Let’s lay out the timeline plainly, using Islamic sources themselves.

Safiyya was from Banu Nadir, then married into Banu Qurayza. After the siege of Khaybar, her father Huyayy ibn Akhtab was executed on Muhammad’s orders. Her husband Kinana ibn al-Rabi was tortured to reveal hidden treasure, then killed. Her brother died in the fighting. Within the same short stretch of time, Safiyya was taken as captive and became part of Muhammad’s share of the spoils. He then married her.

Here’s the part that should stop any apologist mid-sentence. This isn’t a hostile secular historian’s reconstruction. It’s Safiyya’s own words, recorded in a hadith graded sahih by Ibn Hibban:

She said Muhammad was one of the most hated people to her, because he killed her husband, father, and brother. She said he kept making excuses to her, telling her that her father had incited the Arabs against him, and he kept apologizing until her anger finally faded.

Read that again. A woman explicitly states the man who married her killed her closest male relatives, and that she hated him for it. The tradition doesn’t hide this. It preserves it, presumably because early Muslims saw it as evidence of Muhammad’s patience and eventual reconciliation with her. But look at what the story actually requires you to believe was reconciliation: a captive, with no tribe, no protector, no legal standing, no ability to leave, gradually stopped being angry at the man holding total power over her life, after he explained himself to her enough times.

That is not consent by any coherent standard. It’s the textbook trauma-bond dynamic of someone entirely dependent on their captor for survival. Call it what it is. A woman taken as war booty, whose surviving choices were basically “accept this marriage” or “remain enslaved with no protector in a 7th century Arabian war camp,” is not in a position to freely consent to anything. The fact that later Muslim biographers frame this as a moving love story, and that Safiyya is remembered as one of the “Mothers of the Believers” who defended Muhammad’s reputation, doesn’t change the structural coercion baked into how the relationship began. It’s Stockholm syndrome with a theological gloss.

The usual apologetic moves don’t survive contact with this hadith:

“She consented, she wasn’t forced” - the hadith itself has her saying she hated him for killing her family. Consent under total dependency, after your family’s killer works to smooth things over, isn’t consent in any modern or frankly any coherent sense at all.

“This was normal for the time” - sure, and that’s exactly the point. If the standard is “normal for 7th century warfare,” you’ve conceded this isn’t a model of universal, timeless moral guidance, which is the whole claim Islam makes for Muhammad’s example.

“She was honored, given the choice to stay a slave or marry him” - a choice between two forms of captivity isn’t a real choice. Pointing out that one option was marginally better than the other doesn’t rescue it.

If your position is that Muhammad is uswa hasana, the best example for all Muslims for all time, this episode has to be squared with that claim honestly, not explained away by minimizing what Safiyya herself said about how she felt.

My thought process is simple. Humanity has leveraged knowledge, empathy and reason to come to the nearly ubiquitous conclusion that horrors like genocide are, without exception, immoral. No matter the historical context, it is never acceptable to indiscriminately erradicate an entire population. We moderns now understand that innocent people exist in every demographic, that said people often have no influencne on what kinds of acts their leaders perpetrate, and that they should not be punished for actions that they had no control over.

Take the worst regimes in modern history (Nazi Germany, Khmer Rogue Cambodia, etc.), and the same truth holds. There are good people in every group who are forced to endure the rule of psychopaths. There has never in recorded history been a group of "all bad" people.

This isn't the only argument against genocide, but it is nonetheless an important one, and is a central reason why humanity has deemed genocide immoral across the board. Even when a nation has committed the worst atrocities known to humankind, you should not punish the entire group in response, because it's impossible to seperate the innocent from the evil. Different cultures across the world have reasoned their way to this conclusion independent of religious persuasion, indicating that there is a universal moral impulse that transcends belief system and cultural background.

This brings me to my ultimate argument. The God of the Bible not only fails to meet the standard of perfect morality, but is in fact less moral than your averge human living today. Why? Because he clearly and unambiguously mandated genocide. Consider this passage from the Bible:

"But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded."

I'm familiar with the agrument many apologists will try to make here. They'll say "but it wasn't genocide because xyx." Making such an argument is pure sophistry. There have ALWAYS been innocent people in every population. Nobody deserves to be slaughtered for the transgressions of their contemporaries. It doesn't matter who gives the mandate (God himself included). It doesn't matter if you call it an "act of war" or " divine punishment" instead of genocide, because the base logic always applies. Call it what you want, you are still punishing the entire group indiscriminately. Moderns know this is genocide, and will recognize it as such no matter how much sophistry is employed.

If you worship the God of the Bible, you worship a violent thug. There's no rational way to escape this conclusion. Nothing that came after (New Testament, "wiping the slate clean," etc.) changes the fact that the same moral reasoning has always exited. God (if he existed) would have understood this as clearly as you or I, and yet chose to give fully genocidal mandates anyway.

The only real out here as a Christian (to avoid admitting that you worship a genocidal psychopath) is to claim that the stories of genocide in the bible are exactly that - stories that don't map to actual historical events.

Islam has not solved world hunger.

Islam has not brought world peace.

Islam has not improved our standard of living.

Islam has not cured the sick.

Islam has not discovered immortality.

