Thursday, June 11, 2009

An Open Blog Post To Sami Zaatari: On Genesis 1:26

Sami, your most recent article on Genesis 1:26, which you wrote to attack the Trinity, is so incredibly bad I am beside myself. I would write a response, but your article doesn't come close to tackling what I have already said on the matter here.

In fact, though there is nothing in your article I haven't already responded to in the paper linked above, I have been meaning to add something else to the section of that article dealing with the Muslim objection for quite some time. Thanks for stirring the pot; I will get right on it.
Update (8/24/09): Instead of adding to my original article, I decided to write an entirely different one dedicated to debunking the "Plural of Majesty" explanation. It includes specific material relevant to showing that such an explanation is not at all available to Muslims. That means it is back to the drawing board for dawagandists like Zaatari. It can be found through the following link: here.

Monday, June 8, 2009

The Logical Precision of the Qur'an: Not!

“And there are among them illiterates who know not the Book but only lies, and they do but conjecture.” (Shakir, S. 2:78)

This leads to problems like the following:

(1) If such people knew/know that 2+4+2=8, then according to the Qur’an it would be/is a lie, which is absurd. (This might help Muhammad and his followers out of a bind (q.v. Surah 41:9-12), but it would lead to an untold number of other problems.)

(2) If it is true that such people knew/know only lies, then they wouldn't have known/know that they existed/exist. If they did/do know that they existed/exist, then it would have been/is a “lie”, but if their existence was/is a lie, then how did/do they know it since non-existent persons can’t know anything?

(3) It is not possible to “know” only lies, for in the nature of the case a lie can be believed but it cannot be known.

These problems don’t go away even if one tries to restrict the lies “known” by Scriptural illiterates to that which regards “the book”, for once again, it is not possible to know any lies, whether they are about the book or something other than the book. Lies cannot be known. Period. The tenacity of this point also doesn’t go away if one resorts to other translations, for they all yield a similar set of problems.

****Many thanks to PM for alerting me to this****