The Quran; Between the Authority of Tradition and the Scientific Method.

Questions surrounding the revelation of the Quran are numerous, and so are the arguments for and against its divine status. It's been called a miracle, and for many, its credibility rests entirely on the manner of its preservation—the chains down which it’s been passed since its revelation. But is this defensible?

When we ask why it’s miraculous, the arguments we find are not truly rooted in the text itself but in the historical context of its revelation; that is, the chain of events collated and edited by major Islamic exegetes. In short, this is the tradition—a massive literary and cultural incubus erected around the Quran, functioning like a buffer zone, insulating it from questions that, while they may seem to merely poke at the book, are truly important and need to be asked. One such question is the divine status of the Quran: What is really miraculous about it?

Here we encounter two major arguments. The first is what’s known as ‘concordism,’ which is the habit of harmonizing or reconciling ideas found in works like the Quran or the Bible by interpreting them (often the Bible) in ways that align with modern scientific discoveries or theories. An example would be reinterpreting Quranic cosmology in terms of theories like the Big Bang, or adjusting the history of humankind in a way that accords, directly or indirectly, with modern anthropology. This is often done because of the immense success of the scientific method and the educational, industrial, and economic structures erected on the back of revolutionary research in the hard sciences. So successful has the scientific method proven that its approach—one of detached objectivity—has been applied to subjects requiring requiring things like history, lived experience, tradition, culture etc..

The humanities—literature, history, and the so-called soft sciences—have been eclipsed by the former, and experiment, observation, and construction have taken the place of philosophizing, poetics, and other lesser-known areas of these fields. Unfortunately, the Quran has not been spared the encroachments of concordism. Even as it has kept its structure, words, and compositions intact, the reader, having absorbed the framework of the modern scientific view of the universe, approaches the book convinced that the stars to which the Quran refers in numerous places are the same exploding objects in deep space discussed in school textbooks. This is an unconscious form of concordism, as shown in the neglect of considering that stars of modern cosmology are not necessarily what they are purported to be. Not to mention the many other ideas around the history of humankind, biology, and language, all of which bolster the concordist view.

These views, however successful their models have been, cannot be used to interpret the Quran. We cannot use a source external to the Quran to prove its consistency, for that clearly defeats the purpose. This is the same error we see on the side of tradition, where the credibility of the Quran almost entirely rests on the credibility of the traditional material—a non-Quranic source. And though those things are important to some degree, and the humanities as a field of inquiry are nested in culture, tradition, and lived experience, the Quran requires none of these as epistemological conditions but merely as a field in which examples can be found, and ideas verified. And though we argue against concordism, we only do so insofar as the uncritical acceptence of scientific theories as receptacle into which the Quran mold, as it were, is poured. We strictly differentiate between scientific theories and the scientific method, and argue that the Quran demands the scientific method—the method exemplified in the meditations of Descartes, the logic of Mill, the critiques of Kant, of induction, and detached objectivity.

It requires starting afresh from simple given concepts and, with the aid of reason, working out the material contained therein. This is what the book demands as its preconditions. The tradition, though rich and not to be dismissed, is nonetheless stiffened by generations-old dogma, which would impede the researcher by offering ready-made answers, interpretations, and exposition, all of which it falls upon the individual to pursue and derive.

It’s Strange That the Same Epistemological Problem Is Faced on Both Sides. But what is the alternative, you may ask? We answered this in the last video when we said that, as far as the Quran is concerned, the proof is in the pudding. Here, we couldn’t approach the book except by the book itself. There’s no way around the direct study of the text. The claim of the Quran’s miraculousness is derived from the book, particularly verse 88 of chapter 17:

"Say, ˹O Prophet,˺ ‘If ˹all˺ humans and jinn were to come together to produce the equivalent of this Quran, they could not produce its equal, no matter how they supported each other.’"— Quran 17:88

قُل لَّئِنِ ٱجْتَمَعَتِ ٱلْإِنسُ وَٱلْجِنُّ عَلَىٰٓ أَن يَأْتُوا۟ بِمِثْلِ هَـٰذَا ٱلْقُرْءَانِ لَا يَأْتُونَ بِمِثْلِهِۦ وَلَوْ كَانَ بَعْضُهُمْ لِبَعْضٍۢ ظَهِيرًۭا

The proof of this claim can only be found within the text itself; the same goes for claims regarding the preservation of the Quran. The answer cannot be a mere reference to the names of people in a chain of narration. Instead, we must demonstrate that the text is preserved by laws that hold its structure together and can do so in no other way than what we see. This means applying the principle of sufficient reason to the Quran and specifically the criterion of necessity. Why should it be this way and no other way? We’re here to stress-test the book.

