Miracle claims about the Quran

An interesting argument by Muslims goes like this: "I believe that the Quran is the word of God because no human could have made it." Maybe this isn’t exactly how they would word it, but basically this is what they mean — they think the Quran is full of miracles. So I want to shed some light on this issue by addressing some of the most commonly claimed miracles, and the reasoning that Muslims use for why they believe these things are miracles.

“Scientific” facts claimed as miracles

One miraculous claim is that the concept of mountains acting as stakes is mentioned in the Quran. Now, in order to understand why they think this is a miracle, we need to try to understand the reasoning, or logic, of their claim. As far as I can tell, their logic goes like this: Since the Quran contains this fact about physical reality, the Quran must be the word of God. Now, for this to make sense, the concept of mountains acting as stakes must have been something new — something that was revealed to mankind by the Quran. Now, one way to refute this miracle claim is to find evidence that rules out the possibility that the concept was new at the time that the Quran was revealed to mankind. Note that I’m not saying that this is the only way to refute the miracle. I’m just giving one way that could do it. And in fact, we do have evidence of this mountain stake concept being mentioned in Arabic text many decades before the Quran:

 وقَولا له هل أنتَ سويت هذه ….. بلا وتد حتى اطمأ نت كما هيا 

''Did you straighten this [earth] without a stake until it was reassured how it is,'' [1]

Now let’s compare that to the verse in the Quran that talks about the mountain stake concept:

وَالْجِبَالَ أَوْتَادًا

"And the mountains as stakes?” [2]

So the word stakes (plural: al awtaad, singular: al watad), in the context of a mountain, was used in Arabic literature before Mohamed revealed the Quran — which is evidence that refutes this miracle claim.

Now before I go into some of the other commonly claimed miracles of the Quran, I want to examine the reasoning of these so-called miraculous claims so that we can identify what’s wrong them. This is important because by having a general explanation about what’s wrong with the reasoning, we can refute all claims that use this same false reasoning. In this way, all claimed miracles, since they use the same reasoning as above, are already refuted without having to go find any evidence.

So the reasoning of the miraculous claim of the mountain peg concept goes like this: If the Quran contains a verse that expresses a fact about physical reality, then the Quran must be the word of God. This reasoning is flawed because the conclusion does not follow from the premises. In other words, the conclusion (that the Quran must be the word of God) does not follow from the premise (that the Quran contains a verse that expresses a fact about physical reality). One way to show that the conclusion does not follow from the premises is to come up with another possible conclusion that is consistent with the premises. One other possibility is that a human wrote the Quran and that he learned the fact from existing human knowledge. So here we have two possible conclusions following from the premises. I’ll summarize them below:

If the premise (the Quran contains a verse that expresses a fact about physical reality), 

Then the following conclusions are possible,

(1) The Quran is the word of God, OR

(2) A human wrote the Quran and he borrowed the fact from previous human knowledge.

Note that the premise alone cannot select one of the possible conclusions from the set of possible conclusions. In other words, the premise alone does not rule out any of the possible conclusions. This is what is meant by the idea that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. So what we have here is a situation where there’s another possible conclusion that Muslims are ignoring without ruling it out — which is irrational. So this means that at this point, all the possible conclusions are refuted. In order to choose a conclusion rationally, we would need more information in order to rule out one of these possible conclusions leaving the other one unrefuted.

So, what we can conclude is that any claim that uses this same logic is already debunked because we already have a refutation of it’s logic. In other words, since we already know that the claim’s logic is refuted, that means the claim itself is refuted — and this is true for all claims that use this same false logic.

Now to reiterate what I said about evidence, even if we didn’t have any evidence, that does’t mean we can’t come to a conclusion about whether or not the miraculous claim is true. The miraculous claim is concluding that humans couldn’t have done it, and that god must have done it, which is a false conclusion. The fact that there exists the possibility that humans did it, and since this possibility hasn’t been ruled out, is a refutation of the other possibility that god did it. In other words, both possibilities refute each other, since neither of them has enough information to refute it’s rival. So the miraculous claim is refuted since it chooses one possibility over it’s rival without giving any information (in the form of reasoning or argument) for why one possibility is being chosen over the other.

Beautiful literary usage claimed as miracles

Another commonly claimed miracle is that the Quran’s literary usage is so beautiful that it’s beyond what a human can create. Muslims often claim that for the past 1,400 years no human has been able to create a verse that is as beautiful as the Quranic verses. But for this to make sense, we should first rule out the possibility that all of the verses in the Quran originated in the Quran. So what we have here is the following reasoning: 

If the premise (the Quranic verses are so beautiful and no one has created verses like it since then),  

Then the following conclusions are possible, 

(1) The Quran is the word of God, OR 

(2) The verses in the Quran were written by humans before the Quran, and there exists even more beautiful Arab text before the Quran.

At this point we can consider some implications of these theories (possibilities). If theory (1) is true, that means that there couldn’t have been beautiful literary usage in Arabic text before the Quran — because if that were the case, then it wouldn’t make sense to say that the Quran’s literary usage is a miracle. And if theory (2) is true instead, that means that maybe there was previous Arabic text that was as beautiful, or more beautiful than compared to the verses of the Quran. So let’s summarize the theories again, together with these implications.

If the premise (the Quranic verses are so beautiful and no one has created verses like it since then), 

Then the following conclusions are possible, 

(1) The Quran is the word of God and no previous Arabic text was as beautiful as the Quran, OR  

(2) The Quran was written by humans and there exists even more beautiful Arabic text before the Quran.

Now using the explanation from above, notice how there isn’t enough information here to select one possibility from the set of possibilities. So what we have is a situation where all the possibilities are refuted since none of them has enough information to refute it’s rivals.

