Proof that Satan didn't write the Koran

YouTube - Clinton on Koran-Burning Controversy

A pastor at a small church in Florida has taken it upon himself to organize a Koran burning ceremony. No doubt this will generate much needed publicity for his small congregation. What I want to focus on is the motivation behind the burning. What most people who discuss this ignore is that he is burning Korans because of his religious belief that Satan wrote the Koran.

Let's consider this for a minute. Maybe you believe that there is a supernatural force that is solely or chiefly responsible for most of the evil in the world. If you don't then I think that if you work at it for a minute you will be able to imagine what it would be like to possess such a belief. Suppose further that you believed that this supernatural force was a person and that this person wrote the Koran.

What features would the Koran have in this case? Well, first of all the Koran would be extremely well written. The style of writing would indicate a supernatural origin. The Koran would inspire billions of people. It would corrupt them causing them to reject truth and do vile, despicable acts. Such a book would corrupt the very soul of the reader.

Now, assuming this was your belief, wouldn't you want to make sure that as few people had a chance to read the Koran as possible? Wouldn't burning the Koran be a supreme act of virtue? Suppose someone were to tell you that doing this would put our troops in danger overseas. You now face a difficult choice. On the one hand, burning the Koran might put our troops in danger. On the other hand, if you don't burn it then someone might actually read it and be led by the prince of darkness into a life of evil.

But aren't our soldiers sent overseas to fight for right and freedom? Haven't they agreed to sacrifice their lives, if need be, in order to serve higher principles? It seems to me that we are missing the point if we simply point out that burning the Koran will place our soldiers serving in Afghanistan in danger. The point that we should be addressing is whether or not the Koran was indeed written by Satan. That is the point that I want to address.

For the purpose of this post, I will consider Satan to be any supernatural force for evil. In order to accept a supernatural explanation we must first rule out natural ones. It makes no sense to invent some unknown, supernatural cause as explanation for some phenomena when a perfectly well understood, natural one will do.

There are many books in the world. Many of these books are known to have been written by human beings. In fact, human agency is the only well accepted explanation for books that we find on this planet. In order to justify the belief that the Koran was written by Beelzebub, we have to present evidence that it could not have been written by one or more humans. If it could have been written by humans, then we have a well documented, known cause for the Koran's origin. We would not be justified in positing some other, more controversial cause.

Does the Koran contain information that no human would have had access to at the time we are led to believe that the Koran was written? I will attempt to show that not only does it contain no such information, but the words of the Koran betray an ignorance that would not be present in Satan.

First let's examine some of the things that the Koran says about mountains. Turn to 16:15: "He[Allah] set firm mountains upon the earth lest it should move away with you". What this is saying is that the creator of the earth put mountains here to hold it in place. This is complete and total nonsense. The mountains are dwarfed by the size of the earth, as I will explain later. Without mountains the earth would follow pretty much the same orbit that it follows now. If you were a malevolent being intent on corrupting all mankind, wouldn't you come up with something better than that. Satan is said to be evil, not stupid. This passage shows cognitive limitations that Satan wouldn't have.

Look somewhere around 41:10: "He set upon the earth mountains towering high above it." Here the author is displaying a similar ignorance. How high is a tall mountain? Ten miles is very tall indeed, and yet this is very little compared to the radius of the earth. Indeed I have read that a grain of dust on a baseball effects its shape more than the tallest mountain effects the shape of the earth. Would Satan really be so ignorant of Geology? If Satan wanted to write passages that imparted false information about the construction of the earth, in order to give people a false confidence in the corrupt moral and ethical values that he wanted to impart, wouldn't he take care to see to it that his efforts wouldn't be undermined when people discovered the true nature of the earth about a thousand years later?

So we see that it is highly unlikely that Satan really wrote the Koran. Its passages reflect an ignorance of Geology that Satan would, in all probability, not possess. A being capable of plotting so much evil would have to be much more knowledgeable than that. Since the Koran was probably written by humans, humans will be able to present effective arguments against whatever errors it contains. It is not necessary to burn the Koran. In fact burning it will prevent you from opening it up and reading it in order to find and point out its errors.