Week Fourteen: What Is the Quran—A Miracle or Something Sacred?

Skeptic: “All right, my friend... I’m waiting to hear the answer you went looking for.”

Believer: “Perhaps for now I can’t give you a rational and philosophical answer, but in any case, I can’t simply ignore a miracle such as the Quran.”

Skeptic: “Why do you think the Quran is a miracle?”

Believer: “Because no one can produce a book or discourse like it, and there is no error or contradiction in it that would indicate that it is a human work.”

Skeptic: “Actually, there is a contradiction in the Quran concerning this very issue of determinism and free will.”

Believer: “What contradiction?”

Skeptic: “In some verses of the Quran, human beings are presented as responsible for their actions and as possessing freedom and choice in determining their destiny. In other verses, however, it is said that a person’s destiny—and even whether that person is guided or led astray—depends upon God’s will, and that no one’s efforts can prevail against God’s will1.

“Furthermore, there are other contradictions in the Quran, as well as serious scientific errors2.”

Believer: “Then let’s examine the points you’ve raised.”

Skeptic: “I’m not interested in debating them, because you Muslims usually fail to pay attention to what the word miracle actually means. You don’t really treat the Quran as a miracle. In the end, you say that we don’t know the full truth about the Quran, that we cannot judge the Book of God, that scholars must give their opinion, and so on... and eventually, without reaching any conclusion, you simply walk away.”

Believer: “Of course we regard the Quran as the Prophet’s miracle. How can you say that we don’t regard it as a miracle?”

Skeptic: “Please pay close attention!... A miracle presented by someone claiming to be a prophet is supposed to be the very evidence that convinces us and leaves us with no doubt that the claimant is telling the truth.”

Believer: “Exactly. We don’t think otherwise.”

Skeptic: “When someone addresses us and begins presenting arguments and evidence, do you and I have the right to examine his arguments and evidence using our own reason and understanding, or not?”

Believer, in a confident tone, said, “Of course we do.”

Skeptic: “And whenever we do not find his arguments and evidence convincing, do we have the right to regard them as unacceptable, or not?”

Believer: “Yes, we do.”

Skeptic: “But most Muslims do not approach the Quran in this way. On the one hand, they say that this book is the Prophet’s miracle. So one would expect them to grant themselves the right to test that miracle using their own reason and knowledge, to see whether they are actually convinced by it.

“But on the other hand, the moment they encounter a problem in it, or someone points out a contradiction in the Quran—even if they themselves cannot find any answer to that contradiction using their own reason and knowledge—they do not suspend their belief. Instead, they say that there must be no contradiction in the Quran, that the scholars must surely have some solution, and that their own reason simply cannot grasp it.”

Believer: “Shouldn’t one wait and see what the scholars have to say? That isn’t an irrational approach.”

Skeptic: “That depends on what you mean by ‘waiting.’ If you mean patiently studying the arguments of both supportive and critical scholars, so that as little as possible is overlooked, and during that period approaching the divine origin of the Quran and Muhammad’s prophethood not with faith but with doubt and uncertainty, then that would not be irrational. In fact, that is exactly how we approach every matter that is neither sacred nor based on faith. If we were certain of something yesterday but today encounter a serious argument against it, our certainty turns into doubt.

“But if by ‘waiting’ you mean waiting until all Muslim scholars admit that there is a problem in the Quran, while maintaining your faith throughout that entire period, then that is not a rational approach. And apparently, the reverential attitude Muslims have toward the Quran leads them, in practice, to adopt exactly this method, whatever they may claim otherwise.

“In any case, the Quran is presented as a miracle for every individual human being, because Muhammad did not bring a separate miracle and a separate piece of evidence tailored to the intelligence and reasoning ability of each person he sought to convince. Therefore, this same Quran must be capable of convincing every individual human being, whatever their level of intelligence, knowledge, or language.

“Anyone who asks, ‘How am I supposed to know that Muhammad was a prophet?’ will be told, ‘This book is the evidence for his prophethood.’ That means every individual person has the right to judge the credibility of that evidence using their own reason and understanding. If it meant anything else, then some people would have to be told: ‘There is no evidence available that can convince you.’

“If this Quran is supposed to be the evidence for your faith and mine, then it must be capable of convincing both you and me. If I see that you have been convinced, that does not mean I must accept that the evidence itself is convincing. Perhaps you are mistaken.

“The fact that Muslim scholars say the Quran is a convincing miracle cannot be a reason for me to surrender my own right to examine it, ignore unanswered problems that I have found in it, and simply walk away while continuing to believe in the Quran’s ‘heavenly origin.’

“Most Muslims deprive themselves of the right to examine and evaluate the Quran. Instead of first examining it and only afterward coming to believe that it is a divine miracle—while preserving for themselves the right to examine it again and again throughout their lives—they begin by accepting its miraculous nature as meaning that it is sacred and divine, often without ever having read it completely even once or scrutinized it with the intention of finding possible errors or contradictions. And whenever a problem in the Quran is shown to them, they simply pass over it.”

