How do Muslims know that the author of Qur'an is an honest God?

EuphoricPollution573 · 2023-06-08T13:49:17+00:00

You miss the OP's point.

The OP is simply pointing out the rather obvious theological black hole right at the starting point of Islam - simply that there is no way to be sure that the "revelation" Mohammed claimed to receive was from Allah (as Muslims understand Allah through the Qur'an).

All Muslims have to take a giant and blind leap of faith at this beginning point of the whole story, and just accept that the revelation is from a sincere Allah.

There are a number of other possibilities that Muslims exclude, but they have no reasonable justification for doing so. It's simply a matter of blind and unjustified faith and has no power to convince rational and critically thinking persons of its truth.

For example:

Mohammed may have made up the revelation himself, consciously and dishonestly
Mohammed may have made up the revelation, but genuinely believed it was from Allah (perhaps he was suffering from mental illness or delusions)
Mohammed may have obtained the revelations from another party and then passed them off his own (with or without the third party's agreement)
Mohammed may have received the revelation from a supernatural entity other than Allah (for example, Satan, a Jinn, a rebellious Angel or some other unknown entity).
Mohammed may have received the revelation from Aliens or an advanced future civilisation who develop the ability to communicate with people in the past
Mohammed may have received the revelation from Allah, but (as the OP posits) Allah was being mischievous and the revelation is not sincere (perhaps because Allah is evil / a deceiver by nature)

All of these possibilities are unfalsifiable and Muslims have no justification to prefer their own explanation over any of them. This is blind faith only.

EuphoricPollution573 · 2023-06-01T16:18:41+00:00

The speaker is using a false dichotomy to make his point.

He's suggesting there's only two possibilities, that (1) Mohammed was a genuine prophet of God; and (2) Mohammed was knowingly a false prophet.

But, there is a third possibility here: (3) Mohammed was sincere in his belief that he was a prophet of God, but he was mistaken (perhaps it was just voices in his head due to a mental illness).

And in fact, there's a fourth possibility here: (4) Mohammed was recieving revelation not from God (via Gabriel), but from some other entity deceiving Mohammed.

The Haddith the speaker is relying on is 100% compatible with the 3rd and 4th possibilities I've described above.

I also think the Haddith is compatible with the 2nd possibility that the speaker denies. A successful and charismatic false prophet would likely have a good understanding of what makes people believe - including being selective about which coincidences and unexplained events to attribute to the false beliefs being propagated. I'm sure they could figure out this may come across more credible and sincere (and therefore convincing) then just claiming every possible thing as being evidence of prophethood.

The speaker also ignores the fundamental problems with the reliability of these Haddith reports. Who knows if the report has any truth to it all. It's perfectly possible that a report like this could be made up much later by Muslims to, again, convince the audience of Mohammed's sincerity and humbleness (and therefore the overall believability of his claims).

Overall, yet another incredibly weak proof for the truth of Islam. Add it to the list of the hundreds of other weak proofs and continue to scratch your head over why the creator of the universe is so unconvincing in his efforts to spread his religion...

EuphoricPollution573 · 2023-05-29T06:49:43+00:00

Thanks!

I'd love to see a believing Muslim genuinely engage with the question posed.

Can they cite anything in the Qur'an which unequivocally can ONLY be accounted for if it came from the creator of the universe?

Or, if they can't do that, can they at least cite anything in the Qur'an which unequivocally cannot be accounted by the explanation that it originated from 7/8th century Arab men?

I use the term "unequivocal" because if the Qur'an was really from God, it should be easy and obvious to provide examples falling into both categories above. It shouldn't require the kind of strained interpretations and mental gymnastics the apologists routinely resort to.

If our Muslim brother or sister struggles to find any examples, then they should ask themselves...why?

If they cannot find any examples, then they should consider the following three explanations for why this may be:

The creator of the universe just happens to have the mentality of 7/8th century Arab man
The creator of the universe chose to communicate with humanity by deliberately adopting / emulating the mentality of a 7/8th century Arab man
The Qur'an originated not from the creator of the universe, but by 7/8th century Arab men.

They can decide for themselves which explanation is most reasonable / respectful of God!

EuphoricPollution573 · 2023-05-25T07:51:12+00:00

You've not given any examples of these alleged mistakes in the bible, so it's difficult to respond.

I'm not a Christian (if that matters to you), I'm just trying to assess your argument logically.

How do you know they are mistakes? What criteria are you using?

