How to handle the objection that the supernatural ideas in the Qur’an and Sunnah are nonsensical or necessarily false

A very popular line of attack against religion in general, and Islaam in specific, has to do with the supernatural. Descriptions about the supernatural realm are quite common in Islaamic scriptures, like angels, details about paradise and hellfire, jinns (unseen creation from smokeless fire), devils, miraculous feats done by God through the hands of Prophets, and so on. People often say these ideas and information in the Qur’an and Sunnah are absurd, nonsensical, or patently false.

The argument has its variations, depending on the critic’s level of discomfort about the supernatural. Here are two examples.

1. Any supernatural proposition is necessarily false.
2. Any supernatural proposition is necessarily unscientific, and therefore necessarily false.

Just as a “by the way” comment here. In my humble experience, I’ve noticed critics use terms like “absurd” “silly” “nonsensical” “ridiculous” in reference to these ideas. These terms don’t sound like they can be quantified objectively, in fact different people understand them differently i.e. what is absurd to you might not be absurd to me. These judgments are, of course, nowhere near purely intellectual, rather they tend to be emotive for a large part. This tells me that for many people, the argument is not formed out of intellect, but intuition. Personal judgment. Emotions. Maybe this piece of information might benefit you the next time you come across such an argument.

Also, some people, including some Muslims unfortunately, tend to ascribe relatively higher or lower plausibility to some beliefs about the supernatural, as compared to other such beliefs. They would find the existence of angels, for example, to be kinda-sorta plausible, while the night journey of the Prophet to be overly far-fetched and less plausible, while both of them are mentioned in the same source. A critic would sometimes count the idea of talking animals to be absurd and an argument against Islaam, but he would not do the same in the case of the existence of the Day of Judgment, because he views the former to be less plausible than the latter. So much so that to him, the idea of talking animals disproves Islaam, but the existence of the Day of Judgment doesn’t. I think this discrimination between different supernatural ideas is unfounded. I understand where people are coming from when they say these though, depending on one’s personal beliefs and circumstances, certain ideas might appear to be more plausible to him than others. But this distinction is purely emotional, and it would easily crumble when subjected to intellectual scrutiny. At the end of the day, all such beliefs are supernatural, and the supernatural is by definition beyond the natural laws we are used to. There is no way we can make educated guesses or informed judgments about the supernatural by ourselves. Given this premise, statements such as “supernatural belief X is more/less plausible than supernatural belief Y” is insensible, because these plausibility considerations are done according to the standards of the natural world, and are therefore meaningless in the context of the supernatural. So I don’t understand why one supernatural belief should be considered to be any more or any less plausible than the next, given that all of them are equally “supernatural” in nature, and one view doesn’t have any intellectual previlege above the other. An intellectually sound case against the supernatural, therefore, should be against the reference of any supernatural information in the Qur’an in general, and not selectively against certain pieces of supernatural information and not against others.

So, to get back to where we left off. Let’s observe the argument(s) again:

1. Any supernatural proposition is necessarily false.
2. Any supernatural proposition is necessarily unscientific, and therefore necessarily false.

What’s common with both of these arguments is both of them claim that there is no such thing as a “true” supernatural proposition. If any idea is beyond the natural realm, it is patently false. Put differently, for a proposition to qualify as a candidate for truth, it must necessarily be explainable by natural phenomena, and any other proposition fails to qualify. This idea is common in both arguments.

What’s different is the method employed to reach this common conclusion. Argument 1 is quite straightforward and it doesn’t utilize any transitional “step” or premise to reach the conclusion. For this critic, just the fact that a proposition is beyond natural seems to evidently imply that it is impossible. As for argument 2 however, the critic introduces the intermediate premise of science. After this premise is in place, he goes on to argue that what is not science, is not true. Let’s break the argument up into its constituent premises:

Premise 1: Any supernatural proposition is necessarily unscientific.
Premise 2: Any proposition that is necessarily unscientific is necessarily false.
Conclusion: Any supernatural proposition is necessarily false.

“Unscientific” here refers not to something that contradicts science, but rather something that isn’t confirmed by science e.g. claims in epistemology, ethics, aesthetics etc. that are not confirmed (or rather, cannot be confirmed) by science.

So let’s talk about argument 2 first. The first premise of this argument states that the anything beyond the natural world is unscientific. In other words, the answers to scientific questions can and should only be sought within the natural world. A scientfic question will never yield an answer which invokes any supernatural causation. This view is what is known in the philosophy of science as Methodological Naturalism, and our critic believes science needs to presuppose methodological naturalism in order to work.

