The PhD Thesis of Dr. Joshua Little

That Hadith are unreliable—that any given matn cannot be taken at face value as an accurate datum from the 1st Islamic Century, and that any given ʾisnād cannot be taken at face value as an accurate record of a matn’s provenance—cannot be seriously contested, for multiple reasons.

Firstly, there is an overwhelming prior probability based upon the ubiquity of fabrication and pseudepigraphy in Late Antique and Mediaeval religio-historical (pagan, Jewish, and Christian) ascriptions.

Secondly, there is the high frequency of contradictions within the Hadith corpus, which necessitates the occurrence of a huge amount of fabrication, interpolation, and/or mutation and, therefore, skepticism towards any given hadith.

Thirdly, there is the ubiquity of fabrication and interpolation—both reported and demonstrable — in the Hadith corpus, which again casts doubt upon the rest of the corpus.

Fourthly, there is the rapid, extreme mutation and growth of reports that evidently took place over the course of a century or more of oral transmission, which means that any given matn—regardless of the ʾisnād—is likely at best heavily distorted and at worst obliterated beyond its original form.

Fifthly, there is the belated emergence of Hadith as a genre and corpus, largely during the 8th and 9th Centuries CE, which straightforwardly precludes the authenticity of most ascriptions to the 7th Century CE.

Dr. Joshua Little, PhD Thesis

It is available from his own site, or from here:

Calvin on his continuity with the Fathers

Further, even though the Greeks above the rest – and Chrysostom especially among them – extol the ability of the human will, yet all the ancients, save Augustine, so differ, waver, or speak confusedly on this subject, that almost nothing certain can be derived from their writings. Therefore, we shall not stop to list more exactly the opinions of individual writers; but we shall only select at random from one or another, as the explanation of the argument would seem to demand.

Calvin’s Institutes 2.2.4

Mathematical Miracles for everyone!

One of the arguments I have always found extremely bizarre is the argument for the divine origin of the Qur’an based on “mathematical miracles”. Numeric patterns are found in the Qur’an and it is argued that this proves it could have only have come from God.

I recently saw this post and response on Reddit which perfectly explains why this argument doesn’t work…

Your very post is a mathematical miracle. If you count the number of characters without spaces, you get 380, which is 19 x 20!

The first part of your comment has 19 words. The second sentence that mentions the 19 code has 19 words if you count 1% as a word. The sentence inbetween them is also 19 words!! How could this be a coincidence?!

If you count the number of words between the first mention of code and the last mention of code (inclusively), you get 38, which is 19 x 2!

If you count the number of characters (spaces included), you get 209, which is 19 x 11! Amazingly, if you add 2 + 0 + 9 = 11, a clear hint at the factor 😉

There are 38 (19 x 2) monosyllabic words in your comment.

Notice the constant reoccurrence of 38 (380, 38, 38). Surely this indicates deliberate intention. The odds of this happening by chance are in 1/38 * 1/38 * 1/38, which is 1 in 4,332!

There’s more! Up to the 19th word ‘even’ there are exactly 114 (spaces included) characters (19 x 6). Amazingly, till the very end of your comment after the 19th word are 266 characters (spaces included), which is 19 x 14! Interestingly, if you add 2+6+6, you get the factor again: 14. Same goes for the 114, 1+1+4 = 6 – and it’s 19 x 6.

Between the first mention of ‘code’ and the second mention of ‘human’ are 23 words, a clear hint at a code underlying human chromosomes.

can’t be done by a human being, or something..

need I go on?

now think about this very carefully: if this can be done so easily with your comment, couldn’t Rashad have done it with an infinite amount of varied counting methods till he got what he wanted? And we KNOW that he tried many different counting methods, this is not disputed.

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