Preservation
and Truth
Often times my question "How do you know the Qur'an is from God?"
is met by Muslims with a response like this:
No disrespect intended but I really don't see how you can make
a stronger claim for the Bible to be a book of God. ... On the
other hand there is no debate or doubt as to whether the Qur'an
that we have today is the same as was revealed to the Prophet
Muhammad (or if there is it is minimal). The whole tradition
in which the Qur'an was compiled as compared to the Bible would
make it a more accurate historical/religious text.
This obviously completely misses the mark and does not answer
at all the question I posed. It confuses the following two questions:
- Is
the text of the Qur'an accurately preserved?
- Is
the Qur'an true? Is the Qur'an from God?
And those two questions are logically independent. The answer
to the first question will tell me nothing about the answer to
the second question. Let me illustrate this with an example.
There is a movement that is denying that the Holocaust [the murder
of 6 million Jews in Nazi Germany] has ever happpened. Those people
write books and distribute them. Those books are available in
libraries, for example the library of congress, the British Library,
and other libraries which stock basically all books ever published.
In 200 years [if judgment day hasn't come by then] these books
will still be the same. They will still be accurately preserved.
But obviously their content will be just as wrong as when it was
first written and accurate preservation does not make it any more
true.
If the Qur'an was not originally from God, then all the most accurate
preservation won't make it into the word of God. That is what
my question was about. How do we know that the Qur'an was from
God in the first place?
The preservation question will never answer the truth question.
To extend the illustration, let us look at the normal process
in regard to most university text books that go through several
editions. The first edition might still has some inaccuracies,
it is not dealing exhaustively with some topics which should be
included. But it is a successful text book. Soon a reprint is
necessary. There is no time to change all that should be changed.
But the author makes sure that the so far discovered misprints
are corrected. For the next print run he reworks some of the topics
where inaccuracies have been found and corrects mistakes of content
as well as further misprints that were pointed out to him. For
the third print a major overhaul is done, a new chapter on a topic
so far omitted is added, more inaccuracies are corrected as well
as more of the misprints reported up to date.
In the first illustration we have seen that completely accurate
preservation doesn't not imply truth. In this illustration we
see that change of the text can actually improve truth and make
something true which was wrong before.
Both examples together should make it completely clear that the
issue of preservation will never give us an answer to the question
whether the content of the book is true.
To add a last thought, if a book is totally true in the beginning
is then through many stages of copying by hand has undergone slight
changes because it is impossible not to make mistakes when copying
by hand, but apart from these scribal errors it is basically the
same as the original, then obviously this book will still be true.
Preservation questions are important, but they will never answer
the question of truth. For both the Bible and the Qur'an we can
show that there are textual variations as they come with any book
that is copied by hand for centuries. For both the Bible and the
Qur'an we can show that they are essentially the same today as
they were in the second and 8th century respectively. We can indeed
have the confidence that both texts accurately represent what
was the original.
Therefore we now have to ask questions about the truth and trustworthiness
of the content in regard to the Bible and the Qur'an.
