Construction of Islam

Pro Arguments: A) Koran unchanged since written I) Pro says that the Koran is the only religious book that has gone unchanged. Its now clear how this automatically makes the Koran true since there are a lot of other books that are unchanged. ii) Pro doesn't understand the significance of this argument. The Koran can never be “changed” because if it ever were, Pro would just say “its not the Koran”. If necessary, I will upload a document of the Koran and change every “Mohammed” to read “Brohammed”. What will that mean? That Pro is wrong? Or that his argument is always true by definition, and therefore unremarkable. B) No contradictions in the Koran. I explained that it was easy to write a book with no contradictions if you only say a bunch of mutually exclusive things like “Don't eat pork” or “Don't commit adultery”. The rest of this debate should show that the Koran's prophecies are either unremarkable or false. C) The Koran is irreproducible because of its style i) Pro says that no one can match the language of the Koran. He offers no reasoning. This is mere assertionism on all his part. Indeed, that's all he can do because this is an AESTHETIC and SUBJECTIVE claim. ii) Pro says that the Koran never “challenged someone to replicate it, or to outmatch it”, but in his R1 he himself challenged someone to produce another book comparable to it. My argument that other books can't be replicated goes ignored. iii) Pro says that because I am reading an english translation, my argument that the Koron's style is crap is invalid. This is totally abusive because it means I can NEVER challenge this argument. See the prestandards in my R1. I'm even using Pro's own suggested version of the Koran and its still not good enough. Give me a break. Also observe that Pro can't prove his case either – he can offer no analytical support for his argument about the Koran's style. His support amounts to linking us a super long reading of the Koran on youtube, which makes me want to barf. Obviously not the intended effect. D) No one has ever produced a book that lasted as long as the Koran Pro says he never said that the Koran is the oldest book. Quoting him from R1: “ Then the challenge became to produce any book that could last as long as the Koran does, and that has not been passed either.” But Pro concedes that there is an older book than the Koran, so I win this point. E) Mathematics of the Koran mirror the symbol for god, and this math could not have been known back then. Pro says that the mathematics is so insanely complex in the Koran that a supernatural being must have written it. He doesn't answer my point in R2 that his example is just a scatter plot. They do scatter plots in the third grade now [1]. His latest claim to more mathematical miracles includes the fact that some numbers are divisible by 19. Oh no not division! Only god knows division! Pro is trolling us. F) The middle of the Koran is "iron", and so is the middle of the earth i) I'm merely providing a plausible reason why the middle of a book might be Iron. Sure I guess oxygen is also a staple in societies, but iron is what virtually all tools are made of. Since iron is more scarce than oxygen or food, it makes sense to place it at the conceptual center of society. ii) Pro doesn't have a counter argument. The fact that iron is found IN THE EARTH is reason enough to believe people could guess at an iron core. G) Other prophecies i) Again, he doesn't actually spell them out, so I don't have to address them according to the prestandards in R1. Pro is basically saying “well there are arguments that support my position, but you'll have to go read them on this website”. ii) There's been 1,400 years for the prophecies of Islam to come true. You predicted the fall of the Roman empire? Good job. I predict the fall of America. Just watch. 500 years from now I'll have my own religion. Pro also says that there are many false prophecies of other religions. They aren't false. They just haven't come true yet (or their truths were not recorded by historians). iii) On the clay prophecy, Pro merely argues that you can ingest clay and maybe it has health benefits. First, this isn't an academic paper, and a quick google search indicates that there are no academic papers on the subject [2]. So I stand by my source in R2 which says clay actually harms your health. Also, the claim of the Koran is that human beings are MADE from clay. Pro only argues that some minerals found in clay are also found in the human body. That's fine, but the bulk of clay is aluminium silicate, a compound that is not found anywhere in the human body – sources in my R2. iv) A lot of other religions have made prophecies too. Pro says they haven't all come true, but we can just sit around waiting for another thousand or so years and I bet a few more of them will. *** At this point, Pro concludes saying that even though he hasn't addressed all the following arguments, his rebuttal is very valid. Poker Face #2 *** H) The chances of getting all these prophecies correct is below 0% i) Pro does not know basic probability theory ii) The chances of getting half your prophecies correct is significantly higher than 0%. I) Mountains stabilize the earth from shaking and they are like pegs i) Everything provides stability against external forces ii) Most mountains aren't peg like... See R2 for details. J) I had no J argument because apparently I don't know the alphabet. i) But I do know what Roman numerals are. According to Pro, only god can know very basic mathematics, so this makes me god and I command Pro to concede the debate! K) Mohammed was predicted in many religious texts, and that is a miracle Blabla what I wrote in R3. I don't feel like copy-pasting everything when Pro just dropped it cold turkey. Con Arguments - Fallacy of Composition Pro says that the Fallacy of Composition is not a valid fallacy. Well, there is a bloody wikipedia article for it, so it must be onto something. It should be obvious that just because the Koran says SOME true things doesn't make the other parts of it automatically true. Like if Einstein wrote moral philosophy alongside his science, you wouldn't say “the science is true therefore the ethics must be true”. So slam. Conclusion Thus Far: Pro has two types of arguments – irrelevant ones and wrong ones. He spends a lot of time explaining that the Koran is unchanged, and that its style is supposedly unmatchable. But none of these mean the Koran is true. So even if you still agree with Pro on some of these, you should throw them out the window. Pro is wrong about many of the Koran's prophecies and scientific miracles. Mountains are not peg like, they are created primarily by folds/faults in the earth's crust. Human beings can't be made from clay because we don't have any aluminium silicate in our bodies. I'm not sure what Pro's criterion is, but these are pretty egregious errors. What did you expect? Its just a book. [1] http://www.teachervision.fen.com... [2]http://www.google.com...