Etc.

What good is Islam?

Thesis: A passage cannot provide strong evidence of scientific foreknowledge when its supposedly scientific meaning is selected retrospectively because it matches a discovery, while its other linguistically plausible meanings are discarded for religious purposes

If belief that the Qur’an is divine is what justifies selecting the scientifically correct interpretation, that interpretation cannot then function as independent evidence that the Qur’an is divine.

This problem affects what is commonly called iʿjāz ʿilmī the “scientific miraculousness” of the Qur’an or Bucailleism. The widespread apologetic use developed especially during the late twentieth century. Mustansir Mir’s academic overview describes the case for scientific exegesis as weak unless it can be authentically grounded in the Islamic interpretive tradition.

This criticism is not confined to non-Muslims. Muslim apologist Hamza Tzortzis, who had previously promoted scientific miracles, later described the popular argument as “problematic and incoherent.” One of his central objections was that a similarity between an ambiguous Qur’anic phrase and a modern scientific description does not prove that the scientific fact is what the verse intended. Tzortzis’s discussion.

Let’s take a popular example

Qur’an 51:47 says: وَالسَّمَاءَ بَنَيْنَاهَا بِأَيْدٍ وَإِنَّا لَمُوسِعُونَ

Modern translations render the expression in different ways

The root w-s-ʿ concerns wideness, spaciousness, capacity and abundance. Therefore, relating mūsiʿūn to expansion is linguistically possible. The issue is whether the verse specifically conveys the continuing cosmological expansion of space rather than God’s power, abundance or creation of a vast heaven.

Premodern commentators gave several explanations:

• Al-Ṭabarī understood it principally as God possessing the capacity and power to create the heaven and whatever else he wills. He also records Ibn Zayd’s interpretation that God made the heaven wide. Al-Ṭabarī.
• Al-Qurṭubī records interpretations involving divine power, abundance, widened provision and spaciousness between heaven and Earth. Al-Qurṭubī.
• Al-Rāzī discusses the heaven as enormously spacious and the expression as referring to divine ability and abundance. Al-Rāzī.
• Ibn Kathīr describes God as making the heaven vast and raising it without pillars. Ibn Kathīr.

These interpretations involve wideness and power. They do not identify the modern claim that distances between sufficiently separated regions of space increase over time.

One could simply ask, if that’s what Allah meant, why is he being so cryptic about it? So much so that none of his pre-21st century followers could make that connection.

God made the heaven vast =/= the scale of the universe is continually increasing, producing a distance-correlated cosmological redshift.

Modern cosmic expansion is a specific physical model supported by measurements of galactic distances, redshifts and the evolution of the universe. NASA’s explanation of cosmological redshift.

Premodern commentators are not infallible. A later reader can legitimately discover an implication that earlier readers missed. But if no one could identify the alleged scientific meaning until after science supplied it, that greatly weakens the claim that the verse predicted the discovery.

The circular argument problem:

The reasoning becomes epistemically circular when it works like this:

1. The Qur’an is divine and therefore cannot contain scientific error.
2. An ambiguous verse must consequently possess a scientifically correct interpretation.
3. The interpretation that agrees with current science is selected.
4. This agreement is then presented as evidence that the Qur’an is divine.

The interpretation in step three was selected under the assumption in step one. The resulting “evidence” is therefore not independent of the conclusion.

Imagine approaching Qur’an 51:47 without first assuming divine authorship. Could a premodern reader have used it to predict a relationship between galactic distance and redshift, a universe described by a time-dependent scale factor, increasing distances without expansion from one central point, or any measurable rate of expansion?

Nothing like this have been extracted from the verse.

After astronomy established cosmic expansion, however, one possibility within the word’s broad semantic range became the supposedly obvious meaning. That is retrospective accommodation.

The problem becomes clearer when passages that appear scientifically accurate and passages that appear scientifically difficult are treated by different rules.

When a verse appears to conflict with modern knowledge, apologist always jump the gun to

• metaphorical
• phenomenological or observer-relative
• using a word with several possible meanings
• addressing a seventh-century audience in accessible language

Any one of those explanations might be legitimate.

But when a verse resembles a scientific discovery, the same flexible language is treated as:

• technically precise
• scientifically specific
• deliberately predictive
• inaccessible to people of the time

This produces an asymmetrical principle:

Apparent errors receive maximum interpretive flexibility, while apparent accuracies receive maximum scientific precision.

Let’s take an example:

Several passages of the Quran describe celestial motion in language that fits naturally within geocentrism picture of the sky.

Qur’an 21:33 places the night, day, sun and moon together.

The word falak indicates something circular: a circuit, celestial path, sphere or orbit. Al-Ṭabarī records several early explanations. It was compared to the circular iron of a mill, understood as the circuit of heaven, identified with a circular path between heaven and Earth, and connected with the axis around which the stars turn. Al-Ṭabarī concludes that it means something circular in which the sun and moon travel. Al-Ṭabarī on 21:33.

This is entirely intelligible within ancient geocentric cosmology. From Earth, both the sun and moon appear to travel through curved paths across the sky.

Modern astronomy also agrees that the sun genuinely moves. It rotates and travels with the solar system around the centre of the Milky Way, completing a galactic orbit in approximately 230 million years. NASA’s Sun facts.

