trade was the most skeptical account, declaring all the histories to be complete fabrications and arguing that we should reconstruct the history of early Islam from Christian, Syriac etc sources. Most scholars (including Crone, who since changed her mind) would not go that far, but a consensus exists that large parts of the histories are fabricated. There are several problems:
a) Crone's argument was that the chroniclers themselves knew nothing about what had happened -- that the oral accounts had faded away in the intervening centuries. They thus took parts of the Qur'an and expanded them into stories to fit their rulers' views and their own agendas. An element of this may exist, though it is too conspiratorial to explain everything: the histories we have have discrepant accounts of the same events even within each history.
b) there are many, many reasons why people would have an interest in altering the oral accounts they related. Lists of the names of people in early Islamic battles are very precise, for example, because people who could trace their ancestry to early Muslim soldiers accrued social credit and a claim to elite status. Donner argues these lists were only created from about 730.
c) another motive was that of tax status: at some point under the Umayyads, the tradition arose that towns who had surrendered to the Muslims during the early conquests 630 were taxed less than those that were taken by force. Clearly, towns had an interest in an oral tradition claiming they surrendered.
d) as per point 4, rulers had an interest in altering the account of Muhammad's life to suit their purposes. Early Islamic political thought centred on finding ideal caliphs as successors to Muhammad, so rulers had an interest in reading their own characteristics back into the accounts of him.
e) the existence of topoi. Very precise accounts of sieges and battles exist, which were assumed to be real -- until Noth first noticed that the sieges of Cordoba and Damascus, for instance, were described in precisely the same way. The argument is that, hundreds of years after the fact, authors knew little of what actually happened at these sieges, so they took a generic account and inserted the name as appropriate. These are found throughout the accounts: symbolic numbers of soldiers, for instance, appear.
f) systematic biases in the stories presented. Using the isnads, an author had a claim to impartiality: he was merely relating the stories he had heard. By picking and choosing from the oral accounts circulating, however, he could subtly make an argument by providing only anecdotes that hinted at his view. Hence al-Baladhuri presents many towns being conquered rather than surrendering: seen as towns claiming they surrendered were taxed less than those conquered by force, he was arguably aiming to increase the state's tax revenue.

My argument regarding the histories is this: oral accounts may have originally been based in fact, but over the centuries they became shaped as they were told and retold: they changed to fit the time's problems, to fit topoi that listeners would find familiar, or just to be more entertaining. When the compilers came to write down these oral accounts, they then filtered the hundreds of discrepant accounts to first fit their own agenda and argument and second conform to the requirements of their rulers. What we have, then, is an authentic but mutilated group of underlying stories that are then filtered, first under the Umayyads and second, in the opposite direction, under the 'Abbasids, to suit the interests of later rulers. Some fact can be positively identified by finding what is not in the interests of later fabricators. Little of the historical Muhammad is left in these accounts, if he is recoverable at all beyond some basic facts.

In any case, even were we to assume they were of authentic origin, the histories we have provide little evidence of Muhammad's divinity. I am unsure how it would even be possible to prove that historically: we are talking of a period when people believed in miracles and saw them everywhere. If you read Procopius' History of the Wars (c.550), for example, you find an abundance of them, often helping the Romans win battles (or else punishing them for their sin by letting the Persians win) or, for instance, saving a town with a regiment of angels. How can one argue that Muhammad's miracles are both authentic and prove god's divinity, yet that the Christian ones in whose footsteps they softly follow are false?

Indeed, much early Muslim tradition is a transparent attempt to legitimise his divinity by ascribing to him unlikely and, at times, tawdry miracles in the tradition of Christianity. Taking Ibn Ishaq, for instance, the early story of Muhammad is interlaced with improbable accounts of Arab, Jewish and Christian soothsayers all predicting and recognising Muhammad's importance (e.g. p.90). This really is rather improbable. His account of the Battle of the Trench (c627: on p.450-60), however, is the most obvious example of miracle fabrication. Muhammad wins this by brilliant tactics involving, unsurprisingly, the building of a trench in front of the town he was defending. Now, first of all, he explicitly ascribes his tactics to his own brain, and not god's guidance (p454). The biggest miracle of all -- victory -- is not given to God. Because of this, Ibn Ishaq feels he has to insert some tawdry miracles: hence on p451 he lists some perfunctory, standard ones, such as Muhammad moving an immovable rock and amazing all around him. You are free to believe this is evidence of divinity if you wish. Further, it has one of many examples of Ibn Ishaq's portrayal of the Qur'an as being dictated in such a way that just happens to suit Muhammad's interests, rather than as god's eternal word: hence p451 has people slacking off building the trench, because of which Surah 24.62 comes down and people start to behave.


