How Probable is the Philosophical Significance of Numerical Patterns in Religious Texts?

Question

I have a Muslim friend who told me about a chapter in the Quran (the holy book of Muslims) in which he claims there is a "numerical miracle."

This chapter is unique in the Quran because a particular part repeats frequently. The first occurrence of this is in section number 13. If we collect the numbers of these sections, they form the sequence: 13, 16, 18, 21, 23, 25, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77.

If we concatenate these numbers, we get the long number: 77757371696765636159575553514947454240383634323028252321181613 which is divisible by seven.

Reversing this number from right to left, we get: 31618112325282032343638304245474941535557595163656769617375777 which is also divisible by seven.

Similarly, if we concatenate the numbers in the list from left to right, we get: 13161821232528303234363840424547495153555759616365676971737577, which, once again, is divisible by seven.

Up to this point, everything seems to be merely a trivial random occurrence. It's akin to finding patterns in a set of random data, a phenomenon known as the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

Despite not being Muslim and holding no belief in God, particularly in religious contexts, I was surprised to learn that the number seven holds significant value in the Quran and in Islam, as well as in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and even in nature.

I've also come across information suggesting that numerous other patterns in the Quran exhibit similar features related to the number seven.

So What is the probability of such a phenomenon occurring by chance?

My concern is that we could arbitrarily choose any number, such as eight, and attempt to find patterns or connections in quran to correlate with it, falling prey to the same Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

Answer 1

Apophenia describes (among other things) the human propensity to see questionable patterns in random data.

That, in a nutshell, is what basically all of numerology is.

The basic process tends to go like this:

• Look at data from every angle you can think of, perform a whole bunch of arbitrary operations, use different numerology number mappings, consider different translations or parts of texts (e.g. chapters), etc.
• When you find some interesting-looking result, you say "wow, this is so unlikely, someone must've specifically put it there / it must be magic".

The probability of finding this specific pattern is the wrong thing to consider, because it may as well have been some other pattern in some other chapter using some other method. What is the significance of this very specific combination of (1) considering the position (2) of this specific repeated phrase, (3) within this specific chapter, (4) concatenating the positions, and (5) dividing the result by 7? If there's no specific significance, and one could've found any other pattern, then I'd say you're roughly guaranteed to find something that seems unlikely, sooner rather than later, in pretty much any text.

Also, even if we grant that it's exceedingly unlikely to find this pattern in the text, and that this is noteworthy (rather than just being a result of the fact that rare events happen all the time)... so what? If this is supposed to be proof that a deity inspired the book, that would be a deity with a very weird sense of humour. I suspect an all-powerful deity can do something at least a little more impressive and extraordinary than putting some words in a few-thousand-year-old book in some particular order for people to notice at some point. Not only is the basic methodology of numerology complete nonsense, they typically also try to draw conclusions that make absolutely no sense given the evidence.

Putting all this aside, text certainly isn't just random data, and this could count against numerology. If one finds a pattern, that may just be a pattern that exists in writing generally, particularly in the same language written around the same time for similar purposes. It would be pretty mundane to claim that patterns exist in human writing. One could perform similar analysis on other texts to see if similar patterns exist. Although I don't expect this to account for too many instances of found patterns, as the patterns typically seem quite arbitrary. The bigger problems are those mentioned above, i.e. the scattershot approach of numerology and the questionable conclusions drawn from found patterns.

Answer 2

I grew up Muslim and remember reading a lot about these patterns. They confused me just as well. First of all, because Islam has so many rituals that involve numbers such as saying certain things 3 times or 33 times every day, I suspect it sort of puts you in an OCD like state where you start seeing patterns everywhere. This is primarily the reason why you’ll often find Muslims focus on these kinds of things much more than other religious people nowadays.

But I digress. Ultimately, once you realize that these kinds of pattern finding mechanisms aren’t specified in advance, this becomes unremarkable. I could open a book and think of 1,000,000 ways to try to search for a pattern, and sooner or later, I will find interesting ones. It’s just that most people don’t actually do this and when they do, they notice similar patterns. See assassinations foretold in Moby Dick. Presumably, you don’t think Moby Dick predicts assassinations.

The real and more fundamental problem with this, and something that I missed growing up, is that God isn’t any less of a coincidence than whatever coincidence you try to explain. In order for a particular pattern to be explained by God, there must be an agent with all the right properties needed to explain it. Why would reality contain a God with all the right properties to explain a particular event instead of anything else? How is this any less coincidental than simply stating that reality was simply structured in a way to result in that pattern without design? The same point is missed by the fine tuning argument.

Design requires a designer. In every single instance of design where we felt justified to do so, we already knew the designer existed, such as in the case of humans or even beavers. Design inferences help us distinguish between what designers do and what designers don’t once we already know that they exist.

When we don’t, we can’t make this inference.

Answer 3

This chapter is unique in the Quran because a particular part repeats frequently.

No, it's not. Surah Al-Mursalaat for example has "Woe on that day to deniers" 10 times. Let's do numerology divination magic and find out if Islam is true.

This is the hypothesis? If Islam is true, then repeated verses in the Surah are numbered such that their concatenation and reverse concatenation is divisible by seven. Right?

The verses with "Woe on that day to deniers" are numbers 15 19 24 28 34 37 40 45 47 and 49.

The prime factors of 15192428343740454749 are 1×17×107339789×8325638273.

RIP Islam, I guess.

Answer 4

I can't calculate the exact probability of such a phenomenon occurring by chance without a list of the various patterns that would count as "such a phenomenon". But you'll find patterns of that sort in any text of decent size.

Consider the Canterbury Tales, specifically the copy on Project Gutenburg (including the table of contents, transcribers notes, etc.).

We'll map each letter to a number in a fairly obvious way: A=0, ..., Z=25. Non-letters are dropped. We'll then assign a single number to each word by concatenating the letters together in exactly the same way as described in the question. We also index each word according to its position in the text: the first word is 0, the second 1, etc). Finally, we'll sum up the indices of every word whose corresponding giant number is divisible by 7. That number is, itself, divisible by 7. Further, the number of numbers k from 1 to 343 (7x7x7) such that the sum of all words divisible by k is itself divisible by k...is also 7.

It was pure luck that 7 happened to be one of the numbers that had that first property (and I could pick any range of numbers to search over that I wanted to in order to make the second property hold, then find a way to describe that range in terms of that number). And if that particular property didn't hold for any number, I would have just tried a few more until one did.

In summary, patterns like this happen naturally all the time, and even if they didn't, it'd be trivial to add them to a text intentionally.

(Finding a pattern involving "42" in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is left as an exercise for the reader.)