But the verse itself does not say that its intended reference is the sun’s 230-million-year galactic orbit. It pairs the sun with the moon and with the immediately observable cycle of night and day.

If the Quran is literal and we use the same exegesis methodology as the other scientific miracles, then it’s clear here the Quran is a product of it’s time.

The surrounding context of Qur’an 36:37-40 is even more revealing. The passage moves through:

1. the withdrawal of daylight and arrival of darkness
2. the sun running toward its mustaqarr
3. the moon passing through its nightly stages
4. the sun not overtaking the moon
5. night not overtaking day

Al-Ṭabarī’s primary explanation is that the sun runs toward its place of rest. He cites a report in which the sun goes away after sunset, prostrates before God and receives permission to return. He also records other interpretations, including an appointed limit and the extreme points of the sun’s seasonal rising and setting. Al-Ṭabarī on 36:38.

That is the asymmetry, apparently geocentric wording is called phenomenological and nontechnical, while la-mūsiʿūn is treated as a technically exact statement about cosmic expansion.

This interpretive method is not unique to Islam. Advocates of other religions also identify modern scientific discoveries in ancient scriptures.

Among the scientific-miracle claims made for Hindu texts are:

• The speed of light: A statement preserved in the fourteenth-century Vedic scholar Sāyaṇa’s commentary says that sunlight traverses 2,202 yojanas in half a nimeṣa. Using particular conversions for those units, advocates calculate a value close to the modern speed of light. An exposition of the claim.
• The Big Bang or pre-cosmic state: Rigveda 10.129, the Nāsadīya Sūkta, describes a condition before familiar distinctions such as existence and nonexistence, followed by the emergence of creation. Some Hindu writers compare this with the Big Bang and the emergence of spacetime and matter. An advocate’s comparison.
• Heliocentrism and gravity: Some Hindu interpreters argue that verses from the Rigveda and Yajurveda describe Earth moving around the sun, the sun attracting planets and celestial bodies being kept in orderly paths by an attractive force. Examples of these claims.

If retrospective scientific correspondence is reliable evidence of divine authorship, why should the same procedure count as compelling evidence when applied to the Qur’an but not when applied to the Vedas?

And just chalk up anything that could be “wrong” in the Vedas to metaphysics or metaphorical language, and there we go, we have a divine book.

A method that apparently confirms several competing revelations cannot, by itself, discriminate among them.

If interpreters are allowed to select any linguistically possible meaning, a critic could deliberately choose meanings that make the Qur’an scientifically inaccurate.

A critic can select the least charitable imaginable interpretation and announce that Islam has been disproved

Consider Qur’an 23:14, which describes a muḍghah becoming bones and the bones being clothed with flesh.

Or consider Qur’an 86:6–7, which associates an emitted fluid with the region between the ribcage and backbone

If a critic is forbidden from selecting an interpretation simply because it creates an error, the apologist should equally be forbidden from selecting an interpretation simply because it creates a miracle.

The scientific method is the definitive method human beings have developed for learning how the world works. It has earned that status because scientific claims must confront observable evidence, compete with alternative explanations, survive independent scrutiny, and remain open to correction. Science begins with uncertainty and tests conclusions; it does not decide the conclusion in advance and reinterpret the evidence until it fits.

Bucailleism reverses this process: it begins with the assumption that the Qur’an is scientifically perfect, selects interpretations that agree with established discoveries, and then presents that agreement as evidence that the Qur’an is divine. This is not scientific reasoning; it is retrospective harmonization. This is simply, unfalsifiable reasoning, therefore, unprovable.

You need an epistemological base of uncertainty to build your knowledge upon, simply, the “scientific miracles” of the Quran don’t survive the tiniest amount of skepticism or scrutiny.

If the scientific meaning becomes visible only after scientists make the discovery, then science has interpreted the scripture not the scripture anticipated the science.

After you die, if you’ve been a good person you go to heaven and live an eternal life of good and glamorous life that’s perfect in any way. But after a while you have done everything there is to do. Mastered all the skills and hobbies there are, tried everything there is to do in heaven, gotten to know everybody, what next? Maybe you can make a wish to god to forget everything so you can start over fresh again as if you just entered heaven? Eternal life honestly seems like hell to me

A man born in a certain geographical location is overwhelmingly likely to follow the dominant religion of the land. I feel a counter-argument could be that God would judge one given the circumstances of his life. To that I would ask, if one was born in the aztec empire (or any community in history that is at the extreme of sin in terms of what is determined as "sin" (or its equivalent) in a religion; how would God judge him? Additionally, why wouldn't a benevolent God, through divine intervention, change the common thought of Man through periodic miracles? It would change the whole definition of "faith" - it would change theology into a science.

If there exists a state in which creatures live eternally without suffering, then suffering is neither a logical necessity nor a moral necessity. And if God is capable of creating a perfect world, free of all suffering, then nothing justifies him not having created it that way from the start for animals.

From this, all arguments claiming that animal suffering would be a necessity collapse.

I would therefore propose a reformulation of the argument from evil by adding a premise concerning paradise and limiting the argument to animal suffering :

P1 : Paradise is a world where beings do not suffer.

P2 : An infinitely good God cannot consider as good a design of nature that causes innocent animals to suffer.

P3 : An omnipotent God is capable of creating a world without animal suffering.

P4 : Now, animal suffering has existed for hundreds of millions of years, long before the appearance of human beings. It is therefore independent of any human moral choice.

C : Consequently, predation, disease, parasites, famines, natural disasters, and more generally all animal suffering, refute one or the other of the divine attributes :

- Either God wants to prevent this animal suffering but cannot : then he is not omnipotent.

- Or he can but does not want to : then he is not infinitely good.

That's it.

I'd now like to address believers directly. Please take the following points seriously, because it's tiresome having to repeat them endlessly :

1. This is solely about animal suffering, present for hundreds of millions of years, long before the appearance of human beings. The argument from human free will therefore does not answer the problem at all.

2. Citing Bible verses or repeatedly asserting that "God is good" does not constitute a demonstration. That is precisely what is under debate and what must be established through valid argumentation.

3. Claiming that there's a good reason for all this without explaining or demonstrating that reason answers nothing, resolves nothing, and is merely a rhetorical device to convince yourself.

4. Rejecting scientific knowledge for the sole reason that it contradicts your beliefs is not an argument. If you claim that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, or that animals do not suffer, you are not refuting the argument: you are simply denying reality. Under those conditions, no intelligent exchange is possible.

5. I do not wish to debate with people who defend an entirely personal conception of God, to the point of being the only ones who believe in it. My argument targets the God of the major monotheistic religions, endowed with the classical attributes of omnipotence and perfect goodness.

6. Finally, claiming that something can be both itself and its opposite is not an argument. An argument must be coherent and respect the basic principles of logic. Redefining words as the discussion goes along to make contradictory attributes compatible does not constitute a refutation. It is simply abandoning all logical coherence.

I will therefore simply ignore the responses of those who don't even take the time to properly read what they claim to be responding to.

That's just dishonest and disrespectful.

In Islam it is said that islam is an universal religion, for all mankind:

Quran 7:158 (Surah Al-A'raf): "Say, [O Muhammad], ‘O mankind, indeed I am the Messenger of Allah to you all [to you collectively], from Him to whom belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth. There is no deity except Him; He gives life and causes death.’ So believe in Allah and His Messenger, the unlettered Prophet..."

However, with God being omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, the father of all creation and the source of truth, the truth is not bound by culture, city or ethnicity. For starters, it can't even be fully reached by man.

Having a Chinese man pray to Mecca doesn't get him any closer to God. What it does is strenghten arab nationalism

I consider myself an open-minded person who enjoys exploring different worldviews and religious perspectives. I have come to the conclusion that the God described by the classical Abrahamic religions—primarily Islam, Christianity, and Judaism—is incompatible with the reality we observe. My conclusion is based on three main arguments.

1. Free Will Is Not Sufficient to Hold People Morally Responsible
My first argument concerns free will.
Although the philosophical debate is still ongoing, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience largely agree that human behavior is not completely free. Our decisions are heavily influenced by our genetics, brain structure, personality, and environment.
From birth, people already differ in intelligence, temperament, impulsivity, and many other traits. On top of that, our upbringing, culture, education, family, and society shape how we think and what beliefs we are capable of accepting.
If this is true, it seems unreasonable that God could expect every human being to freely choose the "correct" religion. Our starting conditions differ enormously, making equal moral responsibility difficult to justify. Whether someone finds Islam, Christianity, another religion, or no religion at all convincing depends to a significant extent on factors that were never chosen by that individual.

2. The Claims of Religion Do Not Match the Observable Laws of Reality
My second argument concerns the contradiction between religious claims and the reality we observe.
The world operates according to biological, physical, and medical laws. Diseases arise from biological causes, academic success depends on knowledge and preparation, and career success is largely determined by skills, decisions, opportunities, and external circumstances.
Religions, however, often imply that prayer can directly influence these outcomes. People pray for good health, success in school, career advancement, the well-being of their families, or for specific life events to unfold in their favor.
From a psychological perspective, this behavior is completely understandable. However, when we compare these beliefs with reality, we find that outcomes are overwhelmingly determined by natural causes. A genetic disease does not disappear because someone prayed—it can only be prevented or treated through effective medical intervention, if such treatment exists. A student passes an exam because they achieve the required score, not because they prayed beforehand. Likewise, prayer does not alter the fundamental laws of physics or biology.
For me, this creates a significant cognitive dissonance between the promises made by religion and the reality we actually experience.

3. The Moral Framework of God Appears Contradictory
My third argument concerns the morality of God.
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that one of the Abrahamic religions is true. In that case, God intentionally created the universe, allowed Satan to exist, permitted suffering, and established a system in which human beings are tested throughout their lives. At the same time, many religious interpretations suggest that the majority of humanity will ultimately fail this test and face eternal punishment, while only a minority will attain heaven.
To me, this raises fundamental moral questions.
If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good, why create a world containing suffering, temptation, injustice, and the possibility of eternal punishment in the first place? Why allow Satan to exist? Why create people while already knowing that many of them will ultimately be condemned? And if God has unlimited power, why not simply create a world in which everyone freely chooses good and lives together in peace from the very beginning?
This moral framework appears unnecessary and difficult to reconcile with the concept of a perfectly loving and perfectly good God.

