If the Quran is not actually from God, then it still is wrong no matter what it contradicts.
Having a first one would be a crazy historical aberration. If the books, which were scrolls, had any meaning, they would have been used up and copied lots. What books do we have the first copy of?
The Quran says it is from God. You quoted some of the verses saying this yourself.
Exactly.
Exactly as Muslims would say.
That’s your opinion.
Regardless, try to remember what we were discussing. Your claim was that the Quran was internally contradictory because it says the Bible is correct and the Bible says says the Quran is wrong. You have now shown for yourself that this claim cannot be supported.
Because the issue is whether you are able to apply the same degree of skepticism to your own faith that you do to others. It is apparent that you have a much lower standard when assessing Christianity.
Those particular verses are not the only reason I’ve rejected Islam. They’re just the most obvious reason to as a Christian, among other reasons I would if I was an atheist.
So you do not know how much I have assessed Christianity or Islam.
Few people have any great knowledge of Taoism, I probably never was the most orthodox of Taoists, and as I have discussed, I’ve been drifting in the direction of Atheism for much of that time.
Speaking as somebody with an academic background in Statistics, pretty much anything can be assigned a probability – and under Bayesian Theory, we do this all the time (as a priori probabilities). It is then testing this assignment that is the issue. But even then, we don’t Falsify the assignment so much as assign a low (testing error) value of it being correct (Hypothesis Testing). It would be lack of empirical evidence to test the hypothesis, rather than lack of Falsifiability, that would be the problem (but even this wouldn’t stop us assigning the probability in the first place, but merely testing it afterwards).
As a hypothetical, I can destroy a six-sided die, and afterwards assign the probability of it rolling a 6, if I had rolled it, to be 1-in-6. This hypothesis has been rendered unfalsifiable (I don’t know, and can no longer ascertain, that it was a fair die), but it is not unreasonable.
Your six-sided die didn’t exist but we can say that a fair die, when rolled, will have a 1 in 6 chance of ending up showing a 6. Then we test that hypothesis by obtaining a die, checking it for fairness, and rolling it enough times to produce the data that confirms our hypothesis. Is that not a test?
We do not know if the die we were hypothesising about was in fact fair, so we cannot know if our test of a new, fair die is in fact equivalent.
Testing does not in fact falsify, it merely assigns a low (but not zero) probability.
Also, formally, assignment of a probability (or that two means are the same, etc) always happens before testing, so testing is not a requirement for this assignment.
Testing may be thought of as a verification of the assignment.
Addendum: what does this mean for our original issue?
It means that it is not unreasonable to assign a ‘best guess’ estimate of a probability to something, even if this assignment is not falsifiable, and even if it is not testable.
Further addendum: the fact that claims aren’t falsifiable also does not mean that we cannot assign relative probabilities to them.
It is likely not falsifiable to claim that there is currently a meteor of a certain size, nickel content and proximity hurtling towards Earth (assuming said meteor is too small to be detected on telescope etc, and will land somewhere inaccessible).
It is however more likely that this is happening than that a solid gold meteor of similar size and proximity is doing so.
And both of these are more likely than that a Fabergé egg is doing so.
What if the prior probably is 1.0? This comes up fairly often as an unstated assumption in Intelligent Design (is: the probability of evolution is so vanishingly small that it must be Design).
I’m trying to remember how it was explained in the Hypothesis Testing portion of a First Year Statistics course 35-odd years ago. If I’m bollocksing it up, then please please correct me.
Are we talking Schrodinger’s six-sided die here?
In terms of Bayesian analysis, it would make the math very uninteresting (if P(A) = 1, P(A|B) = 1 also), and probably dreadfully unrealistic. I’m not sure that this would surprise anybody about ID.
Lacking testing, any of these assigned probabilities are just guesses. I’d therefore say P=1 makes IDers bad at guessing (and also somewhat unimaginative).
