An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 73: Self-Demolishing Logical Fallacies (Sovereignty (al-Mulk))

Sovereignty (al-Mulk) 1-30

Self-Demolishing Logical Fallacies.

Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Qur’an version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Qur’an, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post https://bit.ly/2ApLDy0

For the online Qur’an that I use, see here http://al-quran.info and http://quran.com

Sovereignty (al-Mulk) 1-15

“Blessed is He in whose hands is all sovereignty, and He has power over all things.”

To begin, “mulk” to me is what a Glaswegian would call what you get out of a dairy cow, but no matter. For a change, because this surah is thirty verses of moderate length I’ve split it down the middle with two chunks of fifteen verses each.

Chunk the first, Allah is praised as being the creator of all things, “who created death and life that He may test you [to see] which of you is best in conduct”. So here it’s stated that life is a test to see who is “best in conduct”, and yet at the same time Allah is referred to as the “All-Forgiving”. This cannot possibly be true of there are some things for which Allah does not forgive you and instead decides to throw you into Hell - “For those who defy their Lord is the punishment of hell.” Allah is All-Forgiving, except, apparently, when it comes to defiance. Is this because He can’t forgive defiance? (I’ve seen Christian apologists try to spin it that God is all-merciful but also all-just, and so has to punish people in order to be just. If that makes sense to you, you’re probably a Christian that wants it to make sense). Is it that He can forgive, but choose not to? In either instance, God cannot be All-forgiving.

There is, however, a nicely vivid description of hell - “they hear it blaring, as it seethes, almost exploding with rage”. Isn’t there always? It’s funny how hell always comes across as more dramatic and interesting than the dull tranquillity of heaven? How in his etchings for the Bible, the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, Gustav Doré puts a lot more effort into the ghoulish and bizarre episodes than he does the transcendent and heavenly.

Talking of which, we are told “He created seven heavens in layers” and “We have certainly adorned the lowest heaven with lamps, and made them missiles against the devils”. I wonder if the stars (for which these lamps of the lowest heaven surely are) as missiles is a reference to meteors? That’s quite a nice poetic image (shame Allah doesn’t want you to depict it). The reader/listener is told “Look again! Do you see any flaw?” Er… is that a serious question? “Look again, once more. Your look will return to you humbled and weary”. No, really, the sky doesn’t work like that. Seems like a fairly fundamental flaw to me, but I appreciate the poetic license.

Sovereignty16-30

“Are you secure that He who is in the sky will not make the earth swallow you while it quakes?”

The rest of this chapter is pretty much a series of “look at the trees” arguments. Earthquakes are caused by tectonic movement, not “He in the sky”. (And I note with amusement here, since the derogatory atheist reference to God as the “magic man in the sky” is pretty much claimed to be true here).

There’s what could have been a good rhetorical device here, in that the next verse asks “Are you secure that He who is in the sky will not unleash upon you a rain of stones?”, but then the “Are you secure…” motif is a abandoned after two goes. Shame. And, yes, pretty much, since rains of stones are not commonly recorded meteorological phenomena. Hail … stones, perhaps. But again – not the man in the sky doing it.

There are some other weak arguments from ignorance - “Have they not regarded the birds above them spreading and closing their wings?” Apparently, once again no-one sustains them but Allah. Or aerodynamic properties. And furthermore “‘It is He who created you, and made for you hearing, eyesight, and hearts. Little do you thank’”. Thank you God, for blindness, deafness, cataracts, astigmatism, cardiomyopthies, angina, septal defects, aortal coarctation, glaucoma, Ménière's disease, otitis media and Usher’s syndrome. If You made it, own Your mistakes.

There are a few verses about why you should put your faith in God, because things (including yourself) exist, and the chapter ends with another argument from ignorance, “Say, ‘Tell me, should your water sink down [into the ground], who will bring you running water?’” To me, this is a malformed question. There is no “who” to bring you running water. The presence, or not, of running water is determined by prevailing global weather patterns meeting local geography, which determines how much water vapour is carried in the air and how likely it is to condense out as precipitation. If water distribution was a system created by a designing mind, you’d expect (I’d expect) something along the lines of the watering system you’d find in a greenhouse, such that adequate quantities were supplied regularly and therefore guaranteeing that everything that needed water got exactly what it needed. Not this chaotic mess of droughts and floods where things got either too much or too little to the extent that they die. If there’s an intelligence behind that it’s either not competent or not benevolent, it can’t be both.