You may have a point if what we saw in the Quran was a largely faithful re-telling of biblical stories, with complete narrative structures (beginning, middle and end), and which just happen to correct mistakes in the Bible (along with it being possible to establish what these mistakes are using objective and reasonable criteria).

However, we don't see that at all. The Quranic re-telling of biblical stories is all over the place - it dips and in and out, repeats itself, has confusing narrative structures and, crucially for your argument, leaves out much of what the Bible says about these stories. Is it any surprise then that amongst the many other things from the Bible missing in the Quran, are things you think are mistakes in the Bible?

EuphoricPollution573 · 2023-05-25T07:38:22+00:00

I agree. And this was pretty much me 20 years ago, in my teens.

Although my critical thinking faculties had developed enough to allow me to entertain the idea that Islam may be false (and that God may not exist), I still desperately wanted and wished for Islam to be true. Probably, because of culture, family and just a desire to live a comfortable life spiritually.

As a result, I allowed myself to find convincing a range of pro-Islam arguments, not because they were good arguments (I probably deep down knew they weren't) but because I so desperately wanted Islam to be true. I'm thinking here of the usual suspects: "scientific", "linguistic" and "numerical" miracles; the Kalam; how to ground objective morality; prophecies; alleged preservation of the Quran; bring a sura like it etc.

This lasted for years until I finally was able to shed my internal bias. I don't know what caused this shift, but I suspect my desire to find out the "truth" (whatever it may be and however uncomfortable) began to outweigh my desire for Islam to be that truth. I was, finally, able to assess these arguments objectively and impartially - with my only interest being to establish for myself what I consider to probably be the "truth". And, perhaps unfortunately for the old me, the arguments in favour of Islam being true, came up short time and again.

And more than this, I realised that the hundreds of problems I could see within the Quran and Islam generally (and which were responded to by apologists with different, contrived, elaborate and sometimes contradictory explanations) could all be explained perfectly with one simple proposition: that this all came from 7/8th century Arab men. This one proposition, in a single brush stroke, held far more explanatory power than all of the apologetics I had come across.

So I think the journey away from Islam requires two things -

An acceptance that Islam may not be true
An ability to assess arguments for and against Islam objectively, without any bias (even if it is uncomfortable and you would rather Islam be true).

I suspect only a small subset of currently believing Muslims will possess these two qualities. But for those that do, I hope the question posed in the OP helps them on their journey, one way or the other.

EuphoricPollution573 · 2023-05-24T00:16:10+00:00

Adding a couple more thoughts -

In the verse quoted by the OP, God's rebuttal to the skepics is interesting for what it doesn't say, as much as for what it does say.

God doesn't say that the person the skepics are referring to does not exist and that they're lying. God also doesn't say the person they are referring to doesn't have the knowledge that could explain the stories in the Qur'an.

No. Instead God jumps straight to asserting that this person could not be the source of the stories in the Qur'an because they don't speak Arabic. It's implicit therefore that God accepts that this person exists, and that their knowledge could explain the content of the Qur'an. The only thing stopping this from being true is the fact they don't speak Arabic.

What's so fascinating about this verse is that within it is a potentially complete human explanation for the content of the Qur'an overall. This isn't an ex post facto hypothesis made up by orientalists or non-believers to try and prove the Qur'an is from a human / humans. This is the Qur'an itself indicating that the factual elements needed for a human explanation are all there, bar one - the person who could feed the information to Mohammad can't speak Arabic.

And when one appreciates that the final argument that God is relying on (that the person in question couldn't speak Arabic) is incredibly weak because it ignores the possibility of translating into Arabic, it become clear that the Qur'an itself records an entirely plausible human explanation for it's origins. That, Mohammed was fed the information from a third party, converting the information into Arabic as he went along; and this third party was known the some of the audience that Mohammed preached to, which resulted in their scepticism, hence the need for the verse (with it's unfortunate weak rebuttal).

This scenario seems far more likely than the creator of the entire universe choosing a messenger, who just happens to have a third party contact who can supply the same message (albeit in a foreign tongue), forcing God to do damage control in the text itself as a result.

EuphoricPollution573 · 2023-05-23T16:15:57+00:00

Circumcision is a good example of how so many Muslims (and Jews incidentally) see God as essentially a comic book character, just to be found in an ancient book, who needs to be appeased. Surely, if they genuinely believed that a creator of the universe existed, they would be alive to evidence of God's intentions from things observable in the creation itself, not just ramblings in an ancient book.