So, in summary: Muhmmad's life may be better-documented than Jesus', but we know very little to any degree of certainty about it, and there is significant evidence of later tampering and systematic biases in the compilations of stories we received. Even if we knew of his life more accurately, the miracle stories and evidences of divinity are often clear interpolations to what is fundamentally the story of a highly-skilled military and diplomatic leader brutally destabilising and subsequently uniting the Arab peninsula. And even if they were not, miracle stories and really not impressive in this period. Nor are people claiming to be the next prophet of God in the apocalyptic atmosphere of the sixth-century Near East, as the story of Musaylima (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musaylimah) underlines.

Thanks Pebble & Son - neat exposition.
About Patricia Crone watering down her ideas - am I right in thinking that it coincided with a lot of pressure on her then department? Or even that it was a hoax?

." However, it has attracted praise as well as criticism, although it has been so poorly received by Muslims, that, in an attempt to at least superficially vindicate the traditional hagiographic historiography of early Islam and Muhammad, that a hoax has circulated since 2006, relating a supposed phone conversation the originator of the hoax had with Ms Crone, wherein she was claimed to have retracted the work.[14]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Muhammad (Which I'd better read right through, now!)

Here's a bit of fun: I didn't know that Muslims went in for venerating relics, but Wikipedia has an account not only of Mo's cloak and his staff, but also of his beard and some teeth - and even a footprint! - being treasured! So much for having a down on idolatry! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relics_of_Muhammad

Here's a reply the apologist made in response to Pebble's post.

"your friend is clearly biased him/herself. Which is okay, as long as you're aware of it. You've given quite a detailed post which I've tried to give the attention it deserves, I hope you'll do me the same courtesy and consider my detailed reply. ...

... Secondly, there is no doubt, despite your friend's carefully couched words, that we have far more historically valid information regarding Muhammad's life than we have of Moses or Jesus or Krishna or Buddha's life. Even if you accept that nothing was collated before 200 years, this is far better than the case of any other religious leader. Morever the Qur'an and the Treaty are accepted as contemporaneous, and they do have important information such as the fact that Muhammad was an orphan, that he escaped from Mecca, they document at least two of the most important battles of that period, they document arguments between Muhammad and his opponents, they document his marriages and even marital problems, they document allegations against his wife, there are umpteen biographical facts which are documented. So what does your friend mean "neither the Qur'an or the Medina constitution shed much light on the life of Muhammad"? You seem like an intelligent chap who likes to make evidence-based statements, I would recommend you avoid quoting this friend in future. Moreover, in the case of other major world religions, we do not find a single written documented contemporaneous statement.

Most of the rest of your friend's points are sheer conjecture. Crone's argument is conjecture. Crone believes that political rulers influenced the oral traditions for political purposes. Fine as a totally unproven hypothesis, as long as we acknowledge it as a hypothesis and nothing more. I personally thought the basis of atheism is that atheists don't like unproven hypotheses, no?

But there's another problem with your friend's argument. The problem is that the vast majority of the reports about Muhammad's life had no political implications for rulers. For instance, an important source for the reports is Muhammad's wife Aisha, who goes into great detail about Muhammad's recommendations to bathe, brush one's teeth, help with domestic chores, free slaves. Furthermore, many of the reports go against the interests of all the poltical leaders who followed. For instance, he recommended that slaves should be freed, but most of the political leaders had many slaves, he recommended that one should treat one's wife with respect, he recommended that a leader shouldn't amass wealth but should instead give all his wealth to the poor, he emphasised that the law must be equally applicable to all citizens. Conceptually, the argument that all these reports were controlled by later political kings just doesn't bear up to scrutiny. Frankly it's what I call an intelligent-but-dumb theory.

