A criterion doesn’t necessarily describe the world. It decides between competing claims about it.
A common modern assumption treats religious text as one input among many into a person’s worldview, weighed against science, tradition, and personal experience, with none of them getting final say over the others.
Al-Furqan (الفرقان), literally “the Criterion,” “the Distinguisher,” or “the Proof,” is one of the Qur’an’s names for itself, and the title of its 25th chapter, a Meccan-period surah addressing early objections to the Qur’an’s claims. The word’s root (f-r-q) carries the sense of separating or distinguishing one thing from another. Classical exegetes, including Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi in his Tafhim al-Qur’an, read the name as asserting that the text’s core function is adjudicative: it exists to separate right from wrong and truth from falsehood, not merely to describe or console.
This framing treats the text as a standard external to human judgment, against which knowledge claims in any domain get measured, rather than as one voice among several in an open-ended deliberation.
Source: Qur’an 25:1; Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi, Tafhim al-Qur’an (The Meaning of the Qur’an) , commentary on Surah Al-Furqan. A primary textual and classical-exegesis source, not independent peer-reviewed scholarship.