I did get a kick out of this article, especially the part about the universe constantly expanding. In the past, I’ve gotten similar enjoyment from similar articles on Nostradamus and other religious texts. When I personally read a creation myth the ancient Greek comedian Aristophanes came up with, I was amused at how closely it seemed to follow the modern description of the evolution of life from single-celled, asexual organisms. And yet he composed the story in ignorance and as an allegory.
We get to have fun like this because we are very good at forcing text into inappropriate molds. I recently rediscovered a term for this, the “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy,” a reference to the joke where a gunfighter shoots at a wall first, then draws the target around it so it looks like his shot was perfect. And just to show that you can do this with anything, I rediscovered it because someone used it to describe my joke comparing Mad Men and Firefly.
Now, if someone were to use the hints in the Koran to make an advance prediction about some cosmological fact, I’d be impressed. I’d be more likely to believe that a djinn created it than an omniscient god, though; that seems like a more parsimonious hypothesis.
Hi truewords,
I did get a kick out of this article, especially the part about the universe constantly expanding. In the past, I’ve gotten similar enjoyment from similar articles on Nostradamus and other religious texts. When I personally read a creation myth the ancient Greek comedian Aristophanes came up with, I was amused at how closely it seemed to follow the modern description of the evolution of life from single-celled, asexual organisms. And yet he composed the story in ignorance and as an allegory.
We get to have fun like this because we are very good at forcing text into inappropriate molds. I recently rediscovered a term for this, the “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy,” a reference to the joke where a gunfighter shoots at a wall first, then draws the target around it so it looks like his shot was perfect. And just to show that you can do this with anything, I rediscovered it because someone used it to describe my joke comparing Mad Men and Firefly.
Now, if someone were to use the hints in the Koran to make an advance prediction about some cosmological fact, I’d be impressed. I’d be more likely to believe that a djinn created it than an omniscient god, though; that seems like a more parsimonious hypothesis.