I think it would be more balanced to argue that perhaps a few of the reports with political implications were tampered with by political leaders, but the vast majority (particularly those which dealt with purely non-political matters) are authentic. However, your friend clearly has an agenda and, having found a potential tool to use against Islam, has gotten overexcited and is employing it rather indiscriminately. The sign of a dogmatic mind.

Your friend's allegation that the compilers of the reports were manipulating them in order to fit in with the whims of their political rulers, this also betrays an ignorance of the life stories of the compilers. For instance, Bukhari travelled thousands of miles to various educational centres throughout the Arab world to gather these reports, he collated about 200,000 reports and then examined their historical reliability to whittle them down to a few thousand. Moreover, he often had to escape from political rulers because of persecution, and this is a common feature of many of the early muslim scholars. None of this fits in with your friend's portrayal. One would expect Bukhari to just sit in his home town and manufacture a few thousand false reports to support his king, by your friend's argument."

Regarding your friend's last (again irrelevant) point about miracle stories, I'm not trying to give miracle stories as an argument in favour of Muhammad's divinity. In fact, if your friend read the Qur'an a little more closely, he/she would find that the Qur'an itself argues against miracle stories as evidence of Muhammad's truth [read Qur'an 17:91-95]. In fact I gave a list of completely non-miracle achievements by Muhammad and then I wrote "All of this by an unlettered unknown unimportant arab bedouin in his forties who never even wrote a small poem or ruled a small tribe beforehand". You then took exception to what I wrote on the basis that the Qur'an is the only contemporaneous document and doesn't give much information about Muhammad. But quite frankly, you're wrong. The Qur'an says he was unlettered, I can give you the reference. It also says he was considered unknown and unimportant and wasn't a known political leader. It also decries poets. So in fact we know all of this from a contemporaneous document which was widely circulated and never challenged. For instance, there is no record in history of anybody, not even an opponent, saying, "Actually Muhammad, you weren't unlettered, you had a PhD in the University of Mecca and studied a bit of creative writing and astronomy and Hindu scripture there, well done for putting it all in the Qur'an". Moreover, we have a lot of information from the isnad chain of narration which has been widely accepted by even anti-islamic scholars such as Watt and only recently has been argued against by arguments which (from examining your friend's summary) are weak to say the least. In any case, what you have as historical fact is: 622 CE nobody knows the name of Muhammad except his own tribe, and even for them he's an inconsequential person, 632 CE an entire society is revolutionised from a society which is barbaric to something which is far advanced of anything in contemporary Roman or Persian civilisation (large-scale emancipation of slaves, no alcohol, fasting, praying five times daily, women's right of inheritance, etc etc), within another twenty years this revolutionary system is exported to a significant proportion of the known world, 1400 years later this legal code continues to exert an important influence and 1 billion people follow this system. "

To be honest, as interesting as Pebbles' information is, I think it's a bit of a red herring to focus on that aspect of the argument, and forces you to argue from a position of weakness. I won't pretend to be well-read on the subject, but it seems to me the consensus of scholarly opinion, and not just among Muslim "scholars", is that Muhammed actually existed, and the broad details of his biography are consistent with that accepted by Islamic faith. So you're going to have a hard time arguing against that. And, really, it's quite irrelevant to the issue at hand. We have clear historical documentation of the existence of other leaders of the past who claimed divinity or were proclaimed as gods by their followers. The emperors of Rome or the pharoahs of Egypt, just as two examples. That these people existed and the claims of divinity are historical facts, but that does not demonstrate that they were in fact divine.

Your friend's arguments are just too similar to those put forward by Christian apologists: "If Jesus wasn't really the Son of God, then why would so many of his followers allow themselves to be persecuted or martyred rather than simply admit it was a lie?"

So to prove that Mo existed and that he and his followers sincerely believed he was the messenger of Allah does not in any way demonstrate that he actually was such a messenger, or that Allah exists at all.

Did your friend not have any reply to the arguments against his claim of scientific "miracles" in the Quran? That would be a much more effective point of argument, IMHO.