Note that methodological naturalism (premise 1) doesn’t render a supernatural proposition false, only unscientific. Then in the second premise, the argument defines truth to be limited to scientific knowledge only, which gives us the conclusion. This view of equating truth to scientific knowledge alone is referred to as scientism. The following definition of scientism is taken from the book “Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview” authored by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, chapter 17, page 346-7:

Scientism…is the view that science is the very paradigm of truth and rationality. If something does not square with currently well-established scientific beliefs, if it is not within the domain of entities appropriate for scientific investigation, or if it is not amenable to scientific methodology, then it is not true or rational. Everything outside of science is a matter of mere belief and subjective opinion, of which rational assessment is impossible.

So argument 2 boils down to two premises, methodological naturalism and scientism. Now I believe argument 2 is a very weak argument, the reasons will be discussed shortly. But as per my experience, with the popularity of the new atheism movement and its apparent veneration of scientism, this argument seems to be more popular of the two, and hence deserving of attention.

Let’s look at premise 1 first, methodological naturalism. I think this premise is of lesser importance to the contention we are presently dealing with (although it is very relevant and of much significance to the Intelligent Design movement we hear so much about), because let’s be honest, the important question to answer is whether supernatural propositions are necessarily false or not, not whether they qualify as scientific or not. Princeton philosopher of science Bradley Monton talks about this issue in context of Intelligent Design in his book “Seeking God in Science”, chapter 3, page 75:

After much seeking, you finally reach the Oracle. You’ve come equipped with a long list of questions, but when the Oracle sees you, she says: “Look, I’m busy, I only have time to answer one question…I’ll give you two options. Do you want to know whether intelligent design is science, or do you want to know whether intelligent design is true?”…Even though much of the philosophical discussion of intelligent design relates to that question, by my lights the imoprtant question is whether intelligent design is true.

So even if methodological naturalism is decisively proven to be a legitimate criterion for science, it doesn’t have much significance as far as our current problem is concerned. That said, I don’t believe that it is necessary to presuppose methodological naturalism for science to work. For starters, methodological naturalism- the claim that scientific answers should only be sought within nature- is a claim to knowledge, and needs to be backed up with evidences. Some evidences have been advanced, but they are nowhere near definitive. A somewhat detailed response to these evidences and arguments can be found in Bradley Monton’s aforementioned book. The book is written largely in the context of intelligent design, but contains valuable material on the legitimacy of methodological naturalism as a demarcation criteria between science and non-science.

Also, methodological naturalism is damaging to science in the sense that it limits science’s efficiency as a tool for pursuit of the truth. Bradley Monton comments on this issue in the same book (page 58):

If science really is permanently committed to methodological naturalism, it follows that the aim of science is not generating true theories. Instead, the aim of science would be something like: generating the best theories that can be formulated subject to the restriction that the theories are naturalistic. More and more evidence could come in suggesting that a supernatural being exists, but scientific theories wouldn’t be allowed to acknowledge that possibility…Science would rightfully be marginalized- what is the point of spending all these resources investigating naturalistic causes, long after it is evident that the causes are supernatural?

Anyways, I don’t want to go into that much detail concerning methodological naturalism, mainly because it isn’t directly related to our discussion. For more details though, the curious reader can consult chapter 17 of Moreland and Craig’s work quoted above, which has a basic treatment of the topic.

What is more relevant to our discussion is the second premise of argument 2: scientism. Like most other ideas in philosophy, scientism has its strong and weak forms, I think the second premise advocates a strong form of scientism. Now even at face value, scientism seems like an extremely weak position to take. It’s kind of obvious that there are truths outside the scientific methodology, for example, philosophical or moral truths. Heck, science as an enterprise itself requires some presuppositions in order for it to work (e.g. the laws and phenomena in nature are uniform, our sensory and rational faculties present an accurate depiction of nature, and so on). The truth of these presuppositions are confirmed by philosophy, not science. If someone embraced strong scientism, the very foundations of science, and subsequently science itself, become meaningless. Even a more basic problem with scientism is that it is self-refuting: the claim “science is the only way of knowing and all other sources of knowledge are unfounded” itself isn’t confirmed by science! The Skeptic’s Dictionary has this to say as regards strong scientism:

Scientism, in the strong sense, is the self-annihilating view that only scientific claims are meaningful, which is not a scientific claim and hence, if true, not meaningful. Thus, scientism is either false or meaningless.

With this, I rest my case, my case being that the second argument which uses science as a stepping-stone to reach the conclusion that supernatural propositions are necessarily false, is utterly baseless. Let’s look at the first argument now. The first argument doesn’t resort to scientism or any other intermediate premise. Rather, it assumes a position referred to as philosophical naturalism, the idea that all human intellectual exercise is necessarily limited to the natural world, and beyond the natural world there is no reality. This is a safer position than scientism, in that it doesn’t limit truth to science. It does acknowledge disciplines other than science (e.g. philosophy) as valid sources of knowledge, but then adds the condition that all of our intellectual efforts combined would only go as far as this natural world.

I would be the first to admit that philosophical naturalism is a contentious topic in philosophy, and I am not very knowledgable about it. At a basic level, burden of proof considerations come to mind i.e. philosophical naturalism seems like a claim to knowledge and the one who makes the claim should carry the burden of proof, instead of just presupposing it. But this raises an obvious but very significant question, which I think is the crux of the topic.

