Eid Riddle
Here’s a fun puzzle appropriate for this time of year!
A family has five children. …
Logical Reasoning and the Torn Shirt
The story of Prophet Yūsuf in the Qur’ān includes an episode that presents an interesting exercise in logical reasoning. In the incident where the ‘Azīz of Egypt finds his wife and Prophet Yūsuf making conflicting claims, a witness speaks up and presents a series of statements that make it possible to reach a conclusion about what happened using a combination of observation (of Prophet Yusuf’s shirt) and logic.
Verses 25 to 28 of Surah #12 Yūsuf mention the following:
The Cosmological Argument Using Math
The cosmological argument to prove the existence of God has been my favourite proof of its kind since the first time it was presented to me. It was simple enough to understand, it felt rigorous enough to be convincing, and it left a lot of room open to extract implications and corollaries that were interesting and useful.
Still, the fact that the argument was presented in natural language, rather than the language of symbolic logic, always left me with an unsettled feeling: shouldn’t this proof, like all others that are watertight and irrefutable, be possible to express in mathematical terms? I made some shallow attempts to codify it myself, but I never managed to do it in a way that left me satisfied.