Shrunk wrote:To be honest, as interesting as Pebbles' information is, I think it's a bit of a red herring to focus on that aspect of the argument, and forces you to argue from a position of weakness. I won't pretend to be well-read on the subject, but it seems to me the consensus of scholarly opinion, and not just among Muslim "scholars", is that Muhammed actually existed, and the broad details of his biography are consistent with that accepted by Islamic faith. So you're going to have a hard time arguing against that. And, really, it's quite irrelevant to the issue at hand. We have clear historical documentation of the existence of other leaders of the past who claimed divinity or were proclaimed as gods by their followers. The emperors of Rome or the pharoahs of Egypt, just as two examples. That these people existed and the claims of divinity are historical facts, but that does not demonstrate that they were in fact divine.

Your friend's arguments are just too similar to those put forward by Christian apologists: "If Jesus wasn't really the Son of God, then why would so many of his followers allow themselves to be persecuted or martyred rather than simply admit it was a lie?"

So to prove that Mo existed and that he and his followers sincerely believed he was the messenger of Allah does not in any way demonstrate that he actually was such a messenger, or that Allah exists at all.

Did your friend not have any reply to the arguments against his claim of scientific "miracles" in the Quran? That would be a much more effective point of argument, IMHO.

He conceded that his interpretations were post-hoc rationalisations and that since his deity was non-empirical, it would be futile to look for empirical evidence after I demonstrated that a non-empirical entity with empirical evidence for it would be absurd. This was after it was pointed out to him that Hinduism, for instance, made statements about the universe that sounded exactly like the first law of thermodynamics, and mentioned a cyclical universe which would seem miraculous if his standards of credulity were held. His argument for why he is muslim and not hindu or buddhist despite those religions containing something as equally "miraculous" is to argue that he is better documented than any other "great" religious leader, which led to the above. I am trying to argue that the contemporary documentation in question is, as Pebble Jr suggested, a bit iffy in terms of being an authentic biography that reveals much. The point isn't to dispute the existence of a historical Mo or anything. He is also trying to make the bizarre claim that theists have had more impact and wants me to bring up a secular leader with similar impact, despite the fallacious appeal to consequences or appeal to utility involved there.

1. Regarding null hypotheses, I do not think it is appropriate to apply this to the notion of God since, by definition, evidence is a limited quantifiable physical quality. For similar reasons, I think it's not sensible to try to establish probabilities with regard to God.

You can replace 'God' with 'Invisible dragon in my garage' and say the same thing. It is basically saying "My hypothesis is untestable in principle, so there's obviously no use trying to test it; this would be inappropriate and foolish".

2. One person here has mentioned that an extraordinary claims requires extraordinary proof. Extraordinary is a matter of perspective. If a man 3000 years ago had said he thought the world was round, this claim would have been regarded as extraordinary. Probably he would not have been able to offer proof of this. By the approach "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof", one would have arrived at the conclusion that the world was flat.

Without evidence and reason that could be verified by others behind his claim that the earth is round, why would he make the claim in the first place? What would lead him to his conclusion? A dream he had at night? If he claimed it without strong enough grounds, his claim should be rightfully dismissed. Why should anyone believe him? 'Cause he's a nice, honest guy?

3. The demand for physical evidence is not reasonable. This is not a perfect analogy, but it is for instance, as if a deaf man were to say, "I will not believe in Beethoven's music until I smell it". How can one smell music? Every evidence must be sought by the appropriate faculty. Humans alone out of all species on this planet have a spiritual faculty and it is perfectly reasonable to hypothesise that this spiritual faculty allows some sort of relationship with God.

First, see prior replies. Second, the claim that we have a spiritual faculty that connects to God is simply asserting/affirming the thing you set out to show.

4. A further note on why the demand for physical evidence is not reasonable: Let us hypothesise, for a moment, that God does indeed exist. Now if God were to send down an angel from heaven to say "God exists", you could deny it as an optical illusion, or as the product of alien technology, whatever physical sign should be shown to you could not possibly prove God's existence because the definition of God is that God is the creator of the laws of physics.

