A knockdown prophecy

[Astreja]

Abu Huraira reported that Allah's Messenger (Peace be upon Him) took hold of my hands and said: " Every one of the children of Adam has been created with three hundred and sixty joints; so he who declares the Glory of Allah, praises Allah, declares Allah to be One, Glorifies Allah, and seeks forgiveness from Allah, and removes stone, or thorn, or bone from people's path, and enjoins what is good and forbids from evil, to the number of those three hundred and sixty joints, will walk that day having saved himself from the Fire."

source : https://sunnah.com/muslim:1007a (Sahih Muslim is one of the most authoritative collections of genuine hadiths in Sunni Islam).

The information is precise and straightforward: there are 360 joints in the human body.

Let's read what modern science says :

"The human body possesses 360 joints and more than 650 muscles; "

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6971295/

Now that wasn't very vague huh ? If anyone reading this wants to be honest with themselves, just ask : what would be your most precise guess about the number of joints, just by casually thinking about your different body parts ? 40 ? 50 ? 100 at most ?

I consider this hadith to be clinching evidence for the truth of Islam, there is simply no honest objection to it.

Seriously?    How hard is it to, you know, count the joints in a human body?  We've been making anatomical observations for a long, long time - at least to the time of Hippocrates in 420 BCE, and possibly longer.

[The Grand Nudger]

But is counting human joints a right or wrongmaking endeavor for religion in the first place? I don't think any of the questions or arguments mean shit.....least of all to Root, until we get a definitive and affirmative answer from Root..on that, in the first place.

[The Architect Of Fate]

It doesn't really matter how ancient people found out how many joints there were. They clearly did as it's clearly written down. And written down ages before Islam was even a thing. We already proved this and denial of this is a strange hill to die on. This isn't a prophecy it can't prophesy if someone already knew about it before the prophet and wrote it down.

[Silver]

Hey, if we had 359 or 361 joints, would you abandon your faith?

He's already been apologizing his way through the joint argument, so it's unlikely.

[Mister Agenda]

Oh wow, what great magic it is that one of the qu'ran's 9th century authors could read Greek.

That was a hadith, which isn't part of the Qur'an. Sounds like you don't have the foggiest idea of what you're talking about.

It's nice the writer was able to accurately count joints, but that's early science, not prophecy. The writer wasn't ever the first to arrive at an accurate count:

Lü Pu-wei's Springs and Autumns (Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu) - of (ca. 239 BC)

Human beings have 360 joints, nine body openings, and five yin and six yang systems of function. In the flesh tightness is desirable; in the blood vessels (hsueh-mo free flow is desirable; in the sinews and bones solidity is desirable; in the operations of the heart and mind harmony is desirable; in the essential ch'i regular motion is desirable. When [these desiderata] are realized, illness has nowhere to abide, and there is nothing from which pathology can develop. When illness lasts and pathology develops, it is because the essential ch'i has become static.

The paragraph you quoted above is a heap of crap, scientifically speaking, aside from the 360 joints part. That's the crucial difference between what one finds in ancient eastern religions and Islam. The former is 99% factual errors and 1% accurate facts, while the latter is 100% accurate facts, even if they're not what atheists expect of a prophecy: some verbatim statement of some recent law of physics for example.

It's not enough for you to find some quote somewhere about joints with the number 360, you have to explain why the Islamic prophet always takes the correct bits and leaves out the scientific mistakes. And aside from trained physicians, almost all people will get the wrong count, some joints are very tricky to even notice, given that they have different sizes.

Do you REALLY want to disqualify Lü Pu-wei on the basis that he didn't get everything right? Where dies the Q'uran say the sun goes at night, again?

[Mister Agenda]

No, there isn't.  Evolution doesn't work that way.  One could always say "modern humans have gene ABC, and pre-humans didn't", but then you would probably find some modern humans that don't have gen ABC either, and that gene might end up being found in some ancient hominids in some degree.

That's because you didn't accurately define what the word "modern human" means, once you stick to a definition, there is necessarily a first human who fits the definition.

But yeah, you always win if you keep changing definitions.

That's not how evolution works. With the exception of hybrids and a few rare instances like the marbled crayfish, no offspring is ever a different species from its parent. There was no first human, no first horse, and no first rabbit. Populations change over time as different alleles become more or less common. It doesn't matter how you define 'modern human', there wasn't a first one.

[The Grand Nudger]

Those rare examples are super interesting. Raphanobrassica. We're told that to account for so much as the minute incremental changes of evolution by natural selection..in truth, we'd have to appeal to some supernatural guiding hand - but we can see that novel pairings of genetics are capable not only of speciation - but even cladogenesis. Believers hold out hope that they can simply include this in their "yes, that's how my god does it" - but that explanation concedes to the naturalists argument in it's entirety. That there are natural mechanisms through which things like speciation and cladogenesis can be achieved and my god uses them.

