My understanding is that Muhammed was illiterate, he couldn't read or write. And so the Quran was not "written" down into a complete book until after Muhammed's death. Is this true?
How can anyone be sure that the Quran is truly the word of God, and hasn't been altered in some way by people afterwards? I have heard there are sayings (hadith) which are more reliable than others, how is that determined? People are fallible, after all.
Muslims started to write quran as it was revleaed to the prophet of God. Muhammad (saw). but most of the companions of prohphet would just memorize it by reciting after the beloved prophet. The official writting of the quran was done in the 2nd KHalif's era. when there weren't a lot of people that had memorized the quran and the khalif was afraid that not many people will know it, so he actually ordered to officially put quran in words on book.
Quran is believed to be the God's word because the scientific facts that are stated in quran 1400 years ago are scientifically proven,
The fact that the Quran in its present form is more than thousand years old and hasn't changed since then is apparently undisputed even among very critical non-Muslim historians.
Archaeologists, experts of Oriental Studies and scholars of other disciplines seem to agree to the fact that the Quran hasn't changed for more than a 1000 years (see The Atlantic Monthly; January 1999; What is the Koran? Volume 283, No 1; pages 43-56).
Furthermore, there are very old manuscripts from the early Middle Ages (800 AD.) exhibited in the British Museum and have been in British possession for centuries (The Quran, M.Lings and Y.H.Safadi, London, 1976). One copy in the Egyptian National Museum written on gazelle skin has been dated back to 688 AD, 58 years after Mohammed and all these old findings are still the same versions as the ones that are being currently distributed among Muslims. This is nothing unusual as such since some Bibles are older than that. You can see an image of a manuscript of 1200 years age exhibited during a ceremony in Kashmir (Figure 6).
Figure 6. A 1200 year old copy of the Quran is presented by Muslims in Kashmir
So the Quran has been preserved in its original form and came historically after the Hindu Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagwandgita, the Torah, the Tao, the Zarathustran scripture, the Buddhist scriptures or all the books of the Bible. Now, could the people in Arabia have known phenomena that are described in it? After all the Arabs are known to have been skilled and there were ancient people before them who had deep universal knowledge. The Egyptians built huge pyramids. The Chinese drew maps and the Indians calculated solar eclipses.
Here is one of the MANY examples why Quran is nothing other than the word of GOD.
The Big Bang itself resulted from an extremely dense singularity. The creation of the universe is one of matter, space and time that are intimately linked together. Matter and space were joined as one and then were separated in the explosion. This is very accurately described in the Quran:
"Do not the unbelievers see that the skies (space) and the earth (matter) were joined together (as one unit of creation) and we ripped them apart?" The Quran, 21:30