True, I don't personally think any evidence in and of itself would suffice, the way the universe we find ourselves in works. But theists claim that God has revealed himself to them in some way or other, and if this revelation had been common among all humans, over time, and from the moment in our lives that we were able to grasp such things, then at least we would have had something common and universal to start from. Denying 'God' then, whatever it was, would have been as nonsensical as denying the rest of reality. That is not the situation we find ourselves in.

6. Having said this, I think there are interesting quotations from the Qur'anic scripture which are difficult to explain although of course bizarre explanations (for instance, the Qur'an was written by advanced aliens) are possible. Regarding the Big Bang, the Qur'an says "Do not the disbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were a closed-up mass, then We opened them out? And We made from water every living thing. Will they not then believe?". It also says that the universe will contract one day in the future and be rolled up into something small. This idea was not a current scientific idea 1400 years ago.

These kinds of '20/20 hindsight' interpretations of scripture tend to bend the scripture to fit the findings of the time of the interpretations; the holy book always comes out on top. It is strange, if these things were always there, why we have not derived scientific knowledge about the universe from these books before we found out through science. Always in hindsight. One good example of how the book always bends to fit reality, sometimes in short notice, is seen here:

7. Similarly, I think it is difficult to reasonably examine the life story of Muhammad (and other great spiritual teachers), without recourse to the idea of God, in my opinion. Either they were charlatans, or they were insane, or they were indeed connecting with God or something which claimed to be God. Muhammad does not bear the hallmarks of a charlatan or a madman. I take his example not simply because I am a muslim, but because his life story is the best documented of the founders of the world's great religions, little is known about the history of other similar people such as Jesus and Krishna/

Quite a few million people base their lives on the 'fact' that Joseph Smith was not a charlatan or a madman, but was truly visited by the angel Moroni, and received gold tablets that he then translated into a book. You'll be hard pressed - to say the least - to get any Mormon to say he was a charlatan, lier or madman. Is this evidence of the Mormon God?

To look at just one small point,

Apologist wrote:Your friend's allegation that the compilers of the reports were manipulating them in order to fit in with the whims of their political rulers, this also betrays an ignorance of the life stories of the compilers. For instance, Bukhari travelled thousands of miles to various educational centres throughout the Arab world to gather these reports, he collated about 200,000 reports and then examined their historical reliability to whittle them down to a few thousand. Moreover, he often had to escape from political rulers because of persecution, and this is a common feature of many of the early muslim scholars. None of this fits in with your friend's portrayal. One would expect Bukhari to just sit in his home town and manufacture a few thousand false reports to support his king, by your friend's argument."

The admission that the vast majority of hadiths were found by Bukhari to be false does not lead to an expectation that he himself was falsifying the remainder. What it does is show that little reliance, if any, can be placed on hadiths generally and opens the possibility that Bukhari missed flaws in the small percentage that he accepted. As for the isnads, scholars have shown that as the chain of tellers becomes longer, the accounts become more detailed - for which read embroidered - and so are unreliable even if not deliberately falsified.
For the rest, I'd like to read - and read around - it again. Some links to the contemporaneous corroborating evidence claimed to exist would be a help.
I think, regarding Shrunk's comment, that demonstrating that Mohammed as portrayed never existed would be a very important step in debunking Islam because the religion has been squeezed through a very tight definition. It claims that every word of the Koran was written down by Allah in heaven, passed down to Mohammed by an angel and promulgated, forever unchanged, by him. If it were be shown that he did not exist and that the text was made up later than his supposed date, it would - or should, at any rate - cause red faces all round.

Oeditor wrote:To look at just one small point,

Apologist wrote:Your friend's allegation that the compilers of the reports were manipulating them in order to fit in with the whims of their political rulers, this also betrays an ignorance of the life stories of the compilers. For instance, Bukhari travelled thousands of miles to various educational centres throughout the Arab world to gather these reports, he collated about 200,000 reports and then examined their historical reliability to whittle them down to a few thousand. Moreover, he often had to escape from political rulers because of persecution, and this is a common feature of many of the early muslim scholars. None of this fits in with your friend's portrayal. One would expect Bukhari to just sit in his home town and manufacture a few thousand false reports to support his king, by your friend's argument."