Modernity is defined in two basic ways. Anatomic modernity is when the bones of some (pre)historic population are identical (or very closely identical) to the bones of contemporary populations. Behavioral or cultural modernity is when we find recognizable artifacts of contemporary human behaviors and beliefs. Full modernity, thusly, is when the remains and the artifacts are recognizable as and to a contemporary human population.

The former we sometimes call early modern, because the difference between us appears to have been more in their behaviors than their anatomy. We hit that 300k to 200k ago - maybe more, maybe less. The latter parcel of traits or attributes doesn't show up until about 40-50k years go.

There was never a singular first anotomic or behaviorally or fully modern man. You can give that literally impossible non-entity any name you want, adam or steve, won't change a thing . This was a vast trend of co-concurrent biological and technological development in populations separated by both time and distance with multiple instances of independent construction, as in the case of bows.

But sure, if we're going to consider this seriously, lets just take any of the many fully modern human men that would have been alive in the earliest moments of full modernity - and we'll call one of them adam. Which one of them is your Adam, Root? That...right there, is a very testable proposition. Anything you have to say on the matter will provide further testable propositions. Will you find the resolution of any of them to be informative? Or will this be another one of those knock down prophecies and scientific miracles in magic book that neither informs nor dissuades you?

[Nay_Sayer]

https://www.healthline.com/health/how-ma...-of-joints

[The Grand Nudger]

I'll even kick this off for Root - since whatever falls from his keys is bound to be a flaming dumpster fire.

Abrahamic Adam was a Child of Toba. An equatorial refuge to one of the main (possible) genetic bottlenecks in human prehistory. That means he wasn't fully modern, but was anatomically modern. That he didn't live his life the way that contemporary humans lived their lives (and that's reflected in every single version of the abrahamic origins myth). He wasn't the only pre-modern or early modern human male still represented in genetic data 75K years later (and here again every bversion of the abrahamic origins myth seems to include other people floating around), but he was one of a small group. This might explain Abrahamic Adams garden religion of apocalypticism by fire.

I'm not personally related to him, but maybe people from the historic (and mythical) umma are. Or..maybe, as I used to like to tease a past poster with..I'm Nudger Mcturkleton, a pasty brother from another mother that the islamists really ought to be more brotherly to, lol. Or maybe abrahamic eve stepped out on abrahamic adam (as the stories seem to strongly suggest.....) and I'm a brother from another father.....another adam....Root and I could always compare our 23andMe results. /s

[R00tKiT]

You showed nothing. You straw manned me and now are going nuh uhh!
My potential explanation is: Someone else, 1k years earlier, a chinese man counted 360 joints as well.
If you want to prove its been a prophecy 1ky after this, then you must rule out the chinese dude being correct, by counting joints of a corpse.

The number 360 you find in ancient texts of eastern religions can simply denote a recurring pattern in some ritual, just like, say, the natural number 666, which the bible associates with the devil or the beast. Nothing tells us somebody actually studied a human skeleton and accurately counted the joints, that's just mental masturbation from your part, not much else.

And no, I don't have to rule out anybody being correct about this number. You still think that simply seeing 360 written in some pre Islam text is enough to rule out a prophecy. I can show you ancient scripture that accidentally agrees with modern physics or molecular biology, this doesn't mean that whoever wrote it really did derive modern theories and verified them experimentally. Similary some random guy writing in a parchment : "360 joints" doesn't mean he did the humble work of counting.

So the essential difference between eastern religious texts and Islamic scripture is that the latter is systematically correct in its statements.

Were you looking for other explanations of why a 7th century Arab counts 360 joints?

Sure, a social reformer and a founder of a world religion really decided to go dissect a body and count joints. I must tell you, Deesse, that's one hell of a stretch.

Were you considering that he knew of greek or chinese people dissecting bodies and counting joints and potentially coming to the same conclusion as the Arab a thousand years later? 
Yes or no?

Yes, ofc, except he had no way to tell whether the chinese guys got the number right or not, and as someone who claims prophethood, it's extremely imprudent to cite this number, it was simply unnecessary for him to bring it up, unless he was absolutely sure of himself.

Let's say I wanted to do some preaching and ordered my followers to repeat some ritual 50 times a day, so I start my speech by : "There are 50 muscles in the human body, if you do xx this exact same number [...] " , as you can see I made a very silly mistake by citing a wrong number and jeopardized my preaching mission, when I could've simply cut to the chase and do the preaching. 

You claimed it was a prophecy. You have to rule out pre islam medicine being correct, not by chance, but by counting joints a thousand years prior.
GO
good luck

Again, I don't have to rule out anything or anybody being correct. Pre islam medicine is not infallible and the prophet knew that, and he took the risk of citing dozens of facts and numbers without any need to do so. I mean, the prophet's primary message is not to let people know how many joints are there ? isn't it ?