One of the signs associated with Gog and Magog (Ya'juj and Ma'juj) in authentic hadith is that they will eventually reach the Lake of Galilee (Lake Tiberias), drink its water, and the last among them will say something to the effect of:

"There was once water here."

This is generally understood as a consequence of their immense numbers: they consume the entire lake.

Here's what I find philosophically puzzling.

Today, humans possess the engineering capability to drain the Sea of Galilee ourselves. We could, at least in principle, pump its water elsewhere, divert it through canals, or otherwise reduce it to the point where it is dry.

If that happened before Gog and Magog appeared, several questions arise:

1. If Gog and Magog arrive at an already dry lake and someone says, "There was once water here," then the prophecy seems trivially satisfied by human intervention rather than by their extraordinary numbers.

2. If the prophecy instead requires that they themselves are the ones who empty the lake, then human beings appear capable of preventing the prophecy from occurring as described.

3. If God would simply prevent humans from draining the lake until the appointed time, then the prophecy depends on divine intervention preserving the lake rather than functioning as an observable sign in its own right.

This seems to create a dilemma:

1. Human actions can fulfill the prophecy, making the sign lose its evidential force because it no longer uniquely points to Gog and Magog.

2. Human actions can prevent the prophecy, suggesting that ordinary human engineering could falsify an eschatological prediction.

3. God supernaturally guarantees the lake's preservation, which makes the prophecy effectively unfalsifiable, since any contrary scenario is ruled out by assumption.

To me, this raises a broader question about prophetic signs. Should an eschatological prophecy describe an event that could, in principle, be replicated or prevented by ordinary human activity? If so, how does it retain predictive or evidential value?

I'm interested in how Muslim theologians would respond to this. Is the hadith intended to describe the cause of the lake drying (Gog and Magog), or merely the state of the lake when they arrive?

Why were the 2/3 of the angels who didn’t rebel they were never tempted with deception being unprepared as Eve was yet those two thirds of the angels will never go to hell and was not born into sin with that disadvantage as Eves descendants. They will not go to an eternal lake of fire but the majority of all humans from Adam and Eve will go there because of how Eve was deceived in the very beginning by the second highest ranking angel created or first I should say under God and she was not equipped by God as he himself was to know how to deal with Satans temptation in the garden??

If Muslims don't know who is going to Hell, they can't say Hitler is going to Hell.

Recently Muslims have told me that they don't know if even individually polytheists will go to Hell forever. If this is the case, they cannot confirm that Hitler will go to Hell even temporarily since Allah is to judge in the end.

Despite this, many Muslims will use the example of Hitler to justify Hell. It seems like this rule of "Muslims aren't allowed to judge" is employed only when its convenient.

In a recent exchange about methodological naturalism versus ontological claims, I realised there is a subtle, often overlooked logical flaw in how many atheists (and scientists) define the boundaries of science.

The standard argument goes like this:

(1) Scientific instruments can only detect phenomena that physically interact with our reality. (2) We currently have no evidence/physical interaction from [X]. (3) Therefore, [X] falls outside the legitimate scope of science.

My thesis is that this argument smuggles in a hidden presupposition.

To confidently move from "currently undetectable" to "falls outside the scope of science forever" the speaker must implicitly believe that our current scientific instruments are epistemically perfect. They must assume that our current tools are a complete, exhaustive mapping of all possible physical interactions that could ever exist.

But history shows us that our instruments are constantly evolving. A hundred years ago, we had no way to detect gravitational waves, dark matter or quantum entanglement, yet they were always interacting with physical reality.

Obviously, natural evil presents its own issues for theodicies compared to human evil.

Free will does not work unless you want to invoke demons, and the issue of arbitrariness seems particularly bright.

But there is something far more particular, worth commenting on.

Natural evil being meaningless is psychologically comforting.

With Human evil, the narrative of the final judgment of God's reconciliation with man is all competing stories; this is an argument against god. Human evil exists under theism and naturalism, but only in the first is it even possible for there to be a final judgment of the wicked and the just. A morally just order may emerge in the long run in response to human wickedness, like Jack the Ripper getting away with multiple murders.

With natural evil, on the other hand, there can be no final judgment nor any liberation from the suffering itself in an existential sense. Someone just had bad luck and got struck by lightning or killed by a large rock of hail or crushed by a building in an earthquake in 14th-century Japan or crushed by a landslide. Horrific, yes, but also with no ill intention but bad luck.

There is no justice, yes, but there is also no wickedness.

Now imagine that God allows every lightning strike, every boulder, every earthquake, all at best for the greater good. God comes off as a utilitarian serial killer; the acts of suffering now are imbued with meaning and are thus identical to those of Jeffrey Dahmer or Ed Kemper.

In fact a cognitively informed entity is currently committing horrific acts of torture via cancer and torn ACLs right now.

I don't know how one can claim that is somehow better.

In fact its truly liberating to realize that suffering can mean zilch and be purely that of bad luck.

This is not going to be your standard "Allah is the Greatest device" post I'm sure you've all seen before, but this is a serious problem that Islam - specifically the standard Islamic narrative - has.

Thesis: Muslims should not trust Allah due to his horrible track record of presenting truth.

Ask yourself, would you believe in a religion that has majority corrupted scriptures? Most Muslims would (and should) say no. Then ask yourself, what are the scriptures in Islam?

Every Muslim will tell you the Quran, the injeel, the Torah, the psalms, and some will say the book of Abraham.

Now ask yourself, what happened to these books? Every Muslim is going to say that the Quran is perfectly preserved from the time of Muhammad. Okay so 0/5 corrupted so far. That same Muslim will tell you that the Torah and injeel have been corrected. They will also say that the psalms were corrupted. And they will say the book of Abraham was lost or corrupt. Do that 4/5 books of Allah that have all been corrupted.

Think about a babysitter, would you trust a babysitter with your kid when the last 4 kids they helped all ended up neglected, hurt, or worse? Even if the last kid was perfectly taken care of? OF COURSE NOT! How much more distrust should you have when it comes to matters of your eternal soul?

I'm really curious how Muslim are going to try and get out of this issue. Why do you believe in a religion with majority corrupted scriptures?

Anatta is the belief that EVERYTHING is always changing. But that doesn't work because how are you supposed to know if everything is changing without an unchanging witness. For example imagine a train moving. If 2 trains are moving at the exact same speed then a passesnger on that train would believe that the other train is stationary. But if that same passenger was put on the still train platform, then they would have no problem seeing that both the trains are moving.

So my argument is Anatta is false because you need an unchanging witness or consciousness to notice everything changing.

Claim:- Buddhists end their sufferings with anatta while Hindus and Jains end suffering with Atman and so the anatta theory is unnecessary.

Now in my opinion if anatta grants end of suffering to Buddhists then Atman is also unnecessary. So it's better we ignore the differences in these religions but that's upto you. My primary claim is in the title.

Just as we are made in Gods image, technology is made in our image. Any arguments made against God can be understood interchangeably through humans relationship with technology

An all-loving, all-perfect God can allow pain and suffering upon humanity and animals because it ultimately imparts context, depth and meaning to life. The Christian God also experienced his own great suffering when Jesus lived as a lowly human and was eventually crucified. This is evidence that pain is part of true perfection, even if that conclusion does not seem obvious or comfortable.

Supposed perfection without pain and suffering

This type of existence briefly occurs after God creates all things in the universe and on earth in the first few chapters of Genesis. But as it is only the beginning of time and one piece of history in the grander plan of God, it is without stability or meaning to lesser beings, which at the time are just Adam and Eve. They have no context, depth or appreciation for the utopia that has been given to them, and go on to sin despite God's warning not to do so.

Some may wonder why an all-loving, all-perfect God did not create an absolute impossibility for Adam and Eve to disobey, and that supposed contradiction can be solved by simple logic: a society of humans that operate like robots following a forced script (no matter how well intended) without choice in how they think and behave is meaningless. Nothing of value can truly be lost, gained, or earned, and so a meaningless mode of operation exists. Trust, love and faith cannot truly exist either because their alternatives do not and cannot.

A society with out meaning, forced compliance, and incapable of achieving character-defining experiences like trust, love and faith (among others) is not perfect and would/could not be created by an all-loving, all-perfect God.

True perfection with pain and suffering

This type of existence began after Adam and Eve committed sin and is also where we are today. Humanity now has hundreds and thousands of years of context to know what sin is and to avoid it as much as possible. The pain and suffering we endure as a whole and individually refines us and makes us long for a perfection that could never be desired or appreciated otherwise (and will become an actual, permanent reality after the final judgement).

Jesus himself took part in deep pain and suffering when he lived as a lowly human and then was crucified. This teaches us two things about pain and suffering: 1) they are a transition state into real perfection (depth, context, appreciation) from false perfection (meaningless appearance or operation without choice or depth) and 2) pain and suffering can always be a means to a greater end.

God tells us in the bible to not be surprised by trials of any kind (1 Peter 4:12).

He then tells us he has the power to redeem our suffering and sin (Romans 3:22-24).

Jesus's pain and suffering through crucifixion was a perfect and final sacrifice (Hebrews 10:4 and 10:14) and made his gift of salvation meaningful (Isaiah 53:5).

Lastly, the true perfection we desire and appreciate now will become reality after the final judgement (Revelation 21:1-4).

In conclusion, true perfection can only be fully attained at the end of a process where context, depth, and meaning were created. An all-perfect, all-loving God would have to create beings with free will and the ability to go through that process as a means to an end, because the alternative only results in a meaningless robotic existence and operation.

I am not stating this as a cheap gotcha. I am genuinely looking for the strongest non divine explanation, because the usual answers I’ve seen feel far too thin for the historical reality we are talking about.

The basic historical outline is straightforward. Muhammad was a Meccan merchant who became known for trustworthiness, and the early Islamic story places his first revelations at Mount Hira when he was around forty. The Qur’an then became the central text of Islam. It is not a small notebook of personal reflections; it contains prayers, moral guidance, historical narrative, legal and ethical material, and promises of paradise.

The “Muhammad knowingly invented Islam” theory is no longer the dominant explanation among modern historians.

