From: kilroy@gboro.glassboro.edu (Dr Nancy's Sweetie)
Subject: Re: Mathematical Miracle in Quran?
Summary: The Quran had to include _some_ pattern.
Keywords: innumeracy, patterns, complex, statistics, probability, `Woof!'
Organization: Glassboro State College
Disclaimer: Brandy the WonderDog is computing the odds that we would be given
            a particular phone number.
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1992 18:14:14 GMT


Somebody called `comptec91065' writes about a complicated mathematical pattern
which was found in the Quran, saying that ``it appears to me that if only 80%
of what he says is correct, there is a phenomena that has slept for 1400 years
that makes "crop circles" and "U.F.O." sightings seem like nothing.''

Then he wonders "what the Christians would do if they could find something
even remotely close to this in their book."


For starters, Christians have been finding patterns in the Bible for many
centuries; with the advent of computers, people have been sticking literature
of all kinds (including scriptures) in machines looking for patterns, and many
different patterns have been found.  There are innumerable silly proofs that
Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare worked on the King James
Version of the Bible, and just about anything else you like.

More to the point about the Quran, the presence of a complex pattern in the
Quran not only proves nothing, it is not even important.  The reason is that
the likelihood of their being _some_ pattern is exactly 1.

Suppose I deal you a hand in the card game Bridge.  There are 52 cards in the
deck, and 13 cards in your hand, so the number of possible hands is:

	     52!
	------------ = 635013559600
	13! (52-13)!

And the odds of getting a _particular_ hand are 1 in 635013559600.  But the
odds of getting _some_ hand are exactly 1.  If I dealt you a hand, and you
said "Wow!  This was a one-in-600 billion deal!", you would be exactly
correct; but the implication that something amazing had happened would be
completely wrong.

If you had specified a hand in advance, and then been dealt that hand, you
would have an amazing, almost impossible occurrence to report.  If you were
able to accurately guess a hand in advance 1% of the time, then you would
have something really worth talking about.

But finding a pattern, and _then_ claiming that something amazing had
happened, is useless.  If you look hard enough and long enough, you can find
a pattern in just about _anything_.

If somebody had said "The Quran includes a mathematical pattern of the first
5000 prime numbers over 1 decillion", and we found out _later_ that this was
true, that might be something worth talking about.  But nobody said anything
like that (so far as I am aware), and finding patterns now proves nothing.


For further reading on the business of patterns and probability, I strongly
suggest you read _Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences_,
by John Allen Paulos.  The book is well-written, very accessible, and does a
lot to clear up sloppy thinking.


Darren F Provine (kilroy@gboro.glassboro.edu)
"Bad things happen occasionally, and they're going to happen to somebody.  Why
 not you?" -- John Allen Paulos
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc