Abdullah Sameer

أَلَا يَعْلَمُ مَنْ خَلَقَ وَهُوَ اللَّطِيفُ الْخَبِيرُ Does He who created not know, while He is the Subtle, the Acquainted? (67:14)

The Watchmaker Argument For God

One of the arguments for the existence of God is nature itself.  The fact that we have eyes, lungs, brains, organs and a functioning body.  We look in awe and wonder at our bodies and the universe and say “There must be a God”

The Teleological argument (also known as the Watchmaker analogy or sometimes as Intelligent Design) claims that if you would see a watch, you would know there is a designer.  In the same way when you look at nature and most specifically, the complexity of us human beings, you can assume there is a designer because it’s like the watch.

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Responding to the Odd/Even Math Miracle of the Quran

One of the claims regarding the Quran is there is a checksum on it.

What is a checksum?  Well it’s an integrity check, a way for an author to sign or “seal the envelope” in order to indicate that the message has not been tampered with. A very simple checksum would be for example if I put the total word count at the bottom of this article.  When you get to the bottom you can see if the number matches the words in this article and you can confirm its correct.  However this wouldn’t be very tamper proof as you could change all of the words and maintain the same number in order to still pass the checksum. A better checksum would be to assign each letter a value (A is 1, B is 2 and so on) and then put the total at the end.  This would be better, but it’s still very weak as someone could tamper with it as long as they kept the same number of letter uses the same it would still pass the checksum.  Nevertheless the point should be clear.

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The so-called mathematical miracle of the Quran

Some people claim there are mathematical miracles to the Quran in terms of number of times words appear to be the same.   This is such a weak argument. It was never used historically and is has several problems.

Just because you find some patterns in the book does not mean it had a divine author.  Can we find these same patterns in other books?  Yes!  There are such coincidences as written here about Moby Dick).  If anyone actually spent the time to count the words you would see it’s really a case of cherrypicking and stretching the data to fit the narrative.

Not just that, all these “miracles” depend on a very specific reading of the Quran which is the Hafs en Asem.  If you read the Warsh or any other variant these counts would be totally different!

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