The Quran itself gives a sort of falsification test
AbdurRaheem Green
The Quran, however, is no casual read. It can be very difficult to get one’s head around, since it doesn’t seem to follow any particular order of events, topic or theme. It repeats itself a lot and even in the best English translation its style is challenging to say the least. In fact, in order to understand it you are forced to think, and thinking is what the Quran asks us to do a lot.
Well I did tell you in the beginning there was going to be stuff you wouldn’t like, like death and hell! Still, the fact that we don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s not real or true.
Is there anything else that might help us accept the claim of the Quran to be from the Creator of the heavens and earth? Well, the Quran itself gives a sort of falsification test. This is in fact a good test to apply to any book that claims to be from the Creator:
“Do they not then consider the Quran carefully? Had it been from other than Allah, they would surely have found therein contradictions in abundance”
[The Quran; Chapter 4 – The Women, verse 82]
The point being here is that if a book is from the Creator of everything, it’s quite rational to conclude that this unique Being must be very intelligent and wise, to a level that is perhaps beyond human comprehension. Certainly one would expect the Creator of all things to be familiar with the basic workings of the natural world and universe, and with events in human history
And there is another remarkable quality about the Quran and that is that it still stands today as by far the most outstanding piece of literature in the Arabic language. In fact, the Quran itself challenges the Arabs, who were masters of poetry and linguistic skill, to produce even one chapter that could compare to it. The shortest chapter of the Quran was a mere three verses! At a time when poets were the ‘pop stars’ of the Arabia, Mohammed showed no poetic ability, either prior to or after the revelation of the Quran.
In fact, his sayings and statements are clearly different linguistically from the Quran and can easily be told apart. Many of the most skilled poets and orators of that time admitted that these were not the words of Mohammed, or even a human. Many embraced Islam just from hearing the Quran being recited. For them it was the most convincing proof of its divine origin. Of course this may be hard for us to appreciate today, but it stands as a historical fact. The question remains as to how someone with no known poetic gifts was able to produce a piece of literature that until today stands supreme in the whole of the Arabic language at a time when the greatest pieces of Arabic poetry were being produced. If one were to take a modern day comparison, it’s as extraordinary as an uneducated person with no scientific knowledge or training expounding a faultless unified theory of physics!