The admission that the vast majority of hadiths were found by Bukhari to be false does not lead to an expectation that he himself was falsifying the remainder. What it does is show that little reliance, if any, can be placed on hadiths generally and opens the possibility that Bukhari missed flaws in the small percentage that he accepted. As for the isnads, scholars have shown that as the chain of tellers becomes longer, the accounts become more detailed - for which read embroidered - and so are unreliable even if not deliberately falsified.

Do you have an academic source I could chuck at him for this, Oeditor?

GenesForLife wrote:Do you have an academic source I could chuck at him for this, Oeditor?

Maybe I shouldn't have said "scholars" without recalling and checking my sources. The name Goldhizer comes to mind. The arguments I have seen go something like: there was a battle; this side won the battle decisively; such and such numbers were killed or captured; such a person and his brother were at the battle... with the amount of detail increasing as the story is retold. Whereas if it depended purely on unaugmented human memory the details should be lost over time. It's not long since I last came across it, but I can't come up with a source at the moment, sorry. I might have to sleep on it but I'll do my best to flesh it out.

GenesForLife wrote:Here's a reply the apologist made in response to Pebble's post.

"your friend is clearly biased him/herself. Which is okay, as long as you're aware of it. You've given quite a detailed post which I've tried to give the attention it deserves, I hope you'll do me the same courtesy and consider my detailed reply. ...


Your friend's allegation that the compilers of the reports were manipulating them in order to fit in with the whims of their political rulers, this also betrays an ignorance of the life stories of the compilers. For instance, Bukhari travelled thousands of miles to various educational centres throughout the Arab world to gather these reports, he collated about 200,000 reports and then examined their historical reliability to whittle them down to a few thousand. Moreover, he often had to escape from political rulers because of persecution, and this is a common feature of many of the early muslim scholars. None of this fits in with your friend's portrayal. One would expect Bukhari to just sit in his home town and manufacture a few thousand false reports to support his king, by your friend's argument"

While waiting for my son to give a detailed reply, this assertion struck me.

Working 7 days a week without break for 20 years, Bikhari would have had to review for accuracy more than 27 life stories per day. So this claim is obviously false or hugely exaggerated. If the number were anywhere near as large as claimed, only very superficial attention to detail could be paid. Secondly the difference between cherry picking and careful analytical collation must be considered. Sifting masses of data for stories that support your initial bias is a very probable explanation for these claims.

Hm, so tales of Bukhari are as dubious as Bukhari found the hadiths? It gets better, or worse, because it's been put at 4000 accepted from 600,000 investigated! http://books.google.co.uk/books?ei=6Uv_ ... rch_anchor That's a Google snippet, which is difficult to see. Search inside the book on some six to find the number investigated and on 4000 to get the number accepted. It points out that only 1 n 150 was ok. It's in The life of Muḥammad , 1976, Part 2, by Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal, Ismaʼil R. Al-Faruqi

LOL good pounding this guy got.

Son's response:



