Extraordinary claims

In some of my recent posts, questions of scientific standards have emerged in the comments, and it's made me want to write about extraordinary claims.

There is an old philosophical saw to the effect that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The meaning should be transparent enough.

Suppose you meet me in the street, and you ask me where I got the newspaper I was carrying. If I said I'd got it from the newsagents down the road, you'd accept that easily enough. If I said I'd been given it by some aliens in the woods, you'd expect a higher level of verification before you could accept the statement.

Notice that these are everyday standards of evidence we're talking about. All scientific claims require sufficient evidence, which by everday standards will always seem extraordinary.

According to Sardar, the definition of a Muslim is that they accept that the Qur'an is the word of God. He goes on to assert that the Qur'an is a perfect book, that it is apparent to the doubting mind (Sardar's phrase) that it is inimitable by humans, and that it existed in Paradise with God, before the universe was created.

Let's have a look at what is actually asserted here. According to the Islamic version of history, the angel Gibreel (Gabriel in the Qur'an) appeared to an illiterate Arabian called Mohammed in the desert on repeated occasions, and recited the book to him direct from God. Because he was illiterate, the book was either transcribed by sages as he recited each sura to them after the event, or passed on orally.

After Mohammed died, a committee was set up to adjudicate between rival versions of the text, some bits of which had been circulating orally for decades. The version assembled by this committee dovetailed exactly with the perfect version, which had been sitting in heaven with God, and in this form is beyond the power of humans to imitate.

This is, to say the least, an extraordinary claim. I'm tempted to say committee again, just for the comedic value. To demonstrate it to a doubting mind, an extraordinary level of evidence would be required.

Note that we are not talking here about a scientific proof, which would always require sufficient evidence whether it was extraordinary or not. We are talking about an everyday acceptance. Because the claim is so extraordinary, the evidence for any kind of acceptance would have to be similarly extraordinary.

Note also that for a book to be perfect, every verse has to be similarly perfect. Sardar tries to dodge round this point by arguing that the book should be read as a whole, but this is a mere fudge. If at any point a single amendment to the text would clearly be an improvement on the existing text, then the perfection claim fails. This is a stiff test, to my mind beyond any book, but then perfection is an extraordinarily big claim.

The book would also have to be absolutely internally consistent, and morally admirable, but those aren't even the biggest evidential challenges. To then go on and meet the requirement of inimitability to a doubting mind some groundbreaking work would be necessary.

Firstly you would have to arrive at some kind of objective assessment of the poetic 'capacity' of humans. This sentence in itself is so absurd that the whole concept of the evidential test, and therefore the whole claim, is instantly nullified. To any genuinely doubting mind, anyway.

Then you would have to 'demonstrate' (how??) that the Qur'an exceeded those limits. You would have to show that the Qur'an, that turgid, repetitive, hell-fixated, lowbrow rant of a book, was somehow in an entirely different league from Ovid, from Moliere, from John Lydon.

Then you would have to show that the gap between the two was so large that it was beyond the bounds of serendipity. In other words, that those parts of the text which were beyond the capacity of humans were so many, and so marvelously interlaced, that mere accident was an inadequate explanation.

Good luck with all of that. Or, when making your extraordinary claims about the miraculous success of your committee, you could stop referring to your doubting minds.

I think I might go through some of my other writings and fill them with rhetorical italics as well. It effectively highlights the bizarre nature of certain claims, and it's much more fun than reading the Qur'an.