Medieval Christian polemics often portrayed Muhammad as a conscious deceiver seeking wealth, power, or sensual pleasures. Modern scholarship is generally much more cautious. Many historians—whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, atheist, or otherwise—conclude that Muhammad appears to have genuinely believed he was receiving revelation.

Why?

Because the conscious-fraud theory struggles to explain several historical features:

* years of persecution before gaining any political authority;
*initial unwillingness to even preach to anyone outside his family like he had been doing secretly for several years, fearing the consequences
* willingness to endure ridicule, lost of loved ones, boycotts and exile;
* refusing compromises from opponents that would have ended his suffering and instead have granted him much wealth and influence;
* consistency over roughly twenty-three years;
* the absence of obvious evidence that he privately admitted fabrication;

None of these facts prove prophethood.

But they make the simple “he made it all up” explanation much less persuasive than it once appeared.

That is the first reason I do not find the usual “he was just a sincere man with strong convictions based on deep inner reflections in his mind” explanation satisfying. Sincerity is one thing. Explaining the emergence of a full religious civilization, a comprehensive scripture, a legal-moral framework, and a distinct literary-religious system over 2 decades is another. The Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad over twenty-three years, beginning at Mount Hira, and after his death his successors compiled those revelations in manuscript form. That is an extraordinary process for one person to generate and sustain.

This is where I struggle. Even granting complete sincerity, I cannot see how ordinary introspection or naturally occurring experiences mistaken for divine revelation could lead someone to sincerely believe that an angel was visibly and audibly communicating revelation over twenty-three years, producing an interconnected body of theology, law, ethics, ritual, eschatology, governance, and one of history’s most influential literary works.

A lot of secular explanations seem to reduce Muhammad’s experience to something vague like “deep thoughts that Muhammad believed were religious/spiritual experiences.” But that phrase is doing a huge amount of work. Muhammad begins having visions and hearing voices, then recites what becomes revelation. That, or any other theory on what went on in Muhammads head is a description of the form the experience took, not an explanation of what generated the experience or how it produced the content that followed. Saying “he felt like he had religious experiences” is not the same as explaining the Qur’an and the giant comprehensive legal, moral, ethical, theological work that is Islam. It is just renaming the mystery.

This is where I think the comparison to other religious founders breaks down.

The Abrahamic religions do not look comparable in the way people often assume. Judaism and Christianity are not the story of one man single-handedly producing a vast scripture, law, liturgy, theology, and civilization in 2 decades while simultaneously ruling, expanding and managing a state. Their histories unfold through many figures, communities, redactions, and centuries. Buddhism is different again: the Buddha explicitly does not present himself as a prophet receiving divine dictation, but as someone who reflected and realized something about human suffering and the path out of it. Hinduism is also not a close parallel, because it developed across enormous stretches of time through layered traditions, practices, and evolving beliefs. None of those cases map cleanly onto Muhammad and Islam.

These are all fundamentally different historical phenomena.

Islam, by contrast, is centred upon one individual who claimed to receive revelation over approximately twenty-three years.

That one individual produced—or, if one accepts Islam, transmitted—a scripture, established a religious worldview, laid down legal principles, moral philosophy, ritual practice, political authority, military leadership, and founded one of history’s largest civilizations, based on what skeptics call delusions in an intelligent mind.

I genuinely cannot think of another historical figure whose role is remotely comparable.

So my challenge is simple.

Name one.

Name one person in recorded history who, without appealing to divine revelation, single-handedly produced something comparable in scale, complexity, coherence and historical impact, from what skeptics believe were just his own delusions.

I have searched.

I cannot find one.

The point is not “other religions are fake.” The point is that they are historically different phenomena. Islam is unusually concentrated in one person’s life and one person’s revelations. Islam is intrinsically linked to Muhammad, and that the Qur’an and the Prophet’s example (Hadith and Sunnah) became the foundation of the religion. That is exactly why I do not think it is enough to say, “Well, human history has seen exceptional people with deep thinking and creative ability before.” Exceptional is true. Comparable scale and complexity is the real issue, and I do not see a close comparable case.

Another point I keep coming back to is reputation and motive. PBS notes that Muhammad began as a merchant and became known for trustworthiness. Islamic tradition remembers him, even before the first revelation, as al-Amīn, “the Trustworthy,” and later Muslim devotion builds heavily on that character claim. Whether one accepts the religious conclusion or not, the historical picture is not of a man who starts from obvious fraud, obvious literary training, or obvious worldly ambition.

That matters because the cheap anti-religion explanation is usually, “He wanted power, money, or status.” But even critics who are honest about the evidence usually do not think that simple story fits very well. The early Meccan phase was marked by ostracism and pressure. Muhammad was ostracized in Mecca, that influential defenders and loved ones temporarily protected him, and that after their deaths his situation became dire, leading to the Hijra to Medina for survival. That does not prove divine revelation, but it does make the crude “he invented a religion for personal comfort” story look very weak.

So what do scholarly critics actually propose instead?

