A knockdown prophecy

[R00tKiT]

Have you ever considered that someone.....sit down now, im gonna debunk Islam as you believe in it, right now!......

OH WOOOOW, LET ME PUT ON AND TIGHTEN MY SEATBELT.

.....has dissected a human body (or two) by the 7th century?*

Okay, seatbelt off.

So, according to your messed up logic, if some random guy dissects a human body and tries to count joints, it's guaranteed that he'll get 360 ?

Okay, probably not. What about a really motivated and intelligent guy trying to count joints in the dissected body ? Still not enough, as some joints are tricky to even notice because, as I said, they're not of the same size.

So we really need a trained physician with background knowledge about human anatomy to do the work. The thing is, even in this case, we still get conflicting accounts (and don't get me wrong, if one adopts a non standard definition of what a joint means, they won't get 360, ofc) about how many joints there are, so we need many trained physicians to do the counting and then choose the count with the most frequent occurence, or maybe the average count, which is 360, according to medical literature.

But clearly, there wasn't enough background knowledge available to even approach the correct figures. The fact that some random Buddhist tradition cites the info doesn't solve the issue for the atheist, because the same buddhist tradition reports a lot of errors that don't appear in the hadith. So, good luck explaining why this is the case.

But see, thats the difference between you and a clever apologist: A clever apologist would have claimed "Muslim medicine was so advanced back then, they already knew about 360 joints. Therefore Allah!".

I think you and I don't have the same definition of clever, or of apologist.

Of course you will also fail to see that the fact of those 360 joints are not the problem, they are actually an irrelevancy. The problem is your underlying methodology to cross check your beliefs with reality. You have a belief and are looking for confirmation. Its guaranteed to lead you to false conclusions. Thank you for this very clear demontration of confirmation bias.

Having an intuition about some fact and then backpedalling to support that fact is something that happens routinely in science.

Let's take an example from math, if one doesn't know the famous formula for calculating the sum 1+2+3+...+n, then they can try to "guess" it by taking small values of n to see what happens, and then prove their guess using mathematical induction.

Similarly, one can see that some religious claims are more plausible than others, or explain some set of data better than other competing claims... they then go and look for the details to confirm their initial intuition, there really is no problem with that, as long as they can rationally assess the available evidence.