At this point, let's take this a step further by finding some evidence that rules out one of these theories. What if we found some grammar mistakes in the Quran? Well that would rule out the theory that the Quran was created by an omniscient being. And sure enough, the Quran does have grammar mistakes. Now some Muslims answer this by saying that the Quran set the Arabic grammar rules, and they use this as reason to believe that the Quran doesn’t have grammar mistakes — i.e. that the Quran is perfect in grammar. But, as my mother pointed out to me, this is circular logic. She said:

"If Muslims are going to claim that there cannot be any grammatical errors since the Qur'an is the standard by which Arabic Grammar is held up to, then they have no basis for claiming it is grammatically perfect since there is no objective standard to test this claim. To say the Qur'an is grammatically perfect because the Qur'an sets the standard of Arabic grammar is a circular argument."

• bad grammar [3] [4]
• better Arabic text previously [5]

Mathematical correlations as miracles

Another type of miracle claim is about mathematical correlations within the Quran. This type of claim is that there are a lot of things in the Quran that count up to something meaningful, and that no human could have done it because it’s too hard for a human to make meaningful verses while also making sure that all of these things count up right. One example is that the number of occurrences of the words belief and it’s opposite, disbelief, are equal. So the reasoning is something like this: Since there exist mathematical correlations in the Quran, that means the Quran is the word of God. But again, just as before, there isn’t enough information here to rule out the possibility that a human did it. So these miraculous claims are debunked too.

Now just to satisfy the people that really want to see some evidence, I’ll show 

Mohamed’s illiteracy as a miracle

Another miracle, and this is the only claim of it’s type, is that Mohamed was illiterate, and so the fact that he recited the Quran means that the Quran is the word of God. What’s interesting here is that if you question a Muslim about why he believes that Mohamed was illiterate, he’ll say that the Quran says so. And if you question him about why he believes that the Quran is the word of God, he’ll talk about the miracles that “prove” it (this Mohamed being illiterate miracle being one of them). But this is circular logic. They are saying that X is the argument for the conclusion Y, and Y is the argument for conclusion X.

X (Mohamed is illiterate) is the argument for the conclusion Y (Quran is the word of God). 

Y (Quran is the word of God) is the argument for the conclusion X (Mohamed is illiterate).

So there are two possibilities here. Either (1) X and Y are true, or (2) X and Y are false. And there isn’t enough information in this miraculous claim to be able to rule out either of these possibilities. So the miraculous claim is debunked since it chooses one of them arbitrarily (without argument).

One way to describe how this reasoning is wrong is to make a comparison: Quoting a book to prove the existence of god is like quoting the author of the Harry Potter book's to prove the existence of Harry Potter. 

The bar is so low

An interesting thing about these miracle claims is that Muslims today are still coming up with new ones. A recent one I’ve heard of is the existence of honey — the implication being that honey's nutritious value is so great that there is no way an omniscient being wasn’t involved. But this miracle claim just ignores the possibility that biological evolution is the cause of the creation of honey. The miracle claim doesn’t contain any information in it that refutes evolution, so why does it choose an omniscient being as the cause without having ruled out evolution as the cause? Because it’s irrational. It irrationally chooses one theory from a set of possible rival theories.

Another issue with these miracle claims is that they don’t contain any information arguing against the theory that an omniscient being is the cause. So it’s just ignoring that it might be wrong. What’s needed is to argue on both sides of the debate so that one can find the flaws in one’s own position. Consider Elliot Temple’s analysis of God vs Evolution [6]: 

In the famous watchmaker analogy, William Paley said that if you find a watch on a heath (area of uncultivated land), you can tell the watch had a designer because of its complex inner workings. He further argued that the complex inner workings of human beings imply that they had a designer too (God). 

This is an important problem and a good question. There are several other formulations: Where does "apparent design" come from? Where does complexity come from? Where do adaptations come from? Where do useful or purposeful things come from? 

All of these questions are fundamentally asking roughly the same thing: Where does knowledge come from? 

One place Paley said knowledge does not come from is randomness. We need a genuine explanation. I agree with him. 

Everyone agrees that people can create knowledge. We can be designers, and invent watches as well as nuclear power plants. But where did people come from originally? And where did animals come from? People didn't invent penguins. 

Paley answered that people were designed by God. This is a bad answer. God, like a person, is a complex, intelligent being. God contains knowledge. So where did God come from? Paley hasn't solved the problem, he's just added a layer of indirection. 

Besides the God answer, which doesn't work, there were no obvious answers to Paley's problem. It's a hard question.

Today, we have found one and only one answer to the question. It's conceivable there are others which we haven't discovered yet, but no one is even close to finding another answer. There are no breakthroughs on the visible horizon.

We found a mechanism by which knowledge can be created which does not assume any knowledge as a premise. It's called evolution.

Consider reading Elliot’s whole essay to find out how evolution works, and how it’s responsible for knowledge creation.

On a final note, I should mention that all miracle claims use the same false logic. They are all based on the premise that the thing in question couldn’t have been done by a human, or couldn’t have happened by chance, or by some other mechanism  — and so it concludes that God must have done it — but without including any information explaining why a human couldn’t have done it, or why it couldn’t have happened by chance, or why it couldn’t have happened by some other mechanism. So all miracles, since they use the same false logic, are debunked. 

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[1] peotry peg

[2] Quran 78:7, translated by Sahih International. [link: http://quran.com/78/7]

[3] The Qur’an Grammatical Errors, by Rafiqul-Haqq and Newton. [link: http://answering-islam.org/Authors/Newton/grammar.html]

[4] title, authors http://www.coptichistory.org/new_page_218.htm

[5] Previous arab poetry beautiful

[6] Evolution and Knowledge, by Elliot Tempe. [link: http://fallibleideas.com/evolution-and-knowledge]