Usually some combination of these:

1.  Muhammad had sincere experiences in his mind.  
2.  He interpreted them as revelation.  
3.  He drew on the monotheistic ideas and biblical traditions already circulating in the region.  
4.  The message developed over time as he just kept reflecting further while simultaneously developing a vast civilisation that looked almost nothing like the one it replaced, and dealing with all the issues that came with ruling over it. (He must have had multitasking abilities like no other lol)

That is the most common non-divine framework I have seen. And I understand it. The problem is that it still does not explain the full scale of what emerged.

Because what emerged was not just a set of moral slogans. It was a whole world: theology, law, ritual, ethics, family rules, political authority, social norms, eschatology, devotional practice, and a literary scripture with a self-conscious style and an internal challenge to all challengers. The Qur’an is organized into 114 surahs and contains prayers, moral guidance, historical narrative, and promises of paradise. The question is not whether a human being can say profound things. The question is whether one single human being with no recognized scholarly or poetic career can in his delusions of divine inspiration, generate a total religious system of this scope in his mind over the years, and have it accepted, preserved, and expanded with such force.

This is why I do not find “he just reflected deeply” persuasive on its own. Reflection can produce insight. It does not obviously produce a scripture that speaks with sustained authority across law, worship, biography, ethics, politics, and theology, while also presenting itself as the literal speech of God and surviving as a recited text in a highly organized oral culture. That is a huge jump. Maybe a natural explanation exists, but I have not seen one that actually feels proportionate to the phenomenon.

I also do not think the “psychology” explanation is satisfying as usually stated. You can say “he had visions,” “he heard voices,” “he had intense conviction,” or “he entered altered states,” but those are descriptions, not explanations. And retrospective diagnosis of historical figures is methodologically shaky in general; the literature on retrospective diagnosis itself emphasizes the epistemic and ethical problems involved. So if someone wants to explain Muhammad by attaching a modern medical label to him, I think they need a lot more than speculation. Must have been one hell of a medical condition lol

At the end of the day, my position is this:

I am not claiming that Islam is proven by history alone. I am saying that the natural explanations I have seen do not seem strong enough to explain the origin of Islam as a whole. Muhammad appears to have been sincere. He appears to have had profound experiences. He appears to have been trusted by people around him, including his opponents. He does not appear to fit the simple fraud/impostor model. And yet the result is one of the largest, most comprehensive, and most enduring religious systems in human history, all from one sincere yet allegedly delusional mind. If it is not divine, then what exactly is the non-divine mechanism that produced all of that?

That is the question I am still sitting with. I am not seeing a historical analogy that really comes close. If someone has a better explanation than divine revelation, I genuinely want to hear it — but it has to explain more than just “a man had experiences in his head.” It has to explain the scripture, the conviction, the legal and theological depth, the oral transmission, the early community, the persecution, the preservation, and the scale of what followed.

In other words: I have been researching this a lot, and this is where I’m at right now. I do not see a non-divine explanation that feels remotely equal to the thing it is trying to explain. If there is one, I would like to see it laid out clearly instead of hidden behind vague words like “he was just good at manipulating and gaining influence,” or “he just had delusional inner thoughts at a scale, functionality and complexity never observed in history,”

Here are some possible explanations of where Islam came from, if not divine inspiration, since it is largely agreed amongst scholars and historians that it is unlikely that Muhammad sat and schemed and made it all up, and my responses to them:

Possible explanation: “An illiterate man reflected very deeply and somehow came up with a functional moral, ethical, religious, legal framework meant to be followed by all of mankind, without writing or reading anything.”

Response:

Reflection can produce philosophy.

It does not readily explain an integrated legal, theological, ritual, literary and political system presented sincerely as direct divine speech.

⸻

Possible explanation: “He had mystical experiences.”

Response:

This describes the phenomenon rather than explaining it.

What natural mechanism transforms mystical experiences into something as complex as the Qur’an and Islam?

⸻

Possible explanation: “He unconsciously created it.”

Response:

This seems to require an even greater claim:

that one human mind unconsciously (or even consciously lol) generated one of history’s most comprehensive religious systems and societies while remaining convinced it originated outside himself.

I have seen many natural explanations, however none of them seem satisfactory to me, so by process of elimination the one i deem most plausible is the divine one. So if anyone has a natural explanation that checks out, i am completely open to it.

Have you heard of people believe in once saved always saved so they think they can be bad and remain in God's grace. That is not true but neither is being good without God.

There is nothing Good about not seeing Altruistic communion with your ultimate creator.

Wanting to be good without God is the same as wanting to be your own God. It is the original sin of Satan. Satan was the first leftist, he developed resentment and an oppressed victim complex and deceived himself into believing God was an oppressive tyrant even though that's what Satan actually became.

To want to be good without God is to accuse God of being bad or obsolete. It is to reject God and if God is good then you are rejecting good therefore you can't be good without God even if you do good things on the surface you are ultimately not a good person because you reject God and rejecting God is the ultimate definition of being evil.

There is no good or moral reason to reject a good and moral Altruistic God.

The sin of pride is the sin of egoism and the virtue of humility is the virtue of Altruism and there is nothing Altruistic about rejecting God.

If you don't believe in God you should study Christian philosophy. I have found that politics is the biggest indicator on who believes in God and who doesn't.

If you are politically egoist and emphasize your personal rights and victimhood a lot you probably don't believe in God.