I guess this means that yes some inferences that I draw are biased toword assuming Islam is divinely inspired. I honestly do try and be as consistent and as critical as possible regarding my approach toward Islam. I have questioned whether Islam is indeed divinely inspired many times before - my faith was quite weak on a couple of occasions at least. I'm not pretending that it's plain sailing and that everything makes sense to me. But I do have faith in the God of the Quran and do feel a personal connection to Him - and I can not ignore this.
You dont need to respond to this post, but will reply to your points anyway.
So you accept you are making biased assumptions when examining you scriptures, which is a brave thing to admit. I wont labour this point, as a scientist you will know everything that I would say anyway. I am less interested in winning an argument, and more interested in you seeing what I see as the err in your logic and understanding. I know you recognise that a religious stance may not be supported by logic, but what I want to point out here additionally is that you are using quasi-logic to support your faith without knowing it.
'I may have mentioned it once or twice but whenever I take a look around me I see amazing beauty and elegance and I can't help but think there is an intelligent designer behind nature. I therefore can not deny and beleive there is a God that created the Universe. I don't think I could ignore this even if I tried. I also beleive there is a lot of good within us humans. I don't beleive that being able to be conscious of God evolved by accident within us - I beleive God gave us this consciousness. I also beleive that if God did create us and gave us our consciousness He must care about us. Since He is the creator af all things I believe Him to be a just God. On this earth there is a lot of injustice. I have two choices - either beleive that God doesn't care about these injustices or I beleive God does care about these injustices and one day He will put things right. I feel it would make much more sense to beleive God will judge us after we die since otherwise it would make him a God who doesn't care about justice - this to me is impossible. In my opinion from a couple of verses from the Quran this might be enough to make me a Muslim (i.e. a submitter to God's will) although I know a lot of scholars would argue otherwise:
Whether you find this world awesome or not is a red herring, we are not debating whether a creator exists or not, we are debating whether the quran is the words of this omnicient creator. And whether he made it blindingly obvious (as claimed in the Quran) that Islam is the right religion over and above all the other faiths. If he didnt, then you might accept its not anyones fault that they dont believe, and wonder why apostates are burned in hell or even why polytheists are.
Once you examine what gives you this faith, then you will see it is only supported by thin straws and religious memes might make them feel like something far more solid & robust. They allow you to close your ears to any opposing views (kaffirs/ideas of hell/ heaven/life after death/feeling special) and draw a degree of comfort in knowing that Allah recognises the bonus value of you believing in him despite having no evidence. At least I used to anyway.
From your posts it sounds like the crux of your faith is that Islam matches how you would imagine the creators religion to be. The idea of a God in your head would be an interventionist, singlular, retributive one etc. And you find all these qualities are matched by the quran, so it is far more likely to be the correct one compared to all the other religions around, , and thats a sound argument.
What you dont see is that being born into the relgion shapes your understanding to come up with these qualities in itself. So in effect you are using your initial cultural backdrop of Islam to justify Islam i.e. you are using Islam to justify itself. Its like looking at a cow and saying its a cow because it looks like one. You will only be right if the person that first showed you what a cow looked like is correct. Thats why religion gets passed on through generations, and only a small percentage convert. Reality is personal & subjective in this instance.
If you were to apply modern logic to any religion and willing to perform mental acrobatics, you could make any religion appear to be perfect in your eyes and be convinced by it, just like all other believers do. In reverse they struggle to understand how you believe in Muhammed/circumcision/multiple marriage/4:34/torture in hell/pigs being haram etc and say that Islam cant be the true religion, and their version of Christianity makes perfect sense to them.
In the end, we have to accept that we dont know and just leave it at that. The only person who has a problem with that is the invisible thing in the sky, who demands that we say we do, or face torture.
And do please excuse me for going on at length here /rant
Topic: The Story of Sulayman