It wasn't Mohammed who founded Islam.

[Rayaan]

Are there any roman or christian or jewish or persian writings from before Abd al-Malik mentioning Muhammad and his prophethood? Those would be nice.

No, I didn't find any.

But, shamefully, what you fail to understand - which is the main error you've been making over and over again - is that the absence of evidence by itself is not an indication of an absence of his prophethood. As you wrote earlier.

Absence of evidence hinting to absence of prophethood soon after Mo's death. That's why I'm leaning towards the later addition of prophethood to the legendary hero/leader.

And that, right there, falls under the convenient and oft-repeated argument from ignorance.

An appeal to ignorance is an argument for or against a proposition on the basis of a lack of evidence against or for it. If there is positive evidence for the conclusion, then of course we have other reasons for accepting it, but a lack of evidence by itself is no evidence.

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/ignorant.html

If you move in the same circles that I do then you’ve probably heard the following phrase many times, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” In and of itself this is totally true. In fact, it is just a special case of a well-known logical fallacy called an argument from ignorance.

https://hilbertthm90.wordpress.com/2013/...l-edition/

One kind of argument from ignorance is based on negative evidence. It assumes that if the hypothesis of interest were true, then experiments made to test it would show positive results. If a drug were toxic, tests of toxicity of reveal this. Whether or not this argument is valid depends on whether the tests would indeed show positive results, and with what probability.

[...]

2. The more evidence found that is compatible with the conclusions of these arguments, the more acceptable they seem to be.

C) Acme Flu Medicine is not toxic because no toxic effects were observed in 50 tests.
D) Acme Flu Medicine is not toxic because no toxic effects were observed in 1 test.

C seems more compelling than D.

3. Negative arguments are acceptable, but they are generally less acceptable than positive arguments.

E) Acme Flu Medicine is toxic because a toxic effect was observed (positive argument)
F) Acme Flu Medicine is not toxic because no toxic effect was observed (negative argument, the argument from ignorance)

Argument E seems more convincing than argument F, but F is somewhat convincing as well.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as..._evidence/


Positive evidence for Muhammad claiming himself to be a Prophet = oral traditions, posthumous writings, Quran, and hadiths <- (fits with numbers 2 and 3 in the quote above).
Positive evidence that Muhammad never claimed to be a Prophet = Nothing <- (no match with numbers 2 and 3)

So at least I do have a positive argument for Muhammad's prophethood, and yours is a negative argument (argument from ignorance), which makes my position more convincing and more likely to be true than yours. Thus, Bayesian probability is on my side, not yours.

That pretty much settles the debate for me. The logic presented is clear, simple, and undeniable.