I'm familiar with the source he's quoting,

Harun Yahya has written a ton of books and has a massive following in the Islamic world. As someone raised in a liberal Muslim family, I've suffered through a few of them. They're mostly bald assertions meant to reinforce belief in those who already have it. Persuasive content is practically nonexistent, and the science is usually so terrible as to leave one wondering whether he isn't trolling his entire readership. His Atlas of Creation was famously taken apart by Richard Dawkins in a talk somewhere (quite humorously, I might add).

You don't need any of the techniques developed at LessWrong to dismiss it as nonsense - Traditional Rationality will do the job just fine.

Hi truewords,

I did get a kick out of this article, especially the part about the universe constantly expanding. In the past, I've gotten similar enjoyment from similar articles on Nostradamus and other religious texts. When I personally read a creation myth the ancient Greek comedian Aristophanes came up with, I was amused at how closely it seemed to follow the modern description of the evolution of life from single-celled, asexual organisms. And yet he composed the story in ignorance and as an allegory.

We get to have fun like this because we are very good at forcing text into inappropriate molds. I recently rediscovered a term for this, the "Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy," a reference to the joke where a gunfighter shoots at a wall first, then draws the target around it so it looks like his shot was perfect. And just to show that you can do this with anything, I rediscovered it because someone used it to describe my joke comparing Mad Men and Firefly.

Now, if someone were to use the hints in the Koran to make an advance prediction about some cosmological fact, I'd be impressed. I'd be more likely to believe that a djinn created it than an omniscient god, though; that seems like a more parsimonious hypothesis.

It is not immediately obvious to me whether this should be banned as spam, banned as some non-spam bannable category, or left in place. What do others think?

Please give examples of the "many scientific facts " to which you refer.