Dear Allah,
Hello again, you BS artist.
In my satirical essay, “An Open Letter to Allah,” in my book, “The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays” (Nine-Banded Books, $13), I criticized one of your blatantly specious arguments for your own existence, an argument which went like this: “Seest thou not that Allah sends down rain from the sky, and forthwith the earth becomes clothed with green?”
But in rereading “The Holy Qur’an,” as translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, I noticed, particularly in Surah 56, another, somewhat different type of argument for your existence. It’s a type of argument known in informal logic as a false dichotomy, false alternative, or an either-or argument. It involves asserting there are only two possibilities when there are actually more than that.
Usually, the one who is using this cheap debating trick will say there are only two alternatives, one that is easy to refute, and the other one that he wants suckers to believe. After refuting the easy-to-refute alternative, he then triumphantly declares that the other alternative must be the truth.
In Surah 56, you don’t bother to spell all that out, Allah, but here’s one example of the false dichotomies you set up:
“See ye the water which ye drink?
“Do ye bring it down (in rain) from the cloud or do We?” (Surah 56: 68-69)
So you’re trying to pretend there are only those two possibilities: (1) either humans bring down the rain from the cloud, or (2) you bring (or send) down the rain, Allah. Presumably, you expect us to reject (1). OK. Let’s say you’re right in implying that humans don’t bring down the rain (even though there might be some exceptions to that generalization). That doesn’t prove that you send down the rain, Allah, because you’ve ignored and haven’t refuted at least two other possibilities.
The first is the possibility that rain is sent down, not by you, Allah, but by some other god, perhaps a god more worthy of worship than you. Maybe Yahweh, or Ahura Mazda, or Zeus, or Thor, or Chalchihuitlcue.
The other possibility you’ve ignored, Allah, is that the rain comes down as part of a natural cycle of events without any god being involved. And here’s the thing, Allah. Your long, boring book contains lots of specious, inconclusive arguments for your existence as “the Creator” of everything, but not a single, solid, conclusive argument for the existence of any such creator of everything.
If, as you pretend, you are all-knowing and all-wise, why can’t you create some better arguments, Allah? As I’ve pointed out before, some mere human philosophers have actually managed to create better, more convincing arguments than you have for the existence of a creator-god.
Allah, you’re a fake,a fraud, a phony. Go play in traffic, Allah.
Yours truly,
L. A. Rollins