Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: what do you think about this one — June 7, 2024 · l7hwphk | Ali Shukri Amin

Intellectual history is not overloading. What I am doing is called problematizing something incorrectly assumed to be simple. Ideas and institutions have a lot of baggage that's taken for granted. Your same argument can be made by a Madrassah student that just assumes the Quran is true.

I made several arguments regarding the lack of statistical sampling in analyses that are predicated on HCM and the methodology's singular reliance on the Availability Bias vis-a-vis the historical record, a well documented logical psychological fallacy.

I also brought up the issue of epiphenomenon.

I didn't even get into the Narrative Fallacy. There are several other arguments I could make, but I don't think it would be helpful at this stage.

The problem here is we are talking past each other. I am not overloading or overcomplicating things, but it's just unfair for me to have to explain the entire Intellectual history of dominant institutions on Reddit comments. The secular academy is the given, so my critique is at a disadvantage. This is why I gave those citations and said it would be better to discuss over the literature over time.

You aren't engaging with the ideas I'm sharing. That's because there's not enough context on Reddit. It seems longwinded and convoluted because I am distilling volumes into comments and trying to rush to give you conclusions.

I also gave several criticisms of HCM and the modern academic approach to humanities in general. You seem to have missed them in entirety.

I was trying to draw an intellectual lineage for you to show you that secularism has a lot of assumptions baked into it. To really grapple with that, you have to go into some of the research I brought up. No amount of reddit comments will suffice.

I was also trying to show you that HCM can be attacked on its premises from a philosophical skeptical perspective using the Heuristics & Biases tradition along with some pretty simple statistical analyses.

For us to meaningfully engage with these ideas, I have to respectfully request you dedicate some time to the source texts. I would appreciate a criticism of these ideas that's based on engaging with them fully. Right now it seems you're discounting them, not because there are glaring issues, but because you haven't been exposed to them and the fact that they're unfamiliar to you comes off as "overloading" something that prima facie seems simple.