Which Christian missionaries are you thinking of?
He's written previously in a way that suggests he doesn't know or respect the difference between atheists and Christians. He seems to think the only reason people would object to his masterful defense of Islam would be to promote and defend a competing religion. He doesn't grasp that many of us here oppose all religion, and that our criticism of his comes from that, not from a different devotion.
In his other thread he touts the superiority of the Qur'an over the Torah and the New Testament, apparently expecting his critics to defend those books. He doesn't get that the majority of his critics don't accept any of them as divine revelation. That said, there are still many of us who have a good working knowledge of the world's compendium of holy writ and can respond meaningfully to claims of historicity, provenance, and so forth. We can point out others' errors without professing a belief in those religions ourselves. It's a common paradox that people who approach a religion academically often know more facts about it than those who were brought up in it and just absorbed it osmotically.
It is somewhat strange to see you repeat this claim after you have been shown pages that count all the occurrences of "day" with quotes, and where the number is anything but 365.
Not so strange if you accept that he's just a cargo-cult evangelist and doesn't really understand either the claims he's making or his critics' lines of reasoning in response. His only engagement to the refutation has been a vague wave of the hands toward Arabic grammar, which he claims supports the hair-splitting taxonomy of which instances of "day" count, and which don't.
Unfortunately we called his bluff. We've come to understand that he doesn't actually read Arabic. He doesn't understand definite articles because Turkish doesn't have them. The idiom he's stumbling over is tied directly to the abstract notion of finiteness in linguistics. The speakers of languages that omit the definite article generally come late to these nuances when learning other languages. Here the nuance is important, because when the Arabic word for "day" is given the particular definiteness that comes from affixing the definite-article prefix, it acquires a wholly different meaning -- one for which some languages like ours have a completely different word. This is not generally true of nouns in Arabic, but it holds here. The Semitic construct of "day-with-definiteness" has a particular meaning, the idea that means exactly "today" in English. The difference in meaning in English between "day" and "today" is fully present in the Arabic, even though it's written as an idiom. Hence his desire to include
al-yawm in the list as if it were just another ordinary reference to "day" is as wrong as it can possibly be.
Now it's unwise for him to try to debate in English when his command of English is so poor. He may be ignoring our responses simply because whatever translation method he's using isn't up to the task. But if he's trying to be a Qur'an scholar and a master evangelist of Islam, unfamiliarity with Arabic is a show-stopper. It doesn't matter what other languages he doesn't read, the inability to read and understand Arabic -- including all its idioms and colloquialisms -- is fatal to an expert understanding of the Qur'an. He told us to go look at the Arabic just trusting that we wouldn't be able to tell that it doesn't say what he says it says.
I am also puzzled why it would be a miracle even if there were 365 occurrences of "day".
We're still trying to figure this out. As near as I can tell, it's just another example of cargo-cult reasoning, although it's not particular to him. Other Muslims tout this as some kind of miracle for the Qur'an. It's as if any old curiosity is just assumed to be evidence of the divine irrespective of any actual probative value.
I drew the parallel to the so-called Bible Code, in which letters taken at different strides in the Masorah are said to reveal hidden, encoded truths. At least that is said to convey some hidden additional meaning, as opposed to being just a numerological curiosity. Incidentally that's a fun computer programming exercise: take a block of text, render strings from it composed of letters at different regular strides, then look for words and phrases in those modulo strings that are deemed unlikely to have arisen by chance. Then ascribe to them whatever significance bubbles up out of your biases. If you do this with the American Declaration of Independence, the word "penis" appears five times. That obviously expresses the Founding Fathers' wishes to establish a gender-oppressive patriarchy.
Armchair stylometry is fun!
30 occurrences of the word "days" is also puzzling, because there are not 30 days in a year, and I am sure your god would know this if he existed.
Yeah, the relationship between the words and the cardinal entities they're supposed to reveal is not consistent. Astronomically speaking, there's no harmonious relationship among the solar day, the lunar month, and the solar or sidereal year. And frankly, the Arabs knew this. It's not as if these words counts actually reveal some arcane knowledge about the natural world. But the relationship of "day" to year, "days" to month, and "month" to year -- i.e., playing fast and loose with both the constituents of each unit and the grammatical number -- is a clear sign of wishful contrivance. It's pure numerology. It makes up the rules so as to arrive at the desired "coincidence," not because the rules have intrinsic significance. It's like taking the number of verses in the new testament, dividing it by Michael Jackson's waist size, and arriving at the number of cubits of longitude for the pizza place where Hilary Clinton is supposed to have a kiddie sex dungeon.