I thank you for your detailed if somewhat condescending response. I must plead guilty to one of your accusations at the outset: I have not, in fact, read the Qur’an through yet. It, al-Baladhuri and a volume of al-Tabari are on my to-do list for the next week. Having only studied this subject for a month, I do have to rely on secondary sources as my guide for what the overall feel of the primary sources are, so am quite willing to admit my ignorance on these matters and revise my opinion in the future. I would be very happy to find that the sources are in fact broadly reliable, because chaotic uncertainty and conjecture is not something historians are comfortable with. Unlike you, I have no investment in the answer. Like you, I have read only a small portion of the primary sources. Unlike you, I am aware of this fact.
Your ignorance of the primary sources can be shown really rather easily, before we get on to looking at the argument itself. I quote:
‘I’m not trying to give miracle stories as an argument in favour of Muhammad’s divinity. In fact, if your friend read the Qur’an a little more closely, he’she would find that the Qur’an itself argues against miracle stories as evidence of Muhammad’s truth [Q 17:91-5].’
If you had read my message a little more closely, however, you would note that I quoted several miracle stories from Ibn Ishaq, the closest we have to a ‘contemporary’ biography of Muhammad (in case you missed it, it was written at least a century after his death). Indeed, Ibn Ishaq is literally littered with them: I have only read from page 69, but the first miracle is on page 71, where Muhammad’s foster mother and her camel magically gains an abundance of milk as a reward for taking Muhammad, whose birth was prophesied, and her donkey miraculously becomes so fast her companions exclaim ‘[b]y God, something extraordinary has happened.’ On the next page, Muhammad falls ill, has his heart extracted, split open, a ‘black drop’ extracted, then the heart replaced. He is then found to weigh more than one thousand people. Shortly after, there is an entire section dedicated to prophesies about Muhammad.
Now, given that you stake your faith on the idea that Muhammad is the most well-documented of the religious leaders, I find it puzzling that you would not have bothered to actually read that documentation. If you had done so, you would be well aware that there is a contradiction between your view of Q 17:91-5, which indicates that any miracle stories about Muhammad must be false, and your claim that ‘the vast majority [of reports] (particularly those which dealt with purely non- political matters) are authentic.’ I look forward to hearing your rationalisation for these miracle stories’ existence in sources you see as unimpeachable with the exception of rare, light political bias.
-—-
These leads on to the second problem with your response on the reliability of these sources. You focus repeatedly on the political bias problem, arguing that it was not a problem for the compilers, meaning that their reliability remains intact. Now, you make a plausible point on Bukhari which, if substantiated by some references, would go some way to support your case. I am doubtful that in the highly-illiterate society in which he lived it was possible to write, have your works preserved and (importantly) disseminated, and be paid a living for it, without a patron in the elite, but let us say your claim is accurate.
That fails to address three crucial issues. Firstly, we are discussing the biographers of Muhammad, not the hadith-collectors. To once again return to Ibn Ishaq, he was commissioned to write his biography by the second ‘Abbasid Caliph, Al-Mansur. Clearly, reports overly-critical of the insecure new regime are unlikely to have been welcomed.
Secondly, ‘rulers’ does not refer simply to the Caliph, but to the political elite. I apologise for not being clearer on that point. The idea that certain accounts contradicted the rulers’ aims (it would be nice to have some citations at some point, seen as you are so keen on evidence) is arguably missing the point: rulers often promulgate rhetoric to create a certain image (as being on the side of the poor, etc.) irrelevant of their actual interests; and at times the elite would appropriate rhetoric to use against the ruler. So arguing for equality before the law, for instance (which is a concept embedded in the Constitution of Medina, so not really relevant to our discussion of invented stories — I’m not sure why you brought it up), could be used by elites against their rulers. I must admit that on this specific point, I am indeed being a conjectural as you are; it is well-established, though, that the univeralist version of Islam was articulated in Iraq by an elite opposed to the narrow Arab Caliphs’ attempt to keep Islam to the Arabs and rule over Persia etc.
Thirdly, and most importantly, you failed to understand the substance of my argument on the histories. The most important distortition occurred in the two centuries from the creation of any original stories to their being written down. It is this organic distortion, through topoi, through the need to be entertaining, and through the need to tell stories relevant to the day’s problems, that constituted the chaotic scrambling of perhaps truthful accounts. When the compilers came to write these down, then the systematic biases came in to play. Indeed, you unwittingly hint at this yourself: you note that Bukhari collated 200,000 reports and dismissed 197,000 of them. I do not know what the ratios are for the biographies, but they certainly heard more than they reported. Now, you can believe that Bukhari, two hundred years after the fact, was able to accurately distinguish a truthful account from an untruthful one; or that when he came across two accounts of the same event, he would not just pick the one that served his biases, or the political narrative of the time, and so on. But I would argue that simply referring to this ‘fact’ (again, citation please) confirms my argument: we are dealing with chroniclers writing hundreds of years on having to choose arbitrarily, or to suit an agenda, from thousands of stories that evolved over the years to fit certain needs.
As an aside, I would appreciate it if you read what I said more closely so I do not have to repeat myself: I did not rely on Crone, and in fact explicitly distanced my view from hers in 5. and 5.a). That said, you are mistaken in saying her points are pure conjecture. Her points are certainly based on evidence: for example, on p.223 of Meccan Trade (which I don’t have to hand, so can’t copy out for you), she quotes two passages, one from Ibn Ishaq (died 767) and one from al-Waqidi (d 823). Both are very similar, showing that al-W was relying on IIshaq’s authority; yet the latter contains significantly more detail about the event. Her point is this: considering how much information al- Waqidi added, seemingly without any basis in fact, how much ‘detail’ must have accumulated between 632 and Ibn Ishaq’s account? The way to criticise Crone is to say that, like other scholars of this period, she fails to show that her criticisms are representative. Someone needs to systematically go through our sources for this period and mark off what we know is accumulated, what we know is a topos, etc etc. That is the principal weakness of my, and others’, tentative conclusion that we know less than we think about Muhammad’s life.
—-
Finally, let us look at this comparison of Muhammad and Jesus. I’ll be brief as I need to go, but basically: the Qur’an does incidentally include details on Muhammad’s life, including, as you note,
His illiteracy is debated — the word can apparently also mean ‘unacquainted with scripture’, as it does in other parts of the Qur’an. More importantly, if you are going to base your argument on the idea that he was ignorant so could not have founded a religion so influential and with so many references to the Bible, you are simply wrong: many Arabs were Christian or Jewish, a clear influence in the Qur’an; many Arabs saw themselves as descendents of Abraham; and again, if you had read Ibn Ishaq, you’d know it claims on p80 that Muhammad talked to a learned monk named Bahira when he was young (for a start). You can’t have it both ways on these biographies.). Some of them are debatable as being ‘details’, mind: you say it tells us of two famous battles. Presumably, this includes Q 3:152, which refers to the Muslim defeat at the Battle of Badr. However, if we did not have Ibn Ishaq to give an account of the Battle, we would know nothing about it; the verse only says ‘Remember when you fled, not caring for anyone, while the Messenger called you from the rear. So He rewarded you with misery piled upon misery...’
In any case, the details we learn about Muhammad’s life are only incidental. Contrast this with the Bible, which explicitly gives four full (and contradictory, as it happens) versions of Jesus’s entire life. You are wrong to say ‘nothing was collated before 200 years, this is far better than the case of any other religious leader’, because most of the gospels are presently dated to less than a hundred years of Jesus’ death. Likewise, you are wrong to say ‘in the case of other world major religions, we do not find a single written documented contemporaneous statements.‘ — how about the Mormons, whose documents we know are contemporary? In a hundred years the Muslims only had the Arabs as converts; the Mormons have 14 million followers! I would like to deal with the idea that Islam’s success is inexplicable by historical factors and so must be divine (the Texas Sharpshooter and the No True Scotsman fallacy are the most glaring problems with it, though it is an interesting point) but have not got the time presently.