Let’s look away from naturalism for a moment, and refocus on what this article is about. We are addressing claims that are leveled against the possibility of supernatural propositions. Here, the positive claims of knowledge are being made the critic, and burden of proof rests on him. Meaning, we are not making a case for the truth of supernatural propositions, but merely defending the possibility of their reality. Of course, the possibility of the existence of anything isn’t a claim of knowledge. The impossibility of something’s existence, however, is. Up to this point, we have been dealing with the claims of supernatural propositions being impossible (not even “very unlikely”, but “impossible”). I think we have established that the arguments aren’t very strong, and supernatural propositions are at least possible. But the mere possibility of something existing doesn’t really amount to much. For example, the existence of unicorns are at least possible (as for the absence of evidence, what if they live on another planet?) but that doesn’t mean we should start taking the existence of unicorns seriously. Well, can’t the same be said about the supernatural propositions found in the Islaamic scriptures? Even if we acknowledge that these propositions are possible, in that they don’t contradict with any principles of logic, why should we differentiate between them and the existence of a unicorn? This is a valid question, and this is where philosophical naturalism enters the picture. Philosophical naturalism is adopted because in some sense it is useful. Imagine what would happen if we begin to take the existence of anything seriously merely on the ground that it is possible (for one, psychics would find a place in the academia). To discount these possibilities, it is better to assume that whatever is beyond the natural world, logically possible as they may be, doesn’t amount to any intellectual merit: they are as good as impossible.

This is where Islaam’s position on these supernatural propositions become relevant. See the Muslim (at least the one who holds that his faith is intellectually justified) wouldn’t claim that the supernatural propositions mentioned in the Qur’an are true or plausible or worth taking seriously merely on the basis of their logical possibility. Rather, she would claim that we are justified in believing these propositions because there is evidence for them. For example, we believe in the miraculous birth of Jesus (peace be upon him) based on the premise that the Islaam is true, or that the Qur’an is the divinely revealed word of God, and that premise would depend on other premises which present the case for the truth of Islaam. So the Muslim’s belief in these supernatural proposition stems from his belief that there is evidence to support these claims. And this is precisely what sets these propositions apart from, say, belief in unicorns. In fact, I think to take something seriously on the sole basis of it being logically possible is a position no one would adopt, and philosophical naturalism does get this point right. However, I would oppose it when there is evidence to believe in a proposition, but philosophical naturalism is gratuitously invoked to wave the evidences away. Consider this example by Bradley Monton gives:

Imagine that some astronomers discover a pulsar that is pulsing out Morse code. The message says that it’s from God, and that God is causing the pulsar to pulse in this unusual way. The astronomers are initially skeptical, but they find that when they formulate questions in their head, the questions are correctly anwered by the message. The astronomers bring in other people to examine this, and the questions are consistently answered. The message goes on to suggest certain experiments that scientists should perform in particle accelerators- the message says that if the experiments are set up in a specified precise way, then God will cause a miracle to occur. The experiments are done, and the resulting cloud chamber tracks spell out Biblical verses. Then the message explains to the scientists how to form a proper quantum theory of gravity….I could go on, but you get the picture…It would be silly for the scientists to refuse to countenance the hypothesis that God exists, due to some prior commitment to methodological naturalism.

Substitute “methodological naturalism” in the last line with “philosophical naturalism”, and I think the same point is made. What if there is evidence for the God hypothesis, or for the truth of Islaam? Would it be reasonable to ignore the evidence because some form of naturalism is presupposed? I would submit no. I understand an initial skepticism towards claims about paranormal etc, but in the face of evidence such naturalistic commitment would seem unfounded. In fact, it would suffer from the same problem as methodological naturalism, in that the scope of our intellectual endeavors in the pursuit of truth will be limited by a presupposed “pledge”.

Of course, the next question that arises at this point is, what evidences- if any- are there for Islaam? But that’s a whole other topic which requires a whole other set of articles. The point here being given that Islaam has evidences, it wouldn’t make sense to ignore them on grounds of naturalistic commitment.

So to conclude, it is definitely logically possible that supernatural propositions are true. If evidence accumulates in order for us to give this a proper benefit of doubt, we by all means should. Simple disregarding the Islaamic scriptures on grounds of them containing these “nonsensical” propositions is a vacuous claim.

Do note that this is a very basic treatment of the issue, a lot more could be said on the different forms of naturalism. Also, apart from the two argument dealt with in this paper, there is another form of reasoning that combines the two. Barbara Forrest, for example, has argued that methodological naturalism is an indirect logical precedent to philosophical naturalism. This view improves argument 2 by getting rid of scientism. But this position seems to hinge on (at least) the lack of evidence for the supernatural world, which has been addressed in this paper.