If it was constructed to last for eternity, then, like an engineer designing a bridge, he seeks the best possible way to construct it—the most cost-effective way, using the resources, materials, and technology available to him. He factors in everything of direct and indirect implication; he considers every variable that may arise and potentially compromise his project. And though far from omniscient, he knows and confides in himself the thought that, if given enough knowledge, he could build the best bridge that could ever be built. He knows this by projecting—often through exponential growth models—from the current state of knowledge and technology what’s possible in the future. He knows that it’s a matter of understanding the laws, turning the variables into constants, and making the unpredictable and arcane into computable ‘laws’ and ‘rules’ that can be mastered with simple steps.

"˹He is˺ the Originator of the heavens and earth. How could He have children when He has no mate? He created all things and has ˹perfect˺ knowledge of everything."— Quran 6:101

بَدِيعُ ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضِ ۖ أَنَّىٰ يَكُونُ لَهُۥ وَلَدٌۭ وَلَمْ تَكُن لَّهُۥ صَـٰحِبَةٌۭ ۖ وَخَلَقَ كُلَّ شَىْءٍۢ ۖ وَهُوَ بِكُلِّ شَىْءٍ عَلِيمٌۭ

This projection—this confidence that with enough knowledge any problem can be solved—is just another way of posing the question that many scholars within and outside the Islamic tradition have grappled with: By what measure can one hold that the Quran is God’s work? How does one know that? What’s the criterion? It’s here where the confidence with which the natural scientist approaches nature is needed.

For if the Quran is as much God’s creation as nature is, why shouldn’t the same rigor and confidence equally apply? God’s name, Al-Aleem العليم (The All-Knowing), means that God possesses the means—you may think of them as ‘solutions’ or ‘applications’—that can be immediately invoked to effect some result. Knowledge, as previously discussed, is not what one already knows, but what one could understand, contextualize, predict, and appropriately respond to by knowing the laws and principles. Extend this to the Quran, and what follows is the epistemological rule that grounds the whole text: Knowledge as application.

But what the apt researcher looks for, and why we say the Quran should be approached scientifically, are the same things the engineer, chemist, physicist, geologist, and particularly the mathematician looks for—in a word, problems to solve. The greater the problem, the more foundational it is. But what sort of problems?

Structural problems. Armed with the principle of sufficient reason, the researcher seeks in things the same definitiveness and necessity expressed in fluid dynamics: how water shapes itself according to its medium. Proofs analogous to this are what’s sought. But even this is not evident enough; the next question would be: What makes water so dynamic? This question opens the door to molecular dynamics, physical chemistry, and so on.

Each question, as Gadamer put it, "When a question arises, it breaks open the being of the object, as it were. Hence the logos that explicates this opened-up being is an answer. Its sense lies in the sense of the question." --- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960, 2nd edition, p362-363) .

And finding this to be true, the scientist stops at nothing, convinced that beneath each layer hides another. On this basis, he approaches the architectonic, the infrastructural. The parameters and criteria of analysis appear by themselves, as if nature was truly meant to be revealed to him in exactly the way it is. This is important because it is the presupposition that urges him on.

His method relies heavily on empirical data and their collection—analogous to ‘examples’ showing ‘aspects’ of the phenomenon he’s researching. Based on this data, he builds a mind map to collate and organize them. He develops theories and models, formulates hypotheses, and compares them to each other. The object is to distill the mass of material into its lowest common denominator, i.e., the simplest, most generalizable explanations.

There’s no comparing the level of intellectual exercise and acumen that goes into science with that applied in religious studies and the softer sciences; not even are the criteria the same, to say nothing of the parameters.

The scientific method, independently of its results, is validated by this fact alone: Its objective consists in the discovery of fundamental laws, and in pursuing this task, it seeks to check for any presuppositions that might impede progress. In this, it naturally relies on experiment and reproducing former results with new means and under different conditions. But to be clear, it’s not the purity of empirical observation that absolves, but the freshness and vivacity with which the mind must work. With such diversity and obscurity as can be derived from observation, the scientist has no choice but to think and rethink, to doubt and rework the premises of his judgments, rather than relying solely on the claims of authority. As Ernst Cassirer put it:

"Theory leads to experiment and decides the character of the experiment, just as experiment determines the content of theory." — Ernst Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought (1921), p. 162-163

But the cycle of theory and experiment is not reserved for the hard sciences; it is also used in domains like literature and philology, albeit with a slight modification. The objects of experiment here are other ideas, assertions, and claims, wherein the experimental part consists of what Schleiermacher calls "understanding the other better than he understood himself." This is, we seek to glean the laws in the morphology of ideas. This can be seen in the rigorous works of A.J. Toynbee’s A Study of History, Arthur Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being, and Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. These are some examples of the scientific method being applied in the field of philology and history.

"In a certain sense we arrive at them 'by abstraction,' but the material from which the abstraction is taken is not sensations but the activity of the mind itself, which we grasp in its immanent lawfulness and hence necessity." — Ernst Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought  (1921), p. 102