Ibn Ishaq – available to download http://ia600503.us.archive.org/3/items/IbnIshaq-SiratRasulAllah-translatorA.Guillaume/

Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam: P Crone ISBN-10: 1593331029
ISBN-13: 978-1593331023

GenesForLife wrote:He conceded that his interpretations were post-hoc rationalisations and that since his deity was non-empirical, it would be futile to look for empirical evidence after I demonstrated that a non-empirical entity with empirical evidence for it would be absurd.

Really? I'm impressed, either by your persuasiveness or his integrity. I"ve never met a Muslim who would concede on this point.

He is also trying to make the bizarre claim that theists have had more impact and wants me to bring up a secular leader with similar impact, despite the fallacious appeal to consequences or appeal to utility involved there.

I'm not really sure how he is defining "secular". But it seems to me that even if you can demonstrate a leader w/ similar impact who did not follow an Abrahamic faith, it would refute his claim.

I'm not sure why he thinks Muhammed's achievement is so uniquely impressive. There have been many empires to rise and fall thru history. Was every one of those brought about by the intervention of Allah? Even today, though Islam undoubtedly remains an important cultural force, pretty well every country where it predominates is a cultural backwater w/ negligible positive influence on the world. If you want to look at someone with enduring influence, how about Qin Shi Huang? The nation he forged has existed without interruption as a major forcefor over 2000 years, and at the moment seems only to be on the ascent.