PATHEOS: Carbon dating suggest Koran is older than Mohammed, because Islam is nonsense

Source: Patheos

In what seems like a regular occurrence in the modern world, more scientific evidence suggests that yet another religion is based on absolute nonsense.

Islamic scholars overwhelmingly claim that the Islamic Prophet Muhammad lived between 570 and 632 A.D. Yet carbon dating of a fragment from a Koran kept at a library in Birmingham suggests that the book was produced between 568 and 645 A.D.

That places the Koran as being written during Mohammed’s childhood or even before his birth. Throwing a huge wrench in the story that the Koran was dictated by Mohammed himself.

“According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad received the revelations that form the Qur’an, the scripture of Islam, between the years AD 610 and 632, the year of his death,” said Professor David Thomas, Professor of Christianity and Islam and Nadir Dinshaw Professor of Interreligious Relations at the University of Birmingham.

“At this time, the divine message was not compiled into the book form in which it appears today. Instead, the revelations were preserved in ‘the memories of men.’ Parts of it had also been written down on parchment, stone, palm leaves and the shoulder blades of camels,” Thomas said. “Caliph Abu Bakr, the first leader of the Muslim community after Muhammad, ordered the collection of all Qur’anic material in the form of a book. The final, authoritative written form was completed and fixed under the direction of the third leader, Caliph Uthman, in about AD 650.”

Of course, Islamic scholars and apologists are disputing the findings and claiming that carbon dating is not accurate enough. But not all scholars agree.

“It destabilizes, to put it mildly, the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the Koran emerged — and that in turn has implications for the historicity of Mohammed and the Companions [his followers],” said Tom Holland, the author of In The Shadow of the Sword.

Keith Small, of Oxford’s Bodleian Library says this finding lends evidence to what many believed to be true, that Mohammed and his followers pieced together the Koran from writings found around that time in order to push their political agenda.

“This would radically alter the edifice of Islamic tradition and the history of the rise of Islam in late Near Eastern antiquity would have to be completely revised, somehow accounting for another book of scripture coming into existence 50 to 100 years before, and then also explaining how this was co-opted into what became the entity of Islam by around AD700,” Small said.

While the findings are sure to upset Muslims around the world, in reality it places the Koran next to the other fictional holy books of the world’s religions, by giving solid evidence that the story of Mohammed and the creation of the Koran is officially bullshit.