Rodrigo Bivar:
I think you’re committing the logical fallacy of tu quoque here. Instead of defending Islam you went and attacked Judaism. Instead of defending the Quran you went and attacked the Torah.
My intention was not to make a serious assertion, but merely to demonstrate to Han that parallelism in different scriptures does not have to mean the later one is based on the earlier one. Both could have a common third source. Many Christians tend to forget this fact in such polemical discussions.
Parallelism is a perfect good way to look at the epistemology. From it, we can decide if a scripture is based on another.
It can be useful, and provide powerful insights, but at the end of the day, it cannot be guarranteed. In other words, it may be logical and systematic, but at the end of the day, in terms of absolute truth it’s nothing but glorified guesswork.
Also, note that it is the Quran’s claim to be a successor religion to Judaism and Christianity. I didn’t make this claim. Muhammad did. Thus, it is legitimate that we do examine his claim.
First of all, if it’s in the Qur’an, then it’s God’s claim, not Muhammad’s. And secondly, I think you’ve misinterpreted the Qur’an if you think it’s claiming the heritage of Judaism and Christianity. In fact the Qur’an does not claim succession to those two faiths, but knocks them quite heavily. What it does claim succession to is the faith of Abraham (PBUH), who was neither a Jew nor Christian. So, it’s actually a claim of a separate lineage directly from Abraham (PBUH) that doesn’t pass through either of the two Abrahamic faiths preceeding Islam.
One case of similarity might be a coincidence. But a preponderance of similarities is more than a coincidence.
To continue that line of thinking, an overwhelming number of similarities becomes improbable in terms of copying, returning the issue back to square one, a coincidence, just like one similarity.
This is especially so in Muhammad’s case, who I often need to remind people, it seems, was wholly illiterate and uneducated, and lived in a land of no schools, libraries, books or even scholarly People of the Book.
Polemics can get so bogged down in finding parallels between the Qur’an and previous Jewish and Christian writings, canonical or apocryphal, that they seemingly never stop to tally up the staggering total. The other day I was figuring a rough count of just how many works have been found to have parallels with the Qur’an, and thus used to accuse Muhammad (PBUH) of plagiarism. I came up with about FORTY different sources, many of them as obscure today, even though we have them readily available in our modern information-at-your-finger-tips age, as they were in Muhammad’s time. It is a virtual library of books and knowledge that an illiterate man is accused of having known by heart.
In their lust to find the “sources” of the Qur’an, the polemics don’t stop and think how improbable it is that Muhammad (PBUH) memorized and then co-opted into the Qur’an that staggering number of sources in a land of practically devoid of books and religious knowledge. They don’t stop to examine this big picture.
I’m not saying this constitutes proof the Qur’an is divine, but it is just something to think about for all the people who suspect “The Honest and Trustworty One” of selling people out.