Believer: “What is wrong with believing in the divine origin of the Quran before reading it in full, simply by hearing some of its verses? Different people are convinced in different ways. Perhaps someone hears only a few verses, notices the Quran’s unique style, and finds it to be divine.”

Skeptic: “A book’s unique style is not evidence that its source is nonhuman. There are many literary masterpieces in the world that have remained unique despite repeated attempts to imitate them. In principle, there is no standardized and reliable yardstick by which a text can be measured stylistically in order to determine whether it is divine or not.

“Even so, I do not criticize someone who, purely because of an emotional response, becomes convinced after hearing a few passages that a text comes from God. But that person should not forget that he has not yet examined the entire text, and he should always preserve for himself the right to doubt its divine origin as soon as he encounters a flaw of the sort one would expect from a human work. Muslims deprive themselves of that right.

“As long as something is called a miracle, the right to examine it, doubt it, and reject it must remain intact. But among Muslims, the Quran is sacred, and anything regarded as sacred is placed beyond criticism and evaluation. That is a contradiction in Muslim belief and practice.”

Believer: “I don’t understand. It is only natural that once something is recognized as a divine miracle, it also becomes sacred. Once we understand that the Quran is the word of God, naturally we should regard its statements as true and worthy of reverence.”

Skeptic: “So which is it in the end—a miracle, or a divine miracle? Which one? These are not the same thing, and they carry two different meanings. It seems that the very idea of treating a text as a miracle gives rise to a contradiction, whether that text is the Quran or any other text.

“If a text is presented to us as a miracle, and by miracle we mean a piece of evidence offered by a claimant to prophethood—evidence that the audience is supposed to examine and scrutinize in order to determine whether the claimant’s claim is true or false—then the audience must always retain the right to judge for itself whether the statements and concepts in that text are true or false. The right to verify the claimant’s claim through examining the evidence is granted to the audience along with the presentation of the evidence itself. Without that right, the audience cannot evaluate the evidence. In this case, the text functions as evidence, and the audience functions as the judge examining the evidence presented.

“But if a text is presented to us as a miracle, and by miracle we mean that the text’s divine origin has already been established, then naturally the audience no longer has the right to examine and scrutinize the text in order to determine whether its statements and concepts are true or false. It must accept whatever the text contains. In this case, the text functions as law or as absolute truth, and the audience functions merely as an executor of that law.

“So apparently, if a text is presented both as a miracle and as sacred truth and law, the audience falls into the fallacy of equivocation. The word miracle is then being used in two completely different senses: in one sense, as evidence and a test; in the other, as something sacred.

“If the Quran is a sacred book for me and I place it beyond the reach of my own reason and judgment, then I must ask how Muhammad’s prophethood was ever established for me in the first place, such that I afterward came to regard him and his book as divine and sacred. After all, I had never examined the Quran as evidence. I had never gone through it sentence by sentence with the deliberate intention of finding a human error in it.

“If there is a God, and that God sends me evidence in order to convince me, then that means he gives me the right to begin examining it; he gives me the right to be convinced or not convinced; and he gives me the right, if I am convinced today on the basis of today’s circumstances and information but begin to doubt again tomorrow on the basis of tomorrow’s circumstances and information, to follow that doubt wherever it leads—without him punishing me for having those doubts. Yet Muslims, inwardly afraid of that very God, do not allow themselves to doubt the Quran.

“A miracle is evidence for determining whether a claimant to prophethood is telling the truth or lying. The right to examine that evidence must always remain. But a sacred object is treated as something that is not open to examination and evaluation. Whoever treats evidence as a sacred object ignores its status as evidence.

“A sacred object does not have the status of evidence, and evidence does not have the status of a sacred object.

“Evidence is something that, psychologically, we permit ourselves to evaluate. A sacred object is something that, psychologically, we do not permit ourselves to evaluate.

“From childhood, the Quran is implanted in our minds as something sacred, and for that very reason we lose the ability to see it as a miracle. We do not approach it as a miracle whose truth or falsity must be examined. Precisely when we encounter an error, contradiction, or any feature in the Quran suggesting that it is ‘human-made,’ instead of following the rational procedure—focusing on that point and treating it as exactly the kind of weakness we were supposed to be looking for—we simply pass over it and try to explain it away. And if we fail to find any explanation, we ignore it for the rest of our lives without allowing it to disturb our religion or faith.

“For these reasons, a text that is supposed to be sacred cannot also serve as the miracle, evidence, and test by which prophethood is verified. The fact that numerous contradictions and human errors in the Quran have survived fourteen centuries of criticism and scrutiny owes more than anything else to this dual and contradictory attitude. And this dual attitude itself arises from choosing a text as the evidence by which prophethood is to be verified—a text that, at the same time, is supposed to be so sacred that no questioning of it is permitted. The same problem exists in any religion in which a text is presented both as a sacred text and as a miracle and evidence3.

