The inability to understand Star Trek was a work of pure fiction concerns me.
None of that happened.
I don't think Emre believes
Star Trek is factual. Despite his curious view of, well, everything, I'm willing to grant that he's using the transporter as a nothing more than thought experiment. He wouldn't be the first to do so. There's one error in the fact that he doesn't know how the transporter is said to work. But the larger error is taking away nothing more than some sort of assurance of his religious beliefs.
Quite a number of people have speculated on whether the transporter would preserve the mind or the soul, and if so by what means. There's nothing mentally ill about positing Islam-is-true as a hypothetical premise,
Star Trek transporters are real as another hypothetical premise, and drawing a conclusion under those hypotheticals that Kirk and Spock will have lost their immortal souls and that consequently Allah will be unable to accept them into Paradise. We could even go on to posit that since their souls no longer exist, they won't be subject to eternal punishment either, but will likely suffer annihilation, whatever that might mean in Islam.
One takeaway would be the notion that it's a good thing no one in Starfleet apparently practices Islam. Emre's predictable takeaway is that science is evil, even when it's only fictional science.
*double checks that we are in Religion and Philosophy while discussing Star Trek*
*considers asking "How the hell did we get here?"*
Both religion and science fiction rely on a tremendous amount of world-building that has to achieve a certain degree of credibility. Both science fiction and religion try to comment on what society is, and what it could or should be. Both religion and science fiction (at least with the franchises) entertain vigorous debate on what constitutes canonical knowledge.
No, the
TNG episode where the transporter recreates the away party as children should not be canon.
It's no wonder Emre can accept his beliefs as pure truths and attack other equally ridiculous religions as wrong yet somehow worth a lifetime dedicated to denouncing them.
Emre simply starts every one of his pseudo-intellectual wanks with the premise that his particular flavor of Islam is obviously and incontrovertibly true. Now if you're going to speculate about how a transporter would behave in a certain corner case, you do so from the perspective that
Star Trek technical lore is true. Those are your axioms. Trying to win the argument by saying, "But transporters aren't real," just gets you quizzical stares. With any such endeavor, an in-universe examination is thoroughly worthless for testing the viability of the axioms. That's not how thinking works.
Emre's wanks always climax in a "Hooray for Islam!" conclusion. Kirk and Spock are cooked because the transporter ate their souls. Science is bad because it told them they would be okay. Philosophy is bad because it didn't predict that outcome. Islam wins again. His arguments are inevitably circular, trapped in a pattern buffer of tautology.
In the huge vat of AI slop that starts this thread, he brings up one of the classic paradoxes in the philosophy of identity and continuity. As with all such debates, the answer often depends on what axioms you set forth. Emre states the problem, dismantles one straw man cherry-picked from classical philosophy, then shows how Islam answers the question. Of course that works only because all of Islam's relevant truth claims are clearly imposed as the axioms in his AI prompt. The operative axiomatic basis of identity is Islam's animistic notion of identity, and then we're supposed to marvel about well Islam navigates the problem. Mainstream science and mainstream philosophy utterly fail to answer the question under the rules of Islam, so they should be eschewed.
Asking, "Okay, what if Islam is not true?" is the same as saying, "But the transporters aren't real." If you criticize Emre's claims by relaxing the premise that Islam isn't true, in his mind you've stepped outside the rules of the exercise.
