River

proof comes in different forms.....some like Beauty and importance of Justice and Equity ( a Criterion)...the Qur'an has this.


Others are looking for something more tangible...i.e mathematically or scientifically oriented. The Qur'an has this as well.



I believe for those expecting proof, the Qur'anic statistic gives them a glimpse of the harmony and balance that exists in outward Qur'anic expressions as well as inner intertextual counts/elements.

Muad'Dib

That's my question--proof of what?

Yes, those patterns are neat, but are we supposed to conclude something from them? I wouldn't be surprised to find similar patterns in Alice in Wonderland, as Lewis Carroll was a mathematician who adored word games.

I'm afraid I must have missed the point of the post.

When you say "outward Qur'anic expression" do you mean a straightforward reading of the Qur'an (i.e., not counting words or letters or things like that)?

River

Ya........I think you missed the point of the post.....


well, anyways....you are correct on the " outward Qur'anic expressions " part.

lpetrich

Has anyone ever bothered to check these Koranic word counts? Seems almost too good to be true.

Muad'Dib

Okay, let me explain why I'm confused...

My only significant experience in dealing with mathematical approaches to texts is with the Bible Codes, where it is claimed (in Witzum, Rips, and Rosenberg's article Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis, Statistical Science vol. 9, pp. 429-38, 1994) that although message-bearing patterns will appear in any text by chance, such patterns appear in the Torah at a level unexplainable by random chance. (This claim was later shown to be erroneous in McKay, Bar-Natan, Bar-Hillel, and Kalai's paper Solving the Bible Code Puzzle, Statistical Science vol. 14, pp. 150-73, 1999.)

My assumption when I read your thread title ("Statistical Perfection of the Qur'an") and your opening post was that this was a similar argument: that although such correspondences happen in numerous literary works by chance, they happen too often in the Qur'an to be merely chance.

You said that this was very different from the Bible Codes, however. I took this to mean that the claim had nothing to do with the frequency of parallels being too great to be explained by chance. I had no idea what an alternative claim could be, thus my questions.

Is the assertion that humans could not have composed a book with those correspondences? As it stands, it seems to be begging the question: If the Qur'an was revealed piecemeal by the angel Gabriel, there's no way those correspondences could have arisen by chance; but doesn't that require assent to the idea that the Qur'an was in fact revealed by the angel Gabriel? Maybe it's the case that I understand the claim but just am not convinced.

Thanks for your replies though, I appreciate it.

echidna

River, I don’t see many obvious 19’s there. Don’t you believe that the Qu’ran is proved by the supposed recurrence of 19 ? I would have expected that for any real mathematical significance, the recurrences should have occurred in multiples of 19.

Nickle

There's no reason to assume the authors intended these numbers to match up, divinely inspired or not. In a large book such as the Qur'an (or bible, or Moby Dick), if you go looking for word counts that match up, your gonna find them. And hey, even some of them might relate to each other!

I think you are falling for the same trap as the Nostradamus and Bible Code people. Hell, even fine tuning arguments are victim to the same error: You are cherry picking what helps your argument and discarding the rest.

Look in the Qur'an and find how these match up:
allah satan
cold hot
jesus moses
sun moon
forgiveness murder
faithfull marriage
war famine

I bet they don't (they would be in your list if they were). So why should we be surprised if the random ones on your list do? We could make hundreds like the ones I listed above and they wouldn't match.

Let's see some of yours:

Adam 25 times
Jesus (2nd Adam) 25 times

I bet Moses would've worked too.

el-moseebah (a disaster) 75 times
el-shokr (thanking Allah) 75 times

??? Loosely related, nice try. Seems like 'fear of allah' would work better here, but it already gets used later on.

el-infaq (spending money for Allah) 73 times
el-redda (satisfaction) 73 times

what about recieving money, how many times does that show up (hint: probably not 73, which is why they went with this backup)

el-zahab (gold) 8 times
el-taraf (prosperity) 8 times

And if prosperity wasn't 8 then they would've went with poverty, and if poverty wasn't 8, then silver, then ruler, then coins, and so forth.

el-aqal (the brain) 44 times
el-noor (the light) 44 times

??? Help me out here. I guess dark wasn't 44 so they tried to slip this one passed us.


el-jahr (expressing something) 16 times
el-alanyeah (announcing something) 16 times

'getting told something' 23

Do you understand what I'm getting at here? There are many possibilities of having related words match up in such a large book. It's like shooting an arrow then drawing the target around where it hits. Frankly, I'm surprised this is all they found! Amateurs.

edit: tags are showing

echidna

Here's one which unfortunately only works in English.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/reference/searchquran.html

Month = 7
Months = 14

... so we could always claim translation error. But ...

Adam = 25 (oddly enough)
Jesus = 28

River, doubtless you have an elaborate explanation for this ?

Edit : oops, wrong site

Bob K

No numerologies for the Koran will ever prove gods exist or that the theology of the Koran is true.

The only proof of the existence of gods will be physical evidence--the gods themselves, who must prove they are gods because they have superior knowledge and superior capabilities for using that knowledge than men.

Because the gods have not revealed themselves lately, in order to obtain physical evidences of the gods--the gods themselves, we will have to capture one, and torture it until it confesses that it is a god, and then force it to perform stunts that will prove it is a god because it has superior knowledge and superior capabilities for using that knowledge than man.

What is the numerological probability that we will ever capture a god?

Bob K

See: http://www.faithfreedom.org/index.htm

Title: This site is created by ex-Muslims to help Muslims leave Islam_

Subtitle: Islam is a lie and this site is the proof

Here is a listing of the negatives in the Koran that suggest it could not have been written/inspired/dictated/etc. by gods:

http://main.faithfreedom.org/Article.../prologue2.htm

Herein Deists write about Islam/The Koran:

http://www.deism.com/islam.htm

Herein Secular Humanists write about Islam/The Koran:

http://www.secularhumanism.org/wtc.htm#_ftnref1