The Book Quran

Contradictions within a work arise basically from the deficiencies of its author. If inconsistencies are to be avoided, two things are essential: absolute knowledge and total objectivity. There is no human being who is not sadly deficient in both of these areas. It is only God who is omniscient, and flawless as a Being, and while works wrought by the human hand are invariably marred by inconsistencies, His book, and His book alone never contradicts itself. Because of man’s inherent limitations, there are many things which, intellectually, he cannot grasp.

He is forced, therefore, to speculate, and this frequently leads him into making erratic judgements and unfounded contentions.

Every human being graduates from youth to old age, and when a man grows old, he often contradicts things he asserted as facts when he was young and immature. With age, his knowledge and experience increase, hence his final verdict being at variance with his initial judgements. But even when death finally comes to take him away, he still has much to learn, and often the assertions of his maturer age are proved wrong after his death.

Truth is not arrived at purely through experience and reasoning.

Human beings, in addition to making inadvertent and unwitting errors (for the simple reason that they are humans, and not God!) are all too prone to make deliberate misrepresentations of facts when they are motivated by the base emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, revenge and fear. One such notorious instance in which the entire western scientific establishment were made dupes of for about half a century was that of the “discovery” of the Piltdown Man, a supposedly “missing link” (according to the evolutionists) between man and his ancestor, the ape. In 1912, the English newspapers trumpeted the news that a fragment of an ancient skull, half ape and half man dating back to some nebulous pre-historic period, had been found at Piltdown, thus providing material evidence which confirmed Darwin’s theory of evolution.

This Piltdown man achieved instant popularity. The name appeared in standard textbooks such as R.S.

Lull’s Organic Evolution. Leading intellectuals counted the discovery among the great triumphs of modern man. In authoritative works such as H.G. Well’s Outline of History and Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, it was mentioned as though there was no doubt about the Piltdown Man’s existence.

For nearly half a century scholars remained enthralled with this “great discovery”. It was only in 1953 that some scientists became doubtful. They extracted the Piltdown man from its iron fireproof box in the British Museum and subjected it to detailed modern scientific analysis, studying it from every relevant angle. Their final conclusion was that the Piltdown Man was a forgery. The great acclaim it has received was totally unfounded. What had actually happened was that someone, who wished to discredit a rival by playing a trick on him, and taken the jaw of a chimpanzee and dyed it to make it look ancient and had then filed its teeth to make them look human. He then submitted his “find” to the British Museum, saying that he had come across it in Piltdown, England. He intended at a later stage to reveal the whole affair as a hoax, in order to make his rival look foolish, but when he saw the seriousness with which his trick has been taken by the entire body of western scientists, he was afraid to own up, and his silence then perverted positive thinking on evolution for several decades.

Human moods and passions are often to blame for people turning a blind eye to the truth and falling a prey to faulty reasoning. Love and hate, friendship and hostility all have their influence on human thinking. A man’s inability to be dispassionate, his elation or depression, his triumph or despair, his successes and frustrations all colour the quality of his thought. Such fluctuations of mood, caprice and wilfulness, can deflect the very best minds from the truth.

The only one who is free of all such caprice and all such limitations is the Almighty. That is why His word is of an impeccable consistency.