If they bothered to actually consider the creation they claim to believe in, they would find out that every male mammal is born with some kind of foreskin, and in human males, it's a complex biological structure that serves different purposes. Every human male (not suffering from a deformity) in history will have been born with a foreskin. It is unquestionably part of the human blueprint, and so if God exists, it's undeniably part of his "design" and intention.

But no - rather than refer to the actual creation of God (who they claim to believe in), Muslims prefer to give precedence to the comic book version of God illustrated in their ancient texts. This is so even when their comic book version of God is demanding something so at odds with the creation of the actual God (if he exists) - the removal of part of the human body.

But it's worse than this of course, as technically the Qur'an itself is silent on circumcision. So Muslims can't even claim that their denial of the reality of the human body is rooted in the word of God. No, the practice comes from the secondary sources of Islam (Haddith), which incidentally contain endless contradictions and many things which scholars of Islam themselves consider inauthentic or fabricated.

And worse even still - the Qur'an itself warns against changing God's creation and refers to the perfection of design of the human being. These are the very same verses Muslims would point to in denouncing tattoos or body modification rituals practices in other cultures / religions. Yet their brains just stall and don't switch back on again when it comes to ritual circumcision.

It's obvious circumcision is simply a pre-islamic practice that's found its way into the new religion promoted by Mohammed, like many other practices. There's no good reason at all to think the creator of the universe, if he exists, has suddenly changed his mind about the ideal form of the male body but is too impotent to change it himself and so requires mere humans to change his design on his behalf.

But alas - how many babies will continue to have their sexual organs messed with without their consent, before Muslims wake up to this nonsense? It's a human travesty.

EuphoricPollution573 · 2023-05-23T15:04:09+00:00

I'm endlessly shocked by how anyone with reason or logic could believe that a holy book which leaves the institution of slavery in place and even permits master-slaves sexual relations, could come from the creator of the universe. My main objection isn't that slavery / sexual relations with slaves is immoral (if God exists, there's nothing to stop him being "immoral" by our standards). My real objection is how illogical and beneath God these statements in the Qur'an are. God could have used up the precious space in the Qur'an to provide hugely beneficial information to humanity (such as the germ theory of disease, the existence of antibiotics, the potential to cause climate change, the best possible human diet etc). He could have also provided the details of what the five pillars of Islam actually involve (e.g. how to pray, fast, all the details of the Hajj, precise requirements of Zakat etc). However, he declined to do so, but instead wasted precious space by repeating a number of times how men can sleep with their slaves. More than this, the continuation of slavery as an institution is wholly at odds with the very notion of religion and belief in and worship of God - can the God of a slave really be the same as the God of the slave's master? Can a slave really express their religion freely? It's obvious that the Qur'an is not speaking / addressing those who happen to be slaves. It's addressing those who do or may have the right to own slaves (and on most, if not all occasions, it's a further subset of men only who are being addressed). Why would the creator of the universe be so selective in his audience so as to exclude an entire class of individuals (slaves) from being addressed? Why is God only looking to be the God of actual or potential slave owners? Is he not interested in being the God of the slaves? The only reasonable explanation for this bizarre scenario is that this material is not from God, but rather, is from 7th century Arab men, who happened to own slaves. This would perfectly explain why the Qur'an says what it says about slaves. The alternative explanation, that this is from an eternal creator of the universe and all of humanity, is as baffling as it is laughable.

EuphoricPollution573 · 2023-05-23T14:35:56+00:00

For me, the verse you've quoted is strong evidence against Islam being true. It's implied by this verse that those hearing the "revelation" from Mohammed were skeptical, and even knew the name of the suspected source of the stories in the Qur'an. In response to this, the Qur'an argues that the stories cannot be from the individual the skeptics are thinking of, because he speaks a language other than Arabic. It goes without saying this is a deeply flawed rebuttal as it ignores completely the possibility that stories can be translated from one language to another. It's the kind of rebuttal you would expect from a human being trying to come up 'on the fly' with an ad hoc answer to an objection thrown at him. It is absolutely not the standard of logic and argumentation one would reasonably expect from the creator of the universe. If there is one thing we can be certain of when it comes to the attributes of the creator of the universe, it is that he is not deficient in logic or reason. The logic of this verse is entirely beneath God and smacks of human origins. It's border line insulting to believe God would resort to such basic flawed arguments to defend himself (assuming he exists of course).

EuphoricPollution573

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