“At this moment, you not only lack rational arguments proving the God of Islam and the Islamic afterlife; your own rational and philosophical arguments actually reject both the God of Islam and the Day of Judgment. Keep in mind that the conclusions of the causal argument do not simply remain silent about the existence of the God of your religion and the Day of Judgment—both central pillars of your religious belief—so that you may preserve your faith if you wish or abandon it if you wish. The causal argument directly declares your religion and your worldview contrary to reason and logic. It does not even allow you to adopt an agnostic position and say, ‘I don’t know,’ regarding the existence of the God of your religion or the establishment of an afterlife.

“Before the causal argument, you might have said: ‘We cannot confidently and rationally prove that God and the afterlife do not exist, so we are free to choose according to personal preference.’ But after the causal argument, you must say: ‘I know that neither the personal God of religions nor a Day of Judgment exists.’ The path to belief based merely on personal preference is now closed.

“And the one miracle you believe supports your prophet’s claim—you do not even look at it as a miracle. Psychologically, you are not prepared to examine and evaluate it fairly. So even when you do examine it and encounter a problem, you unconsciously accept the first and most superficial answer that comes to mind as a justification. And even if you continue the investigation further, you cannot remain faithful to the conclusions of your own evaluation.

“Now it is time for you to admit that you have no right to teach this religion to children, and that you should stop doing so if you want to act honorably. I am not telling you to abandon your faith. I am telling you to stop preaching and teaching your faith to children—even to your own child.

“By teaching and promoting religious instruction to your own children and to others, you place them at risk of unjustifiably accepting false, sometimes harmful, irrational, and at times immoral religious beliefs. At such a sensitive age, you lead them to regard religious doctrines and commandments as sacred and to accept them blindly, without having the ability to evaluate them, and then to follow them dogmatically.

“These children usually continue, into adulthood, to preserve those beliefs and obey the commandments their religion has made sacred. Because they often lack rational and justified grounds for those beliefs, criticism may leave them frustrated and sometimes angry. Some may even attack their opponents and try to eliminate them so that they no longer have to hear criticism or dissent. Others may endlessly plead, ‘Please respect our beliefs,’ because they possess neither adequate justification for the truth of those beliefs nor the psychological ability to let go of them.

“And by then, they will not know—or may no longer want to know—that people like you were the ones who, with benevolent intentions, brought this harm upon them, along with harms far greater than these.”

Believer: “How can you say with such certainty that I should stop teaching—or, as you put it, preaching? Do you really think that with your imperfect reason and mine, and after only these few sessions of discussion, we can conclude that Islam is not a divine religion, or that there is no afterlife?

“And just because you think there is a contradiction in the Quran, and suppose I cannot find an answer to your claim, does that mean there really is a contradiction in the Quran and that this book cannot be from God?”

Skeptic: “Whatever argument I bring you, if you cannot refute it, you will ultimately point to the limitations of my understanding and of human knowledge in general, and then present me with a long list of ‘unreliable’ ways by which human beings try to discover the truth.”

Believer: “Am I saying anything false? Isn’t it true that our ways of discovering the truth are highly uncertain, and that we cannot be certain that any of our conceptions correspond to reality? Isn’t it true that one cannot be certain about the conclusions of a few weeks of philosophical discussion?”

Skeptic: “You’re right—but remember, you are the one who has ‘faith,’ not me.

“If you believe that human ways of knowing and understanding are so uncertain, then how are you certain that your prophet’s claim is true? How did you arrive at faith in that matter?

“You regard every one of my arguments as uncertain. But have you examined every one of your own arguments from that same perspective?

“You thought you had reliable rational arguments for proving the existence of the God of Islam, prophethood, and the afterlife. But when, using that same reason of yours, you saw that the conclusion of your argument turned out to be the opposite—that rational arguments not only failed to prove the God and afterlife of your religion but actually rejected them—was that when you suddenly remembered that using reason is not a reliable path to knowledge?

“You thought the Quran was a miracle proving the divine origin of Islam. But when you saw that rational examination could lead to a different conclusion about the Quran, you suddenly remembered that we cannot confidently declare that the Quran is not divine? How, then, were you previously able to declare with confidence that the Quran was a divine miracle and arrive at an unshakable faith? Was your reason and knowledge not imperfect and insufficient when you judged the Quran to be a divine miracle? Have they only become imperfect and insufficient now?

“Remember that your faith is supposed to rest on that same long list of ‘human limitations in reaching the truth.’ If that list is really decisive, then faith should never arise in the first place.

“It is not honorable to instill something so confidently into the minds of your own children and others when, by your own account, it is something one cannot justifiably have faith in.”

Believer looked at his watch and said, “I have something to do today and need to leave early. If you agree, we can meet again next week.”

The following week, and the week after that, Believer said that he could not make it to their meeting.

After that, they never saw each other again.