Why Study Religious Texts with Statistical Methods? — Ali Shukri Amin
First published on my writing site: www.aliamin.info/2026/05/why-study-religious-texts-with-statistical-methods/
By Ali Shukri Amin. I first wrote this as comments on r/AcademicQuran, in the thread “What is the justification for studying religious texts like the Quran/Bible through a methodological naturalist framework?”, copied here as written.
Comment 1
This is a great quote and really emblematic of so many problems
“It’s also broadly, we could say, a secular approach. It does not assume the correctness of any given religion,
As Talal Asad deftly demonstrated in Formations of the Secular, secularism is actually a faith commitment like Christianity or Islam. It is a derivative of Protestantism.
and it excludes supernatural miracles, etc., as being wildly improbable.
Again, the way these “probabilities” are being methodologically deduced is never explained. I.e. it’s not actually probabilistic reasoning.
If I say to you, what explains the conquests is that the Roman and Persian empires just had an apocalyptic world war and absolutely demolished each other, then the Romans won and were massively degraded, and the Persian Empire fell into anarchy, and there was also a big plague, and at the same time the Arabs coalesced under centralized leadership — you can understand how you get from what I said to the success of the Arab conquests. You can actually see, ‘Oh, I understand.’ It was harder for them to organize, they had fewer resources, the Persians are in disarray. It actually makes sense.
Great examples of the Narrative Fallacy, Hindsight Bias, & Plausibility fallacies.
But if I say ‘it was God’ — what would that even mean as an explanation? What are the mechanisms?
The naturalistic explanations before lacked causal evidence and were lacking the same “mechanisms” as just handwaving it to God.
Posted May 18, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
Comment 2
There is a certain kind of statistical analysis that follows particular procedures & is rigorous enough to be called “scientific”. Then there’s booting up Python & crunching numbers on some stocks API to find patterns you think will give you a market edge. Both are statistical analysis. One is scientific. The other isn’t. What is usually done in history is somewhere in the middle; statistical analysis to draw conclusions that satisfy historians, i.e. not methodologically rigorous enough for scientific conclusions.
in historical reasoning, for you, what area of history related to the subject matter of this subreddit has a best supernatural explanation? Can you directly answer this question?
I gave you a clear answer. The rapid rise of the Rashidun caliphs. History as a whole, including the history of Islam, Christianity, etc., is best explained by there being supernatural forces that have chosen this specific timeline to occur.
If we believe history is not guided by the noumenon and is entirely phenomenal, we have to throw out the vast majority of historical explanations because there is not sufficient causal evidence for it. This is a huge problem for academics of Islamic studies, were they to diligently hold to the actual strictures of naturalism and empiricism. Instead, we find them veering into the narrative fallacy when actual evidence is sparse.
Obviously Joshua Little is correct that there are all sorts of known material conditions that underlie the Rashidun conquests. Do those not exist because you don’t like them or because you want the explanation to be supernatural?
The point is not that material conditions exist or not. That’s not the argument. The argument is about causality. You lack the requisite causality that is required under an empirical framework to demonstrate which, if any, of those material conditions lead to any conclusions. Why do you lack that causal justification? Because you can’t run experiments against the Rashidun conquests to remove variables or add a control. You can’t run statistical analysis on 10,000,000 scenarios where all of the variables are altered to actually determine causality. There’s no way, under a naturalistic framework, to actually determine correlation from causality from noise with respect to the Rashidun conquests.
A Christian scholar can use manuscript research, carbon dating, epigraphic research, etc. while also believing God chose the specific observed history. Such a scholar could then argue that the material conditions lead to that outcome because history has meaning and is not a product of randomness. Their conclusion can be informed by the empirical evidences while still availing an explanation because there is faith that history has inherent meaning.
A secular researcher cannot do this. They often do, but this just betrays a lack of commitment or understanding of their own method. Under secularism, history has no inherent meaning or order. Therefore, there must be CAUSAL evidence.
Posted May 18, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
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