Post 6
Tzortzis argues that the Koran is so superbly crafted that it cannot be the work of a human. He doesn't mean the actual message or the poetical beauty, but rather that its linguistic features are so unique and perfect that its existence lies “outside the productive capacity” of nature. It is thus a miracle in itself, attesting to the existence of a deity.
But Tzortzis goes further. He says that, for epistemological reasons – which means, because the experts say so – we must blindly believe in the Koran's uniqueness. All we have to concern our little minds with is the reasoning: since the Koran is a miracle, then there must be a god. It doesn't matter that these experts are biased religious apologists, nor that they are wrong, nor the contradictions that it implies.
I confess to having low interest in the Arabic language, with so much philosophical treasures to be found in Greek, Latin, German, French, Chinese... So I'll leave that to other sources. To see some criticism to the idea that the Koran is perfect and unique, you can even check out its Wikipedia page.
To see how ridiculous and conceited the arguments by these apologists are, check out this Quora entry. For example, did you know you that if you are not an Arab, you are a “dumb” person, living in a culture with low literary accomplishments? And that the Arabic high standards of literature prove the Koran is above the highest human literary capabilities? So sad.
So, without delving into the Koran itself, I'll provide two counter-arguments to this claim.
First one, Tzortzis is resorting to 'The God of the Gaps' argument, meaning that if you cannot explain something, god did it. But nothing that exists is “outside the productive capacity of nature”. Rainbows were once unexplained and so we gave it mythological explanations. We did the same to the passage of seasons, to the existence of suffering, and to most everything else. But we do understand those now. As modern men and women, when we find something we don't understand yet, we just keep looking.
So much of what we thought of as miracles are now explained. And so much were just lies, stories and misunderstanding. Don't let yourself be fooled by stories, no matter how 'expert' is the storyteller.
The second argument is based on the difference between 'letter' and 'spirit' of a work. For a text to be morphologically unique is enormously less important than for it to be unique in terms of content. Shakespeare is unique not because he invented new metrics, but because of his artistic value: it resonates within ourselves concepts that could not be conveyed in other ways. In other words, Shakespeare speaks using words something that words can't say.
That's exactly the difference between spirit and letter proposed by the German philosopher Johann Fichte. Simply put, letter is how the text is conveyed, spirit is what is conveyed in spite of letters. This claim of the Koran being miraculous because of its unique style is analogous to saying a painting is art because the frame is beautiful and the paint used is of the highest quality, and forget about what is painted. The uniqueness of the Koran's letter will not impress an audience if you first did not convince them of its spirit.
To convince us of the merits of the Koran – not its divine origin, mind you, I'm just talking about its merits – Muslims apologists should argue about its morality, its artistic value and its potential to do good. Not about stylistic innovations.
I enjoyed the fact that you replied to these claims without having to argue about the poetical beauty of the Koran.
I'd add that one could argue that the Koran is a beautiful piece of literature and still think it is not the word of a god. Also, I'd say that it is not true that for someone to experience a literally work he needs to learn the language. If that was the case, than Shakespeare wouldn't be famous among Spanish, Cervantes wouldn't have English fans and Homer would be long forgotten.
Let's consider Homer. There are Greeks today, but their language is not that of Homer. Languages change over time. You may learn ancient Greek, that is true, but you'll never know for sure the context, the idiomatic expressions, the subtleties of the ancient Greek. Not even if you are a Greek.
Thus, would it be true that only Arabic speakers can grasp the miracle of the Koran, than it would also be true that it is not the modern Arab, but the Arab of the time that matters, including the context and all idiomatic expressions.